Awesome movies watched by me in the last 24 hours. (Oh, btw, I’m watching Digg Nation {do you dress like a douchebag??? http://www.arabianmonkey.com/doclothesmakeyouadouchebag.html}, which is totally awesome… HOWEVER… Watching the last couple of episodes has eaten up our broadband and now my family are using the internet on DIAL-UP SPEED.)
So on Friday night I got to watch American Psycho based on the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Mary Harron and stars Christen Bale as the American psycho. Now, I didn’t really know what this movie was about, which sounds really stupid because it’s probably a very well known but it was released before I was able to watch it without being scarred. So it’s set in the 80’s and it follows the life of wall street-er Patrick Bateman who deals with his emotional problems through sadistic violence and murder.
First off… It’s REALLY good. Love the narration. It is also REALLY disturbing… although there isn’t much gore during the murders there are a lot of them. I thought that it was really well done, Bale plays an excellent psycho and the scene where Christie, the prostitute, tries to escape from the apartment is so full of tension you could cut it with the chainsaw he was carrying.
There were some bad points: I got rather confused as to who people were because there were lots of characters that entered and exited without much introduction but were referred to later etc… This was made more difficult by the fact that many of the male characters dressed the same and had similar characteristics.
Interesting: (because I’m going to turn this into a PMI) Has the line: “Don’t stare at her ass, eat it.” My friends from like yr 11 may/may not remember this… {joke}. This movie stars Jared Leto (Paul Allen) as the primary victim, of Patrick Bateman. This was the first time that I’d seen Jared Leto as an actor, I didn’t even know who he was before The Kill. For those of you who don’t know, Jared Leto is the lead singer of the band 30 Seconds to Mars who, I would say, are most famous for their song From Yesterday (which has a 30 million dollar music video, the full length version is half an hour. Watch it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5uSu2fTIOQ)
It’s one of the movies everyone is talking about: Juno. (Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody who won the Oscar this year for orginal screenplay BTW) I got to watch it at Rebecca’s house today with Mona and Ludwig (and Becca who was looking at cars to buy on TradeMe and had already watched it twice before.) The script deserves all the attention that it’s getting… it’s oh so very witty and good. So it’s about Juno who gets preggers to her best friend Bleeker… I’m sure you’ve seen the promos. She decides to give it up for adoption after not being able to go through with the abortion and that’s where I’m going to leave it ‘cos I don’t wanna spoil it for those of you who have been unable to get your greedy little hands on a pirated/downloaded copy or are too poor/lazy to go watch it at the movies.
Favourite moments: I didn’t have any particular favourite moments (that I can remember), but the film as a whole was very satisfying. Lots of favourite lines… can’t remember them though… And there were heaps of laugh-out-loud scenes… (Ludwig found more than I did.) And it had a mega-cute/very appropriate soundtrack.
Not much to complain about. Overall nothing that I can remember stands out as being really good (apart from whats said above) or really bad. I don’t know whether that’s because I just didn’t asorb the movie as well as I should have or because I wasn’t asorbed in the movie.
Interesting: Mark (the husband of the adopting couple) and Juno have interesting conversations about music, (which I didn’t really follow because you kinda need background knowledge to know what’s going on) which also occurred in American Psycho except it wasn’t really normal person to person conversation, it was more of a monologue before Bateman killed his victims.
The final movie that I watched at Rebecca’s was Mona’s Pan’s Labryinth (directed and written by Guillermo del Toro) which Mona and Rebecca are doing for visual text for english. I must say that the trailors for this movie are very misleading as I thought this would totally have been a Narnia type of movie where it’s all fantasy but it has a mixture of reality and fantasy, the reality is often scarier than the fantasy. I’m going to take the plot outline from IMDb ‘cos I’m too lazy to think of my own: In 1944 fascist Spain, a girl, fascinated with fairy-tales, is sent along with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather, a ruthless captain of the Spanish army. During the night, she meets a fairy who takes her to an old faun in the center of the labyrinth. He tells her she’s a princess, but must prove her royalty by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again. Credit goes to Tim for that outline.
Plus: Great costumes and wonderful acting from Ivana Bacquero who plays Ofelia especially in the scene where she tells a story to her unborn brother. I really like the story of the fantasy world contrasted with reality story line… In a movie like this I’d normally get bored during the war plot line and probably want to see more of the mythology but both sides of the story are very good and mesh well with each other.
Minus: Ludwig and Rebecca thought that the Pale Man was funny. I didn’t.
Interesting: Doug Jones played both the Pale Man and the Faun and also doesn’t actually speak any Spanish and as well as memorising his own lines he had to memorise Ofelia’s lines as the servos in the head piece which manouvered the face of Faun were so loud that he couldn’t hear her speak them. Another interesting fact: It got 22 minutes of applause at the Cannes Film Festival!!! Thanks IMBd. Ooo and another thing, Pan in Greek mythology is the god of the shepards and flocks and Juno in Roman mythology is wife/sister to god of god’s Jupiter.
Out of all three I liked Pan’s Labryinth the best… Although the movie that I’d want to watch again would be Juno. But the best one to do a movie study on would be American Psycho just because Patrick Bateman is an excellent character to analyse. I recommend all three, so go and watch!