Juno
I’ve only read good reviews about this film and I like it too. It’s a sweet story about sixteen year old Juno (Ellen Page) who finds out that she’s pregnant – the result of a one-time sexual encounter with her friend Bleeker (Michael Cera), in the infamous chair. What would you do if you were in her shoes?
At first she thinks of abortion, but she couldn’t get through with it when Su-Chin convinces her that the fetus already has fingernails. The next option is to give the baby up for adoption. And so at only 16, she’s already making adult decisions. And as she goes through her pregnancy, she understands the adults in her life, a lot.
My favourite quotes:
Vanessa Loring: Your parents are probably wondering where you are.
Juno MacGuff: Nah… I mean, I’m already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
Dad Mac to Juno: In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with.
Reservation Road
I tried to rent this movie on the first week that it came out on DVD. But Rogers Video didn’t get copies only until recently. I don’t know why this movie didn’t get as much buzz as I think it should have. It’s probably because of the review that I’ve read on Rotten Tomatoes. “While the performances are fine, Reservation Road quickly adopts an excessively maudlin tone along with highly improbable plot turns.” I looked up maudlin in the dictionary and found this meaning – tearfully or weakly emotional; foolishly sentimental.
Well, I didn’t find Reservation Road tearfully or weakly emotional, though I agree that it is such a heartbreaking story. It is about two fathers: Ethan (Joaquin Phoenix) and Dwight (Mark Ruffalo), the son of one was killed in a hit and run accident. The story follows the agony of one father and the grief his family has to go through after the death of the son. It also follows the guilt of the man who run over this boy and how he is torn apart. He wants to turn himself in but that also means that he’ll lose his only boy.
Yes, I shed a tear or two, but I wasn’t crying the whole time. Powerful performances from Phoenix, Ruffalo and Jennifer Connelly, who played the victim’s mother. Dakota’s little sister, Elle Fanning also stars in this movie. She’s good, too.
Lars and the Real Girl
What can I say? I love Ryan Gosling and I think he’s really good in both drama and comedy.
Lars and the Real Girl is a funny but heartwarming movie about Lars, who is very shy and pretty much keeps to himself. One day, he brings home his fiancé, Bianca. The thing is, Bianca came out of a big wooden box. And she’s not alive. She’s a life- sized inflatable doll, and she’s anatomically correct. Lars’ brother and sister-in-law suspect that there’s something wrong with him so they consulted a psychiatrist who told them that Lars has a mental illness – delusion. They were told to go along with it. Later on, the entire town also goes along with it. I love the character development towards the end.
My favourite quotes:
Dagmar: It’s such a comfort sometimes, just to have somebody’s arms around you. Don’t you think?
Lars Lindstrom: No.
Dagmar: It feels good.
Lars Lindstrom: It does not feel good. It, it hurts.
Dagmar: Oh, like a cut, or bruise?
Lars Lindstrom: Like a burn. Like when you go outside and your feet freeze and you come back in and then they thaw out? It’s like that. It’s almost exactly like that.
Dagmar: Same with everyone?
Lars Lindstrom: Uh, not really with Bianca. But everyone else.
Love in the Time of Cholera
I thought I’d give this book a try even though I had a hard time finishing Garcia-Marquez’s other book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read the first couple of chapters of Cholera, painstakingly and then I learned that they were filming a movie based on this book, so I abandoned it. I thought that I’d just wait for the movie to come out. Okay, so I rented the movie and now I don’t quite get what’s so great about the story. There’s this guy, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) who fell in love with this lovely girl, Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). But her father didn’t approve of him because he was only a telegraph operator. He kept the two apart and Fermina later on married a doctor, Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). For fifty years, Florentino stayed in love with Fermina, but he had been sleeping with other women. “To ease the pain of his love for Fermina,“ he said. To ease the pain or was he just being horny? 🙂 Warning: There are a lot of nude and intercourse scenes. What did I tell you? So please, somebody convince me that the book is a lot better than the movie, before you give me a beating. Then maybe I will pick up the book and start reading it again and maybe finish it this time.
My Movie Room 