The Secret World Of Arrietty - The new Studio Ghibli film, this one written but not directed by Hayao Miyazaki. A young boy is sent out to his aunt's house in the country to rest in calm surroundings before a heart operation and he discovers little people living beneath the house. I thought it was a really sweet, enjoyable movie that works for kids and adults. It's not on the same plateau as some other Ghibli stuff, but it was still a pretty good film.
Voice - Hadn't seen this Korean movie in a few years and BoobyTrap DVR'ed it not knowing that I owned it. It's the fourth in a series of haunted schoolgirl films (known as the Whispering Corridor series). All 4 are completely unrelated, but involve ghosts and schoolgirls. This one stars Kim Ok-bin (from
Thirst), as a young music student with a tremendous singing voice. One day, she stays at school late to practice and ends up being murdered by a ghostly apparition with a really sharp piece of sheet music. She ends up as a ghost, forced to roam the school oblivious to all except her best friend who can hear her voice. The two of them have to figure out who killed her and why before more students end up dead.
It's a decent movie that I liked better the last time I saw it. Despite the cover, it's really not much of a horror movie at all. It's more of a supernatural drama. Some of the cinematography is really nice (and I'm a sucker for emergency back-up red lighting) and the music is beautiful, but it's not worth much more than a rent. In the series, I'd say it's 2nd or 3rd best, with the definite top being
Memento Mori, which is also more drama than horror.
Hobo With A Shotgun - Rutger Hauer is a hobo and he gets tired of people preying on other people so he buys a shotgun with the small amount of money he has and takes justice to the streets. Really violent and funny. I liked it better when I saw it in the theater, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly. BoobyTrap even liked it.
The Conversation - Had never seen this before, but I've read that this is Francis Ford Coppola's favorite movie that he directed and IMDB says it's Hackman's favorite movie of his and I felt like a douche for never having seen it. Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who records a conversation between a man and a woman in a busy park. As he's filtering the recordings, he becomes worried that the people he's taped might be killed because of what they're saying. It's happened to him before and it left a mark on him, but his employers really want the tape and are willing to go the extra mile to get a hold of it.
Very good movie. Pretty tense, very well acted and interesting. It's nowhere ****ing near the level of Coppola's better work, but it was a solid thriller worth repeat viewings.
Rebecca - Another film that I was sort of embarrassed I hadn't seen. I could say that about a bunch of Hitchcock movies, but this one I'd heard a lot about, so it was a little higher on my list. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier get married somewhat impulsively after a short romance and go back to his large mansion to live. Joan Fontaine finds out that Laurence is a widower whose wife, Rebecca, died at sea not too very long ago and still haunts him. Really liked this movie. Especially the ending.
Jane Eyre (1944) - Watched this not cognizant of the fact that it was another Joan Fontaine movie. I just knew it was Orson Welles playing Rochester this time and that was enough for me. This is only the second version of Jane Eyre I've seen, but after liking the recent Fassbender/Wasikowska one so much, I'd be open to watching pretty much any of the other adaptations (and there have been many).
I didn't like this one as much as the recent one, but I still liked it a lot. It didn't have the supernatural atmosphere of the recent one, but it was still really dark and moody. The cinematography was ****ing awesome (and done by George Barnes, who also did Rebecca) and pretty much stole the show for me. Orson Welles was great and intense. He plays a good *******. Having said that, there were some story elements missing that I wouldn't have noticed (or probably cared about) if I wasn't already familiar with the story. The entire second half of the story feels rushed, like they had shot the first half of it and then realized that the movie was going to end up being 5 hours long so they had to cram the rest of the book into 45 minutes. I also didn't like Joan Fontaine's Jane anywhere near as much as Mia Wasikowska's. She was much less fierce and independent seeming most of the time. A lot more obviously emotional. Overall, though, I still liked it a lot and would definitely watch it again. Might even buy it at some point.
The Proposition - Been a while since I saw this, so when it popped up on one of the HD movie channels, I decided to see it again. Guy Pearce is Charlie, one of the outlaw Burns brothers, known for being particularly brutal and murderous, back when Australia still belonged to Britain and the Brits were attempting to "civilize" it. Ray Winstone is the captain of the local police and he manages to capture Charlie and his younger brother Mikey. He takes Mikey off, but let's Charlie go, telling him that he will kill Mikey in 5 days if Charlie doesn't kill or capture his older brother Arthur (played by Danny Huston), with whom Charlie is on the outs because he doesn't like murder and rape all that much.
It's a dirty, violent movie that feels like it's straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Which is unsurprising given that it's written by Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, whose next movie was the McCarthy adaptation The Road. And just like Cormac McCarthy novels, it's really ****ing good. Great story, great acting, great cinematography, great score... I like pretty much everything about this movie. Danny Huston gives a Colonel Kurtz-ish performance that is still the high point of his career for me in a pretty solid resume. Highly recommended.
Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo - Rinko Kikuchi is a hitwoman who also works the graveyard shift at the Tokyo fishmarket. She's hired to kill Sergi Lopez (the bad guy from Pan's Labyrinth) because Lopez's girlfriend committed suicide and her father blames him, but she falls in love with him instead which does not please the people who hired her much at all.
Not a bad movie, but not a great one, either. Some good cinematography and not a bad story, but it just didn't have the impact it clearly was expecting to. I never really cared much about any of the characters and so when bad things happen to them, it didn't have much effect. There are some pretty explicit sex scenes that are pretty good, even though neither actor is very attractive, but there isn't a whole lot more this film has to offer. It's ok. Rent it if you like Rinko Kikuchi or meditative, artsy movies.
