It'd be less obnoxious if Jay Chou's name weren't RIGHT THERE ON THE POSTER, two inches away.
FirstShowing tweeted today about an interesting error on IMDb’s Green Hornet page: Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou’s role as Kato has been credited to MILF-popularizing American actor John Cho. Uh, WTF?
Yes. Just yes.
Here’s what I didn’t like about Conversations with Other Women: One, the continuous use of split-screen is effective about half the time and distracting the other half of the time. Two, lines like “She always was the type to see better in the dark”– no one talks like that, ever, unless one is a character in an amateur theater piece that’s been polished one too many times.
Here’s what I liked about Conversations with Other Women: everything else. It features two consistently impressive actors doing what they do best; a poignant little love story that unfolds like a striptease; and a soft, seductive soundtrack. Bad dialogue and annoying editing might be enough to sink a lesser film, but when the rest of a film works so well, the flaws are easy to forgive.
Michael Cera kicks an unprecedented amount of ass as Scott Pilgrim
The first thing I need to tell you about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is this: The book is better. Yes, everyone says this every time a movie based on a book is released. Yes, it’s an entirely different medium. But seriously, the book is better. The film cuts out too much of the book’s depth and breadth to compare. Whereas the series is about not just Scott but Ramona, their friends, the rest of their universe, and growing up, the film is really just about Scott.
So that’s the bad news. The good news is that Edgar Wright’s film version has a vibrant energy of its own that makes it a spectacularly good time at the theater. In other words: Holy shit, it’s fun. Wright’s shown a knack for combining wacky and sweet with pop culture inside jokes as far back as Spaced, and he takes it to the extreme here. The result is exhilarating, a film that looks and feels like nothing else you’ve ever seen before.
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I could not resist an excuse to post a picture of former Angel in the outfield Joseph Gordon-Levitt
It’s been about 18 hours since I saw Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and in that time my thoughts on the film have shifted around somewhat. I went in expecting a masterpiece, exited feeling pretty sure that if it wasn’t quite a masterpiece, it was close enough, and went to bed thinking it was very good if perhaps a little overrated after all. By the time I finished my coffee this morning (COFFEEEEEEE), I’d decided that it was a pretty damn amazing movie after all, just not for the reasons I’d initially looked to.
Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg in Adventureland
There are few movies in this universe that I despise more than Garden State. I have many reasons for disliking it, from its unlikable main characters to its creepy fetishization of depression. But what really pushes me over the edge is the unbelievable hype that surrounded it. “The Graduate for our generation”? No, thanks.
That said, I get what the movie was going for, because Adventureland is the movie Garden State wishes it was. Both attempt to capture the exciting, terrifying space just before adulthood, and both feature aimless young men at a crossroads in life who fall for irresistible young women. But Adventureland is a warmer, more relatable film– and as a result, a much more moving film, too.
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