Category Archives: Romances
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve is the latest from the makers of the extraordinarily original (not) Valentine’s Day. You may be thinking, “wow, this is going to be stunningly lacklustre.” Well, you would be right. Joy of joys, deck the halls, auld lang syne, this movie is more mind-numbing than anybody could wish for.
Just like Valentine’s Day (and Love Actually, but we’ll get to that), New Year’s Eve is a rom-com that aims to top all rom-coms. It isn’t just one rom-com, but MANY rom-coms ROLLED INTO ONE. It’s a bunch of different love stories from different people all over New York, and they’re all intertwined in some way. One person from each story knows another person from another story, and they know someone from another story, blah blah blah. Apparently everybody in New York celebrates New Year’s Eve by falling in love. Apparently that’s how it works.
I am normally on top of rom-coms. I am all over them like a cat on a baby. I love them. They’re great. I’m having trouble finding nice things to say about this rom-com, though.
First off, it’s not really a rom-com. There are two parts to romantic comedies – romance. And comedy. Romance, it’s got. Chocablock full. More romance than you can shake a cheese at. Comedy? Hm.
Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh. At Abigail Breslin’s self-conciousness. And Katherine Heigl’s badly-done hair. And the fact that Jessica Biel kept pushing her fake belly IN, making it very very obvious that it was just a sack of lentils.
No, I am being a little bit mean. There are in fact some funny moments. But you’ll only really giggle half-heartedly at them, and you’ll only really do that if you’re in a cinema that’s quite full, and everybody else is giggling half-heartedly, and you just don’t want to stand out from the crowd.
But the lack of actual humour isn’t even my main problem with New Year’s Eve, it’s that it is, without a doubt, an exact copy/paste of Valentine’s Day. Just pasted onto a different holiday. The same cast, the same crew, the same format, the same storyline(s), the same heart-squishing sugar cuteness – only this time it’s getting a bit old. And they’ve added a couple of vomit-worthy musical numbers (I kid you not). And Valentine’s Day was just a poorly-Americanised Love Actually, so really NYE is just a copy of a copy. A bad copy of a bad copy. It’s unbearable.
And such a wonderful cast too, just wasted on an unchallenging script and poor direction. Their are “more celebrities than rehab”, and with some exceptions (can I get a Hilary Swank-induced shudder) they all have measurable talent. But their performances are heartbreakingly poor in New Year’s Eve. Michelle Pfeiffer is the most uncomfortable to watch, which is so sad, but on the plus side Zac Efron as her character’s young protégé is pleasantly surprising. I think people expect far less of Zac Efron than he is capable of, me included, but we’re seeing him come further and further out of his tweenie shell all the time.
All this aside, it can’t be denied that in some ways this movie is perfect. I went to see it with my mum after she’d had a tiring day, and it was a perfect girly thing to do to cheer her up. It’s a fun sleepover movie. It’s got a certain lack of intelligence that means it’s not confronting, or challenging, and it serves its purpose of pure escapism. It’s fun to name the stars and to wonder at how big Abigail Breslin’s gotten. It’s nice to perve on Zac Efron and Ashton Kutcher (even if his beard does make him look a bit homeless). It’s the definition of chick flick. On pure enjoyment, it rates pretty high. That’s why I have to give it a 2.5/5.
I know, I know. I’m hopeless.
xx
Za.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1
Teenage girls everywhere, rejoice! The time has come for the latest venture in the Twilight Saga – Breaking Dawn Part 1. And boy, is it the pile of manure I hoped it would be!
In Breaking Dawn Part 1 we rejoin the grimacing Bella (played by Kristen Stewart) and the literally sparkly vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) for the next chapter of their relationship – marriage. They are quite happy until, by some incredible feat, Bella becomes pregnant by her undead husband, thus creating a half-vampire, half-human baby.
There are so many things wrong with this film. Just so many. Let’s start at the top.
I have never been a fan of Twilight. I can’t stress that enough. I think Bella is a mundane, self-obsessed character who teaches young girls ways of going about relationships that are just so misguided in this day and age. Bella is seventeen when she falls in love with Edward, and eighteen when they get married. Edward is her first boyfriend, she has no other point of reference when it comes to relationships, and yet she is so sure that she is ready to give up everything at the age of eighteen for this creepy, dangerous, dull guy. And I mean, she is ready to give up everything for Edward – her family, her virginity, even her mortality. In the second Twilight movie, New Moon, Edward leaves Bella because he knows he’s too dangerous for her, and she just can’t cope without him. What kind of message is this sending to teenage girls? That when someone you’ve been going out with for about six months dumps you you’re expected to fall to pieces? For months? That men are everything? It’s revolting. Young women of today need to and can be strong and independent without love.
But morals aside, the actual plot of Breaking Dawn Part 1 is pretty poor. The lead-up to the wedding and the actual wedding drag on and on, and it seems like it takes half the film to get to the complication (the pregnancy). It’s pure fluff, and it’s practically unbearable. Once you get to the pregnancy, the Edward/Bella angst that we know and love really sets in, and it just becomes a grump-fest. There is a small worry about whether Bella will survive carrying her baby, but it’s terrifyingly obvious from the get-go that there’s no question of a less-than-happy ending for the less-than-happy couple.
One problem in particular I had was that in the movie, they didn’t explain the concept of imprinting very well. In the book, imprinting is described as when a werewolf meets the one person they are meant to be with and forms an unbreakable connection with them. It is possible for a werewolf to imprint on a child, but in the book it implies that imprinting on a child means you don’t really fall in love with them until they grow up. Until then, it’s more like you’re their brother or bodyguard or something. In the movie, this isn’t clear. And then Jacob, Bella’s werewolf best-friend, goes and imprints on a baby. It’s super-creepy, because it looks exactly like they’re falling in love. It’s sick, really.
Breaking Dawn has a few animated effects, and I found them a bit unsettling. They were easily identifiable and just not up to the standard that they should have been, except for one. Bella loses a lot of weight when she’s pregnant because she can’t eat, and the effects they used were great. She looked gaunt and just awful. My friends swore to me after we’d left the cinema that she’s lost the weight in real life, but apparently not, which, I have to say, was pretty impressive. She looked horrific and very real.
Kristen Stewart is less than astounding as Bella, and the same for Robert Pattinson as Edward. It’s a shame, really. These two are capable of some decent acting if put in the right situation (Stewart was good in The Runaways, Pattinson was fine in Harry Potter), but with a lack of substance in their characters and their only defining features being smarm, the pair do the best they can. Taylor Lautner as Jacob on the other hand, is just ridiculous. Lautner is proving himself more and more often to be the worst actor in history. On the plus side, his terrible acting does give the movie some pretty funny moments, no matter how unintentional. I giggled myself silly in some parts.
But, even with all these flaws, I was somehow satisfied with Breaking Dawn Part 1. Like, I really wanted it to be bad. If it had been a good film, I would have been disappointed that the filmmakers had succeeded in making such a dull story and such unappealing characters somehow interesting. I’m quite glad they didn’t really. I can continue being haughty and above this saga for the time being. 2/5 stars from me.
xx
Za.
(By the way, have you entered our Puss In Boots 3D competition yet? Go now!)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Let me just say before we begin that anything and everything I say in this review may be tainted by my bias towards the UNBELIEVABLE HOTTIE Michael Cera, who stars in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Got that? If you totally and utterly disagree with me, there’s a chance that in fact you’re right and I’m wrong, because I as a fifteen-year-old girl am influenced in unspoken ways by the attractiveness of dorky b-list celebrities. Capisce? Great. Let’s begin.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is undeniably a film for nerds and hipsters, and all variations of people in-between. It’s about Scott Pilgrim, an unassuming, 22-year-old bassist from Canada. He becomes romantically involved with a girl who is far too cool for him, Ramona Flowers, and discovers that if he wants to date her he has to defeat her seven evil exes, each more evil than the last. Scott learns many lessons along the way about life, friendship and love. Can I get an “awwwwww”.
It takes a little getting used to the idea that it doesn’t really seem to be set in our world, but in one where it’s possible for a Michael Cera-grade weakling to out punch the guy who plays Superman, and parts of the movie seem a little too cheap and easy plot-wise, but I won’t ruin anything for you. I think the fight scenes with the 7 evil exes mostly hold the weight of the film, much like the musical numbers do in musicals, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just interesting. And the fight scenes are incredibly cool, so it’s excusable.
But all these minor negatives are out-shined by the awesome effects, the incredible cast and the overall EPICNESS of the whole thing.
Scott Pilgrim is based on a series of comic-books, and my one huge point of praise for it is that it retains that kind of comic-book feel. The visuals in Scott Pilgrim are exquisite and exciting and funny. There’s onomatopoeia popping up everywhere all the time, and the fight scenes are like a video game. There’s no blood or anything, it’s all got a kind of other-worldly, Super Smash Bros. Brawl kind of feel to it. The effects are seriously gorgeous and they make the film. Without them, it would run the risk of being a poorly-plotted mess, but it seems to save it a little bit.
The cast has Michael Cera in it. Need I say more. But no, seriously, the cast does an incredible job in this movie. They’re perfect in their roles and they represent their comic-book versions so well. The soundtrack is awesome too, Scott’s band is pretty good.
But the best thing about Scott Pilgrim is the feeling of epicness you get. You know when you watch a movie and you feel like you’re IN the movie when you’ve finished watching it? Yeah? Well, I got that feeling from this movie. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s hard to do in a movie, and so I’m giving Scott Pilgrim 4/5 stars.
xx
Za.
Definitely, Maybe
For my birthday I sometimes like to watch a romantic comedy – preferably a good one that I haven’t seen before – and to be honest the selection was a bit thin on the ground this year, but I asked my very generously helpful friends for suggestions and we came to the consensus of Definitely, Maybe, for no real reason other than it has Abigail Breslin in it who is inarguably adorable.
Definitely, Maybe is the story of a young father, Will, who is in the process of being divorced by his wife. His 10-year-old daughter, Maya, is suddenly curious as to how the two of them met in the first place, and thinks that in the telling of the story Will will come to realise how much he loved her when they first got together and that that will repair their marriage. Will at first doesn’t want to tell Maya the story, but eventually concedes, saying that he is going to tell a story about the three major loves in his life (one of them being Maya’s mother), but he’ll change the names of the women so Maya is forced to guess who her mother is.
It sounded interesting to me for two reasons: 1. My own parents split up when I was nine, and 2. It was made by the same people as Notting Hill and Love Actually, my favourite romcoms of all time (although it feels to me like they’ve copied the poster design for this movie from Love Actually).
I liked the premise of the film, that it was a story told by a man to his daughter. It was almost a love story between Will and Maya (in a totally paternal way) than it was between Will and any of the women. Will was a really great dad to Maya and the film represented their relationship as just as important, if not more important, than his romantic relationships. Which I think is really important. It’s great to see a movie that highlights the importance of fatherhood (as opposed to the importance of motherhood) and the impact dads have on their children, which is often very different in real life to the way fatherhood is usually portrayed in the media.
I really liked Maya, too – she wasn’t a dumbed-down version of a ten-year-old, which can happen in movies. Children are made to seem cute and helpless. But Maya spoke to her father like a person and had real feelings about their divorce, which I identified with. She was a smart girl, and I think a lot of the time children are not seen as smart or grown-up in movies, but her character was really lovely. And Abigail Breslin is an extraordinary actor, as well as being adorable (she is getting older now, though).
The cast was great (Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, etc. etc. etc.), and they did pretty well in their roles. I feel like Rachel Weisz could have done better as Summer, Will’s second love interest, but now I’m nitpicking, and nobody likes a nitpicker. Unless they actually have nits, and then it’s a different story.
As well as being a love story, the movie seemed to be a bit of an anti-love story, in that two of the three relationships Will has turn out to not work. Love isn’t always a happy ending, as Disney would have you believe. Definitely, Maybe is about how relationships are imperfect and difficult and the realities of life are that you have to deal with them. That really identified with me, and I think it is a really accessible concept for most people. Love doesn’t always stick around.
It was a great movie for a birthday treat, and probably a good girls’-night-in DVD hire, but quite honestly not very appealing to the male population. As with most romcoms, I guess. I liked it, but I didn’t quite love it – maybe a 4/5 from me.
xx
Za.
No Strings Attached
No Strings Attached revolves around a couple of old friends who have sex for fun one morning and decide to make it a regular thing – without feelings.
I really wanted to watch this when it first came out and I sadly missed it, but luckily because of my overseas trip I was able to catch up with it on the plane.
Natalie Portman is wonderful as always in the role of Emma, as is Ashton Kutcher as Adam, but the characters are a little depthless and the actors take them as far as they possibly can within the parameters of the poor character writing.
I was expecting more nudity, but I think they tried to play for a wider audience and there’s hardly any actual sex scenes. That’s good news for parents, but I just wanted to see Ashton Kutcher take his clothes off. So sad face.
It is another typical romantic comedy with a predictable plot, and follows the regular foolproof pattern of try 3 times and fail, succeed on the fourth try, but it is a sweet story and Portman and Kutcher do have some chemistry. Plus, it IS a romantic comedy. And I love those.
The whole thing is a bit clumsily put together, but I keep coming back to the impeccable casting as No Strings Attached‘s saving grace. Really good and attractive choices.
This movie was really only to fill my time on my long flight, so I enjoyed it in a kind of sedated way. It was colour and movement. But when I analyse it, No Strings was actually pretty good. Another girls’-night-in movie. 3.5/5 stars
xx
Za.
Wild Child
I remember really wanting to see Wild Child when it came out in 2008. As an 11-year-old tween it was incredibly appealing. And let’s face it, it is a movie for pre-teen girls. And teenage girls too. So obviously I enjoyed it when I saw it for the first time last week, to a certain extent.
I started off a little unsure. I don’t like Emma Roberts. She seems sweet enough, but I don’t think she’s a great actress. There’s something about her American rich-girl attitude that doesn’t sit right with me. But then, that made her perfect for the role of Poppy, a stuck-up Malibu princess who is shipped off to boarding school in England for misbehaving. Let me tell you, I am so glad the plot moved to England. English humour and English accents and English countrysides are far more appealing to me than a Californian approach to movie-making. Not sure why.
I hated Poppy at the beginning and I felt no sympathy for her, but I really, really liked her dorm mates. They were incredibly adorable and totally funny. Why isn’t Juno Temple (Drippy) in everything? She’s so cute!
Juno Temple as Drippy... adorable!
As the movie goes on Poppy redeems herself and of course you end up caring about her. She’s really a sweet girl at heart and her totally adorable friends make her see that. She changes her hair and reinvents herself (because we all know that dying your hair changes the very basis of your personality).
The plot line is appealing and the jokes are funny. The soundtrack is young and pretty good. The girls are active and good role models. The love interest it hot. It’s a perfect sleepover movie.
I think if you’re not a teenage girl you will probably not get this movie. Which is a serious let-down. I have to give it 3.5/5 though, because I did enjoy it.
xx
Za.
Sorry for the short review! Bit busy getting ready for my trip to the UK. Because of this I won’t be posting regularly for about the next 4 weeks. I will try to post about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, because the premiere of that will be SO EXCITING! Are you excited? I am. See you in a few weeks!
The Little Mermaid
You all know I’ve been sadly lacking in the Disney Princess department in my past – I only watched The Little Mermaid for the first time this weekend. Some people don’t see it as a REAL Disney classic like Beauty and the Beast, but certainly in the circle that I’ve been brought up in, Ariel is one of the most important of the princesses. Everybody’s seen The Little Mermaid and everybody loves it. Well, everybody except me, it seems.
Ariel is a mermaid princess, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the great sea-king Triton. Her main problem is that she loves humans and would like to explore the surface world, but her father won’t let her. She then falls in love with a human prince and a whole bunch of problems arise from this (involving the signing of her soul over to an evil witch). Eventually the evil witch is killed, the prince falls in love with Ariel, and she chooses to give up her family, world, and tail for a pair of legs and a happy marriage to her true love.
My main problem with this movie is the moral message. Let’s take a look at it – she is a weak little girl who is totally reliant on her looks and her voice, and she chooses to change the very thing that defines the basis of her character – her mermaid-ity. She does this all for her happy ending, her so-called “true love” who she has spent barely 3 days with. What is this telling our children? That it’s OK to change yourself for a relationship? That happy endings are a must? That all the relationships we have have to end happily? What message is this sending children? I have a real problem with this.
I also have a big problem with the fact that she does get married at age 16. It’s so taboo and unacceptable in today’s society for a regular girl to do that, but for a princess it seems to be OK. It also seems to be OK for her to marry her first love (probably not even true love, she’s only sixteen, for God’s sake), and after she’s only known him for three days.
Ariel also has a cruel father who crushes her dreams, but in the end it seems that all has been forgiven and forgotten bewteen the two. Just like that. The character relationships are so under-developed. I don’t know, Ariel seems so naive. It’s ridiculous. She’s also headstrong crossing King Triton without a second thought, and she’s seriously annoying. She’s flitty and silly and weak and URGH. I can’t stand Ariel. She’s everything I hate about teenage girls. Disney does get some princesses right, like Jasmine in Aladdin, who sticks up for herself and recognises that she doesn’t need a man, but Ariel is like every typical princess – manipulatable by everybody around her.
It has to be said that there are good points to The Little Mermaid - it’s full of fun and whimsy. Like most Disney classics it’s charming and colourful. The soundtrack is also wonderful, with catchy, easily recognisable songs. Ursula, the evil sea-witch, is incredibly cool too. She’s rocking. I love her. Baddie-licous.
But that’s about it.
I don’t know if I’m in a particularly ranty mood tonight or what, but I did not enjoy The Little Mermaid very much. At all. Poor. It did not suck me in.
Sorry Disney, but you’re falling very short on just 2.5/stars. Just 50%. I do better than that in Maths tests, which is saying something.
Not really recommendable.
xx
Za.
Notting Hill
I haven’t seen any movies this week (a first in a while), so I think I’ll have to review an old favourite of mine: Notting Hill.
This is one of the first movies I watched when I was little and only really just getting into movies as more than just colour and movement, but as a credible form of entertainment and art. It and movies like Love Actually (which is an incredibly similar style of movie) are really basic movies that I can’t help but… love. They’re comfort films. I watch them when I’m sad. Which makes them incredibly hard to criticise. So I have to tell you now that this review is not going to be very long because of that.
Notting Hill is pretty obviously the kind of movie I enjoy. It’s a British romcom classic, and it has the whole package – Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Richard Curtis, could you really ask for more? I don’t think so. The storyline involves a young-ish bloke who’s kind of at a dead end in life until one day he accidentally bumps into a beautiful movie star. And you can probably guess how the rest of the story goes – it’s love at first sight, then they’re not sure if they’re meant for each other, it’s a situation of will they won’t they, and then in the end of course they do. It’s well executed and predictable and relatable and very, very sweet.
The characters are funny, and Hugh Grant slides effortlessly into his classic role as a romantic but unsure doofus. Rhys Ifans and Emma Chambers are hilarious in their characters and Julia Roberts is gorgeous and naïve and on top of her game.
As a romcom you do invest some sort of expectation that it will be funny and it does have many laugh-out-loud moments (LOL moments?), which I think if it lacked would bring down the tone of the whole movie, but as such it’s really enjoyable.
Overall there’s not many points I can make for or against Notting Hill, because in the end it is a breezy, light, comfort film that always makes me happy, and for that I can hardly rebuke it. I have to give it 4.5/5 stars.
xx
Za.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
When my mother heard I hadn’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind she practically died. She predicted it would be exactly the kind of movie I would enjoy, and she was right – I did enjoy it, very much. She was shocked at herself for not having made me watch it.
The concept of Eternal Sunshine is really interesting and very original – an organisation exists that allows people to eliminate their hurtful memories. Joel, played by Jim Carrey (who I normally hate but LOVED in this), discovers that his girlfriend Clementine has erased all memories of their relationship, and doesn’t recognise him anymore. He decides to have Clementine erased from his memories so he doesn’t have to deal with the loss. I love this idea, it’s futuristic and almost dystopic, but kind of believable as well. Maybe we’ve all had a memory or a person erased, but we don’t remember that we’ve done it. It’s all very Matrix-y.
I really enjoyed the acting in this, everybody was great, but what I liked the most was the back story involving the people who worked at the organisation (which I can’t tell you about because of SPOILERS). So. Yeah. It was good. And I thought the main characters, Joel and Clementine, were really perfect for one another, which just made the ending so much better (can’t tell, spoilers!).
There were a whole bunch of dream scenes throughout, which were happening as Joel slowly forgot everything about Clementine. I didn’t watch any of the special features, but my mother tells me that a lot of the particularly freaky sequences that looked particularly CGI were in fact done in real time. If you’ve seen Eternal Sunshine you’ll be pretty fascinated by that fact, for those who haven’t let me tell you that doing them in real time is an impressive feat.
I really, really liked this movie. 4.5/5. Exceptional.
xx
Za.
High Fidelity
High Fidelity is one of those classic indie movies. Kind of like Garden State. With peculiar but very cool characters and a ripping soundtrack. I don’t think I liked it quite as much as I liked Garden State, but maybe I was just in a better mood that day. Or something. But I still enjoyed it. Just not as much.
High Fidelity follows the story of a slightly self-loathing record store owner as he breaks up with his long-term girlfriend. Rob is a compulsive list maker, and throughout the movie he revisits his top 5 most memorable break ups and tries to find out why girls always break up with him, in a sort of self-discovery way.
The acting is fabulous and John and Joan Cusack are both hilarious in their roles. I cared about all the characters. In particular I liked Todd Louiso as Dick, Rob’s quietly opinionated employee. He was sweet and funny and just quiet. He was a real dork and I was rooting for him the whole film – when he got a girlfriend I was over the moon. Dick, representing nerds everywhere.
The thing I loved most about Rob was how cool he was. You know, when you see somebody cool in a movie, you just want to be like them, you know? And Rob was just, like, completely cool. He didn’t care about anything. He was so hipster it made my eyes burn. He was so laid-back I was worried about him falling over (Geddit? Laid-back?). The whole vibe of the thing was incredibly relaxed and just… cool.
The ending was great, too, a little reminiscent of 500 Days of Summer. It felt like the beginning of a relationship. The beginning of a new story. Like the movie had gone from start to start rather that start to finish. I liked that.
The best thing about it was EASILY the soundtrack. What an amazing soundtrack. Great music. Mmm.
My problem with High Fidelity is pretty shallow. It’s one of those things where I just don’t feel absolutely… right about it. There’s something that doesn’t sit right with me. I could never really get completely into it.
But, that being said, I did really like it, and I can’t fault it on many levels. So I have to give High Fidelity 4/5. Pretty good, huh? I can probably recommend it.
xx
Za.
