Good evening,
Today has been a long day filled with movies and.. well, just movies actually. It all started last thursday, after a night of copious drinking we had managed to reel in another sucker to join our Pathe Unlimited crew. Which naturally meant that we had to see at least one movie on friday.
The only movie showing at a practical time that I hadn't already seen already was The Bachelorette, so me, a veteran Pathe Unlimited member and the rookie, set out to sit through the bachelorette trying to rid our bodies of yesterday's poison. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Sure it was a cinematic piece of crap, but it was funny. And one of the girls was very sexy.
Anyways, after that little box of sunshine I still felt a longing for more. Which resulted in me and my new found moviepartner setting sail for Hope Springs. A movie that was very cute, oh so very cute. I'm going to stop myself here before I start rambling on and on again, because the point was. That after all of that, as we were about to call it a day. I stumbled upon a magazine advertising a film festival on Sunday (today), featuring 5 prerelease viewings. That was an offer too good to pass up, it was a bit of a struggle at first, trying to find someone crazy enough to go sit through five movies in a row with yours truly. But I succeeded, and this morning at 9:45am, I was waiting in front of the movie theater planning on not leaving until after the last movie of the day, which would be at 23:15.
The day started off strong with Amour, a french film that took Cannes by storm, it was an impressive piece of cinema. We were taken on a journey witnessing an elderly woman slowly losing her mind after suffering from a stroke. I felt like the movie was a tad drawn out, it was not necessarily boring, but it felt like it could've been edited down a bit. Apart from that, quite amazing. What I also loved was people applauding at the end of the movie. It made me feel... at home, surrounded by movie lovers I guess. A giant theater filled with people crazy enough to sit through 10 hours of cinema in a single day.
Then we moved on to The perks of being a wallflower. A movie that I was actually looking forward to. And also the movie that surprised me the most. (And that's including the surprise mystery movie) It features Logan Lerman, an actor I had not seen before. And he was joined by two people I was very happy to see being able to break their mold. Emma Watson and Ezra Miller traded their generic molds for something new. And did it quite well. Although afterwards people still referred to Emma as "Hermione", ah well, that's what you get for doing Harry Potter. Anyways, the movie started off feeling like quite the generic High School movie, but as it went along it felt like a snowball rolling down the hill. Taking on more and more topics and depth, finally leaving me choked up for the last 40 minutes of the movie.
The third movie, Jagten, was very impressive. Mads Mikkelsen seems to be growing in popularity and I can see why. I don't have that much to say about this movie other than that it felt incredibly credible to me. (See what I did there?) A lot of quite heavy stuff happened in the movie but it managed to remain very convincing.
On to the mystery movie, I don't know what to say about this. It felt like they wanted to give us a break from all the heavy movies and felt like throwing yet another generic movie at us. So they blessed us with Trouble with the curve, the latest Clint Eastwood movie. It had predictability, it had a struggling father daughter relationship, it had a bad guy, it had a misunderstood good guy and last but not least, it had Justin Timberlake. What can I say? It had it all.
Okay, and finally they sent us away with Lawless, a movie that was slightly above entertaining. It had certain elements that made it incredibly generic. But they seemed well aware of that, and decided to make fun of themselves for that fact. This reminded me of a Grindhouse kind of approach, make your movies so ridiculously over the top, it's awesome again. Sadly, they didn't manage to pull it off. Which leaves me at my original verdict: "slightly above entertaining."
Well, all in all, a great day for a movieloving s-o-b like myself. Can't wait to do it all again next year. Now I'm off to explore rainbows, unicorns and greener pastures in Neverland.
Teun
