Short Movie Reviews

I have seen some movies recently. Here are my thoughts.

There Will Be Blood: Yeah, but you have sit through twenty boring, largely-pretentious hours of Daniel Day-Lewis as Jed Clampett before you get to the blood. And then there's still another sixteen hours before the movie ends and there's a little bit more blood. I'm not stupid; I get the point that Paul Thomas Anderson is making. It's just that less and less seemed to be happening in this movie with every passing minute. (Plus...I have to be honest and say that I was confused by Paul Dano's dual role. I swear the first character never mentions he has a twin brother. Maybe I just missed it.) A muddled mess. Avoid it. If you can sneak into a theater and see it for free, do so for the oil rig explosion.

In the interest of fairness, I will say that the wordless portion of the movie was really cool. So see it for that, too, but like I said, only if you can see it for free.

Atonement: The title sums up perfectly what I would like to see from the director for making this thing. Again, I want to say up front that I'm not stupid, and I totally understand what the point of the movie was--but the journey is not worth taking. The structure stinks, and the ending is a horrible, horrible cheat. It worked well in the book, but this isn't a book, it's a movie and it Just Doesn't Work. The whole thing is basically an excuse to masturbate to Keira Knightley, who is hot. But nothing here is a surprise, nothing is romantic, nothing is particularly well-written or well-acted. A muddled mess. Avoid it. If you can sneak into a theater and see it for free, do so for...uh...well, I can't think of a reason. Maybe the newly-celebrated Dunkirk Tracking Shot, although frankly it did nothing for me.

Juno: I enjoyed this movie. I think the best thing I can say about it is that I really, really tried to find something about it that I didn't like, and there wasn't much. Be forewarned that the script is not nearly as brilliant as people are claiming it is, and that the acting is not nearly as great as people are claiming it is--but both are still pretty darn good. About the only thing I wished was that they had not had Every Single Character be so damn snarky all the time. I say this as a fan of snappy dialog: stop already with the snappy dialog. I thought it was a touch sentimental about motherhood, so if you're the kind of person who wants to avoid that, perhaps you should stay away from this movie, but otherwise it was perfectly enjoyable.