Drew Barrymore:entertaining or annoying?

DREW BARRYMORE

Oh Drew Barrymore, 

As a child I thought you were cool because you got to make movies I liked (FIRESTARTER) , then you had your naughty comeback as a teen (having sex on a car hood with Tom Skerritt in POISON IVY) and then you entered back into Hollywood with your daisy power, big smiles, David Letterman flashing, popularity and from there became a succesfull producer with your own production team, all while maintaining a laid-back, lots-of-giggles attitude. 

While over all you have a less then amazing filmography, it is unique. I did slightly obsess over you in high school and kind of love that you are often riding the line between cute and embarrassing. Plus, for a RomCom girl you have a bit of double chin I appreciate. 

I am going to go ahead and rate all your movies I have seen. I think it will be interesting to see how many are any good. Because regardless I like you somehow. I like your bad fashion moments, or crazy hair moments, or short marriages, you don't fit the mold of leading lady and still make the big bucks.

I am putting these in order of the movies I liked best-worst.  

1. DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Gotta pick this as my favorite movie from this list, sadly, maybe one of the worst acting jobs of her career (or what I have seen of it). I love Jake Gyllenhaal in this movie, and the music is great, and there is something just so cool about this movie despite its many flaws, Barrymore being a big one. To be fair, she helped produce this movie and played a huge part in it getting made and released so for that, I thank her. There is a moment in the movie, during the sisters dance troupe performance, that has several seconds of the most awkward acting I have ever seen. It is a cut to Drew Barrymore standing off stage and looking back and forth with her eyes. Seriously as strange as that sounds, watch for it. Very unfortunate. So, while number one on my list of her movies, not a strong performance by her. 

2. THE WEDDING SINGER (1998)

Also, one of the only Adam Sandler movies that I don't hate, I LOVE this movie. It's one of the best in it's genre and a true classic. It is funny and touching and I usually hate sentimental movies. It is also one of Drew's best characters, and hair-style. She is charming and funny and cute. Big A+ all around. 

3. SCREAM (1996)

Saw this movie in the theater with my girl-friends when I was 15. I loved it, and still do love this movie. Maybe the only successful movie to pull of the horror movie/teen comedy blend, it really is scary and funny and very nostalgic for me. Drew plays the opening girl who gets tormented and stabbed to death and it really is a great opening sequence. I saw this movie at the time I really really liked Drew so I was so freaked out watching her struggle and it affected me when she died. Also great in this movie is Skeet Ulrich being so greasy and gross but I remember thinking he was hot, eww. 

4. E.T (1982)

I don't watch this movie very often, but it is a real classic and very good and Drew is adorable. It is what created the first phase of her crazy career. Not much to say, it's E.T.

5. FIRESTARTER (1984)

This is a super cheesy movie and lots of the acting is weak, but she is a cool kid! She starts fire's with her mind and kills lots of people. Because the government is assholes and killed her parents. I loved this movie when I was a kid and still do.

6. MUSIC AND LYRICS (2007)

One of my top guilty pleasures, I was shocked by how much I enjoyed this movie. Several of my best friends in Olympia used to watch this all the time. My friend Steve once said "the only person as good at playing their go-to character as Drew Barrymore is Hugh Grant." But this movie really is a good RomCom guilty pleasure, and I really like the music for the fictional musicians in it.

7.CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (2002)

Good movie. I only saw it once when it first came out, so I don't remember it all that well, but I know I liked it. Sam Rockwell  is always great and Clooney is a good director. I think Barrymore was fine, but maybe I thought she was miscast?

8. SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (1989)

A pretty good, little seen movie, starring Jeff Bridges. It is a family drama about a divoreced father and widow, both with two children, who fall in love. Drew is the troubled teenage daughter of the widow and she is pretty decent. This is maybe the last movie she made before going into rehab and writing her memoir. 

9. CHARLIE'S ANGELS (2000)

I liked this movie a lot when it came out. Pretty bad, but also pretty good. Bill Murrey is always entertaining, even when he seems to find the material lame, which I think he does in this movie. Barrymore is the best example of her own contradictions with this character because she rides the line of embarrassing and fun in this movie pretty damn tightly. 

10. POISON IVY (1992)

This is a GREAT bad movie. Barrymore plays the title character (Ivy), who is a troubled but hot teenage girl who befriends a lonely outcast girl (Sara Gilbert from Roseanne!) and as the name suggests, ends up sleeping with the father and murdering the mother. It is 90's sexual thriller at its best/worst. The sex scenes with Skerritt are gross though. 

11. GREY GARDENS (2009)

Of course, this is not nearly as good as the documentary made twenty years earlier, but it is maybe Drew's best performance. This is one of the only times I can say Drew really transforms herself into someone else, and even with an accent she pulls it off. She makes Little Edie sympathetic and likable despite being a complete mess of a person. I suggest seeing the documentary first, then this for a happier ending.

12. GOING THE DISTANCE (2010)
I just watched this RomCom a few nights ago. It wasn't as good as MUSIC AND LYRICS but it did have some really funny parts, as well as some really bad parts. Both Drew and Justin Long are good, have good chemistry and he has one really funny scene in a spray tan booth. At times his character can be a jerk, but in the end I liked where they ended up.

13.  GUNCRAZY (1992)

This movie is decent. Drew plays a poor teenager, obsessed with guns, who is stuck living with an abusive step-father. After he rapes her one day she murders him. She then meets up with her prison pen pal who has been let out early, and they go on a crime spree. Of course, they start off with good intentions but the world is against their type and they end up going out in a blaze of gun fire, much like a modern Bonnie and Clyde. Drew is good in this movie, another sex starlet role, made right after POISON IVY, and her co-star, James LeGros, is a much less creepy sex partner then Mr. Skerritt.


14. EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU (1996)

In this Woody Allen musical Drew is fun, but it is not one of his better films and her singing is only okay. I wouldn't see this movie again, but it is bearable, and we are getting down to where her movies start getting pretty bad. 

15. WAYNE'S WORLD 2 (1993)

Not as good as the first one, it still has funny parts. I haven't seen this since I was 14, so I don't remember it all that well, but I thought Drew was cool at the time. 

16. CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE (2003)

I saw this movie with a friend in Paris when I was 19 and traveling. It was fun and I enjoyed myself, but the movies pretty bad. While not boring, it is ridiculously over the top.  Bill Murray is gone, replaced by Bernie Mac who I don't like nearly enough, and Diaz is a little desperatley hyper in this one. Drew produced this one as well.

17. NEVER BEEN KISSED (1999)

An alright for its genre movie, I like Drew in this movie, but its way too sweet at the end for me, and I feel like I have never made it all the way through, just catch chunks of it here and there. I know this was one of the first big movies her production company produced, which is cool, but its not a very exciting addition to movies in general. 

18. EVERAFTER (1998)

I would never need to watch this movie again, but its a decent fairy tale story for girls. Pretty much the rest of the movies on this list or awful, so this is the last one I can really give any positive words about. Fairly dull, Drew is Cinderella who gets the guy, and maybe has some girl-positive messages, I think, but saw it a really long time ago. 

19.BOYS ON THE SIDE (1995)
Pretty, pretty, pretty bad movie. The characters are really cliched and it's a tear jerker that more tedious then sad. It as Whoopi Goldberg as a lesbian, Mary Elizabeth Parker dying of AIDS and Drew as the "wild girl" stuck with an abusive boyfriend. Who I think beats several of them up at one point.


20. 50 FIRST DATES (2004)

As I said before, I am generally not an Adam Sandler fan, and this movie is awful. Bad, stupid plot and not very funny jokes. Its all the bad parts of the RomCom genre and the worst parts of Sandlers humor put together.





MAD LOVE (1995)
First off, Chris'o'Donell is one of the lamest actors to have a short, but popular career. I don't like him ever and Drew's character in this is an obnoxious "wild girl" who charms boys by risking their lives all the time I guess.

22. BATMAN FOREVER (1995)
Well, everyone knows this movie is awful. Drew is in it for less then 3 minutes which is lucky for her.

23. BAD GIRLS (1994)

A really awful movie. A group of women start a cowgirl gang in the wild west and fight back against evil cowboy men. If this movie was any good at all I would have enjoyed it just because it is about strong women. But its bad, and all the women stay lame the whole movie. Drew does look cute in the western outfits though, so maybe it should be higher...
 

I want to see this movie!

I started reading about this film early last year but it only played in festivals, I am so happy its going to released soon! Female director and a creepy story and I love Michelle Williams. Check this out!

5 GREAT HORROR MOVIES YOU MAY NOT HAVE SEEN

I love scary movies. 

I could make a long list of horror films I like. This is 5 random movies that freaked me out in different ways, and not all of them are horror in the traditional sense. I picked these 5 because they are movies that many people have not seen. Below is a brief description of each movie and some of their horror highlights. 

1. A TALE OF TWO SISTERS 2003   dir. Ji-woon Kim

"There was a girl under the kitchen sink."

This is a scary movie. It starts with two sisters returning home after spending time in a hospital. In true creepy fashion their step-mother is clearly crazy and violent and their father is emotionally absent. TWO SISTERS  is a ghost story, and has a creepy female ghost with long black hair over her face, the same one used in many movies. But TWO SISTERS remains original, mostly in the creepy characters in the film. The family scenes, over meals mostly, are off putting and confusing. Early in the film you get the feeling that something doesn't add up, the conversations they have don't make sense at times, like a piece of the puzzle has been left out.    Watching it the first time my fear was increased as I struggled to make sense of everything. My mind raced to understand what was really going on and that added to my panic. The good news is on my second viewing, it all held together and made sense. A truly great, gory and suspenseful horror flick.   The best image used is a trail of blood being made by a dragged potato sack full of what sounds like a crying girl.

2. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK1975   dir. Peter Weir

"What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream."

This isn't the scary movie to get when you want gore and screams and killers. It's really more of an art film, but it is very creepy and bothered me for awhile after I first saw it. The story takes place in Australia in 1900, following a group of girls who attend a privet school. On a field trip to Hanging Rock several of the girls go exploring and vanish. Their disappearance haunts many people, including two boys who spied on the girls as they started their exploration, and an orphan student who has a crush on one of the girls who goes missing, and who is not allowed on the field trip because her guardian  is behind on payments. The school also suffers financially as more and more girls are pulled from the school following the incident. This makes the head mistress rather mad, and she takes it out on the poor orphan girl. The costume designs are wonderful and the music is both lovely and haunting. While slow paced at times, the film builds to a devastating conclusion that leaves the audience horrified and curious as to what really happened to the missing girls. 

3. BLACK CHRISTMAS1974   dir. Bob Clark 

"Filthy Billy, I know what you did nasty Billy! "

The original and maybe best slasher movie ever made, BLACK CHRISTMAS is scary! It takes place in a sorority house over Christmas break as girls are murdered one by one. It opens with a POV shot through the killers eyes as he climbs up the side of the sorority house into their attic. The killer is creepy, never being seen, because he is always talking to himself and in a baby voice saying really creepy and gross things. Inside the house are two phone lines and the killer uses one to make obscene phone calls to the rest of the girls, after each phone call, he kills a girl. The reason this slasher film is superior to the hundreds that followed is the characters are not one dimensional. They are given personality, relationships and problems. It also offers a terrifying ending as the final girl learns the killer is in the house but can't leave without trying to get her friends out. We know they are all dead and that only the killer is left with her, but she bravely tries to get to them in time, knowing that a mad man is hiding near her. If you are a horror movie fan this is a must see. (Do NOT watch the remake, it is awful) 

4. REPULSION1965    dir. Roman Polanski 

 "I must get this crack mended"

This disturbing tale of madness was made several years before the more popular ROSEMARY'S BABY and shares several themes. REPULSION is the story of a beautiful young woman who is on the edge of insanity. She lives with her sister and works at a hair salon. Early in the movie there is a scene of her walking home from work past a construction sight, one of the workers watches her, blonde, long legs and calls out to her. We see this from his point of view, making us the spectator also. Soon the young women is left alone for a weekend when her sister and boyfriend go out of town. Immediately the young women begins to unravel. She stares at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking she can see them growing. She buys meat but forgets to put it in the fridge and it begins to rot. A man comes to visit and when he attempts to rape her, she kills him and this sends her over the edge. She barricades  herself in the apartment with the body and rotting meat. The cracks grow in size and soon she sees hands coming out of the walls to grab her. The cinematography is great in this movie and Catherine Deneuve as the young women is both sympathetic and terrifying.

THE BROOD1979 dir. David Cronenberg

"Thirty seconds after you're born you have a past and sixty seconds after that you begin to lie to yourself about 

it "

One of my favorite Cronenberg films, this gross movie has some of the scariest monsters I have seen. They are particularly scary because they look like children but have demon faces. One warning, much of the acting in this movie is bad. The lead actor is awful and scenes with him can be funny they are so bad. But, being a B movie this doesn't ruin the movie, just enhances its cheese factors. My favorite scene in the movie is one where a preschool teacher is beat to death by several of the monsters that look like children, in front of her class of real children who, of course, freak out and cry. The end reveal is grosser then gross, giving audiences some of the sickest imagery of breast feeding and child birth ever put on film. Not a movie to watch while eating.

Academy Awards Time

The Oscars are here and 2010 films are gonna be getting their awards today. I have been watching so many movies from this last year I am ready to move on and after today I am going to. But first I will make my predictions and choose my picks for all the top awards.

This years ceremony will have a new feel to it I think. Hosts James Franco and Anne Hatheway bring youth to the show, and since neither are comics (in the sense that past hosts have been) I am predicting sketches will dominate, maybe them doing bits from many classic movies?

I always enjoy seeing the dresses on the red carpet. Pregnant Natalie Portman will be glowing I am sure, and I have high hopes for Jennifer Laurence and Michelle Williams, both up for best actress along with Ms. Portman.

So here are the nominees, If a name/title is in red I have NOT seen it. Otherwise I have.

BEST PICTURE
BLACK SWAN
TRUE GRIT
KINGS SPEECH will win 
SOCIAL NETWORK
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT My Pick
WINTER BONES
INCEPTION
127 HOURS
TOY STORY 3
THE FIGHTER

If any movie beats KINGS SPEECH it will be SOCIAL NETWORK, which just weeks ago I would have predicted, but SPEECH has picked up momentum recently and is a very academy friendly movie. I liked lots of these movies, I choose THE KIDS because it was my favorite movie of all ten. Both TRUE GRIT and SOCIAL NETWORK were amazing and I would be happy to see either win.

BEST ACTRESS
Natalie Portman will win
Jennifer Laurence
Michelle Williams
Nicol Kidman
Annette Bening My Pick

All 5 actresses were great in their films. I would be happy to see any of them win really. I pick Bening because I think playing as normal of a person as she does in THE KIDS is hard and the scene when she sings Joni Mitchelle at the dinner table is amazing.

BEST ACTOR
Javier Bardem 
Jessie Eisenberg
James Franco
Colin Firth will win My Pick 
Jeff Bridges

Another great catagory. I almost want to say Jessie Eisenberg is my pick, but Firth is really great in KINGS SPEECH and was great last year in A SINGLE MAN and I want him to get an oscar.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Helena Bonham Cater
Jacki Weaver
Amy Adams
Melissa Leo my pick 
Hailee Steinfeld will win 


I am predicting Steinfeld will win because Melissa Leo (who is also a good bet for taking home the gold) might loose based on votes being spit between her and Amy Adams because they are both in the same film and both are good. I think Leo is great as the mom and always great in every film she does. My only problem with Steinfeld winning is that she is not the supporting actress in TRUE GRIT she is a lead and it seems unfair to compare her performance to the others when she is in every scene in the movie and the rest are supporting.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR 
Mark Ruffalo
Geoffrey Rush
Christian Bale will win
Jeremy Renner
John Hawkes My Pick


Bale's performance in THE FIGHTER seems to have gotten him many awards this season and I think it will tonight as well. There is a chance Rush will beat him because KINGS SPEECH has been picking up speed recently. I think Hawkes was great in WINTER BONES, I wish he would win.

BEST DIRECTOR 
David Fincher
Coen Brothers
Tom Hooper will win 
David O Russell
Darren Aronofsky My Pick

I think whatever film gets best picture the director will match. But Fincher has a great shot too. I choose the BLACK SWAN director because I love his crazy style.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
WASTE LAND
INSIDE JOB  will win 
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP My Pick
RESTREPO
GASLAND

Most people predict INSIDE JOB will win. I have not seen it but want to and am going ahead and predicting it to win. Of the three I have seen both EXIT IT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and GASLAND are great. I give it to GIFT SHOP just barley over GASLAND because it stayed more consistent.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE 
TOY STORY 3 will win
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
THE ILLUSIONIST

I am not picking a personal winner because I have only seen 2 and think I would really like ILLUSIONIST. it seems a sure bet that TOY STORY will win.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY 
ANOTHER YEAR
KINGS SPEECH will win
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT My Pick 
THE FIGHTER
INCEPTION

This is a hard choice. I loved the script for ANOTHER YEAR but still want KIDS  to get it. The script was original and so funny.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY 
TRUE GRIT
SOCIAL NETWORK My pick/will win 
WINTER BONES
127 HOURS
TOY STORY 3

Aaron Sorkin is a great writer and what I loved most about SOCIAL NETWORK is that the characters have conversations and talk to each other. I think this should and will win.

BEST FOREIGN FILM
IN A BETTER WORLD
INCENDIES
BIUTIFUL wll win
OUTSIDE THE LAW 
DOGTOOTH

Since I have only seen one of these films (boo) I won't pick it. but I loved DOGTOOTH so I would be happy to see it win. It sounds like BIUTIFUL  is great and will win.

There we go. The show is later today and I will be watching it, hope you will too.

ABORTION; elephant in the room

For a long time I have been annoyed by the treatment of abortion in movies and television.  An estimated 3500 abortions are performed every day in the world, but abortion is so sensitive to many people it has become a procedure to be consistently rejected in film and tv.   I find it frustrating to be watching a show dealing with unwanted pregnancy and suddenly I am watching a repudiation of abortion. Examples of ways that the possibility of abortion is treated often in shows and movies are A) she has a miscarriage B) she visits an abortion clinic but is discouraged by a person or the place itself.  


In real life, women get abortions. 


Even more preposterous are the movies with plot lines about unwanted pregnancies that refuse to even say the word.  KNOCKED UP  has a single, career minded women get pregnant from a one night stand. The whole movie is about her pregnancy, but the word abortion is never uttered. One character uses a word that rhymes with abortion to avoid upsetting his friend and others ask her if she will "take care of it' but they won't even use the word.  
2008's WAITRESS is about a women who is trapped in a marriage with an abusive man. When she becomes pregnant she is horrified and even writes letters to her unborn baby blaming it for her miserable life, but this movie also never uses the word abortion. A friend asks if she will "get rid of it" but when her answer is simply, no, they move on and never come back to the suggestion. 


This unbalance of what women in movies are doing vs. what women in real life are doing seems so absurd to me that it greatly offends my  feminist sensibilities. 

The recent movie that brought all of this to mind is BLUE VALENTINE.

(there is a spoiler coming up so don't read on if you care)

BLUE VALENTINE is a movie trying to capture raw intimate moments in a relationship that is falling apart.  It shows the beginning and the bitter end.  Soon after the couple meet she realizes she is pregnant.  (The pregnancy is accidental.)  She decides to have an abortion.  The movie focuses on her as the procedure begins; she is emotional, and watching, so was I.  The scene is graphic and honest.  And then she changes her mind and stops the abortion and continues the pregnancy.      

Now, here’s the problem.  The pregnancy is the reason the couple marry and the reason they end up where they do.  Had she gone ahead with the abortion the couple would not have had a child to rush them into marriage and unhappiness.  She has a baby because it is necessary to the movie’s plot.  So why does she start to get an abortion?  The decision to stop the abortion took me out of the movie.  It is a scene in which I was emotionally invested and then I was yanked out of the movie because, once again, a woman in a movie does not have an abortion.   

To be fair, I really liked BLUE VALENTINE, and so it is more annoying than usual that, again, an abortion is avoided.  

 I have made a list of movies that deal with abortions.

1) Dirty Dancing

2) 4 Months, 2 Weeks, 3 Days
3) Enter the Void

4) Lake Of Fire

5) Vera Drake
6) Revolutionary Road
7) Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her
8) Cabaret
9) Godfather II
10) Greenberg (although they never say the word, a lead character does get one) 

My Top Ten Films of 2010

Here is my top ten movie list for 2010. I have seen a much higher percentage of films this year then ever before I think, however this list is likely to change over the next four weeks as I see some of the movies I missed. The major movies I have yet to see that have gotten good buzz are 127 HOURS, TOY STORY 3, ANIMAL KINGDOM, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, CARLOS, OUTSIDE THE LAW, IN A BETTER WORLD, ANOTHER YEAR, INCENDIES, BIUTIFUL so look for some of these to pop up and replace some on this list over the next month. I plan to see all of the Oscar nominated movies before the awards are given out. Whew. Sure is a fun way to be busy.

Here we go.

1) I AM LOVE

The most beautiful film I saw in 2010, I AM LOVE, has gorgeous cinematography that is a throwback to 70's Italian cinema. It stars the fascinating Tilda Swinton as an emotionally repressed Russian-born women now married into a rich Italian family. Her desires are awakened, you could say, by the food of a young chef who befriends her oldest son.  The score is composed by John Adams and it takes the film to an even higher level. I really can't say enough good things about this movie. The movie left me breathless. 

2)THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

For me this movie had a lot going for it before I even saw it. THE KIDS is the story of a lesbian couple raising children, and it is written and directed by a women. Plus, it features Julianne Moore who rocks, and my number one celebrity crush, Mark Ruffalo, who, it turns out, is at his hottest. It lived up to my hopes and has remained one of my favorite films since I saw it in June. I liked that THE KIDS is a comedy where no one is the bad guy, the characters are complex and flawed, and relatable. The pain they cause one another comes from real places giving me compassion for them all. 

3) DOGTOOTH

A surprising Oscar nomination for best foreign film, this Greek drama is disturbing and very odd. It is the story of parents who choose to raise their three children in complete isolation from the rest of the world. They teach their children different definitions for common words, like "salt" is "telephone", and a pussy is a small yellow flower. The only outsider brought to the house (always blindfolded for the drive to and from) is a prostitute  for the son. The two daughters are fascinated by this woman, and she uses their curiosity to fill her own needs. Needless to say the methods the parents use on their children lead to increasingly disturbing behavior and a rather disturbing climax. The complexity of the mythology the parents have invented is part of what makes the movie so rich. DOGTOOTH left me wanting to watch it again, to find answers that will help me understand how and why this creepy world exists.

4) SOCIAL NETWORK

I didn't expect to like this movie as much as I did. I had heard a lot of criticism of its depictions of women, and because I find the depictions of women insulting in over 50% of movies I was sure this one was going to offend me. It did not. SOCIAL NETWORK is about white male Harvard elitists, and it does nothing to make them likable. The acting is top-notch and the directing is sharp. There are more female roles (with names even!) then many popular movies, and it made me excited to see Rooney Mara take on the role of Lisbeth Sanders in director Fincher's upcoming version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. 

5) WINTER'S BONE  

Rarely do movies get made about the class of people that are portrayed in WINTER'S BONE. Jennifer Lawrence plays 17 year old Ree, living in a back woods town devastated by meth. Ree is raising her younger siblings and caring for her crazy mother; her father is a missing meth dealer. Everything about this movie feels raw and real. The actors look rough; they play people I have never seen before on a big screen. The location and music add to the movie authenticity. The performances are great and the strength of Ree is astonishing to see.

6) BLUE VALENTINE

Another raw movie, BLUE VALENTINE, is the story of a young married couple on the brink of breaking up. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, both consistently great actors, are at their best and some of their scenes are painful to watch, especially the bad sex they have in a motel. I have seen countless movies about relationships but BLUE VALENTINE captures two people who are so unhappy together that every little thing the other does drives the other crazy, and neither can help but consistently say that one thing that will push the other over the edge. Great writing. (There is one part of the movie that took me out of it;I won't go into that here, but I will later write about it.) Still, an almost perfect movie.

7) CATFISH

The less you know about this documentary the better-I suggest seeing it, not reading about it. I will say it is a fun companion piece to SOCIAL NETORK because it is about the friendships we make on sites like Facebook and Myspace. CATFISH is creepy and sad and very entertaining. 

8) SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD 
This was the biggest surprise of the year for me. I only saw it recently and was blown away by how much I liked it.  The story is of Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), who spends his time playing guitar in a band, sleeping in a bed with his gay best friend, and being bummed out over his last girl friend who dumped him when she became famous.  Scott’s world is shaken when he meets the girl of his dreams, (he literally dreams about her before meeting her).  In order to date her he must fight her seven evil exes.  In the world of Scott,people fight as if they were in video games:  you can score bonus lives and turn into gold coins when you lose.  This movie captures the angst of early twenties so well.  The people in it hurt each other all the time, but are so lost in their own pain they don’t see what they do to others. Also great is the music, written by Beck and Metric and Broken Social Scene among others, performed by the actors who play fictional bands in the movie. 

9) BLACK SWAN

A huge fan of director Darren Aronofsky, I was excited to see BLACK SWAN as soon as I first heard about it.  While not my favorite of Aronofsky’s films--that title belongs to REQUIEM FOR A DREAM--I do think SWAN is visually fascinating and the movie strikes a wonderful balance of art film, horror movie.  The story is of Nina (Natalie Portman), an obsessive ballerina who has no life outside of dance.  Just as she is given the lead role in Swan Lake her sanity begins to collapse and everything falls into chaos.  I loved that SWAN never over-explains Nina’s history.  The story implies she is anorexic and into some form of self-mutilation.  We understand the mother/daughter relationship without the movie defining it.  Because delusions begin to overtake Nina so early in the film the audience never knows her without them.  Her disease is the desire for perfection. 

10) SHUTTER ISLAND
 I considered putting this movie higher, because of how underrated I think it is. I personally thought it was great. DiCaprio and Scorsese are a good team and SHUTTER also stars my favorite crush, Mark Ruffalo, and the amazing Michelle Williams. I think the biggest challenge viewers have with SHUTTER is whether you can accept the way-out-there twist at the end. I read the novel by Dennis Lehane years ago and loved it, great page turner, so I already knew the ending going in and was fine with it, but I understand it could be too crazy for some.  INCEPTION  is not on this list, and one of the main reasons is that the central love story did not work for me in INCEPTION. In SHUTTER ISLAND it did. The similarities of both movies are kind of weird so its easy for me to compare. DiCaprio's character is suffering in both films and haunted by memories of his wife and children. In SHUTTER the visions of his wife and daughter are creepy and effecting. The storm that is destroying the island he is on represents the damage of his guilt. In INCEPTION I never felt the children were real, and the images of them in his memories were cliched. The moments DiCaprio shares with Williams are always creepy and mysterious and beautiful.  I think SHUTTER ISLAND  is a top notch thriller.

THE RUNAWAYS is a waste of interesting material

I saw THE RUNAWAYS a few days ago and was seriously annoyed by it. Joan Jett is a cool lady and The Runaways were a cool band. So why is the movie about them so incredibly lame?

The biggest problem is that the movie has no voice. It isn't saying anything. It lakes any focus what-so-ever. The movie makes no effort to show any historical relevance the band had, or any effect it had on females, or the music world,  at that time.

The movie starts with Joan Jett, played poorly by Kirsten Stewart, introducing herself to Kim Fowley as an electric guitar player. He is interested and helps her start up an all girl rock band. They find Cherie Cherry in his club and like her blonde hair and attitude so they ask her to join as the singer. The rest of the band is filled in by girls who the movie never bothers to develop in the slightest. The girls practice in a trailer with Fowley telling them they need to sell sex and be tough. Soon they are touring and doing drugs and having sex. Next they are huge in Japan and Cherie causes problems by posing alone in sexy magazines and developing a drug problem. They start to fight and Cherie quits. All that she is left with is her drug problem and her old life, which wasn't great.
 But all these cliched scenes don't build into anything. Were these girls corrupted? Were they empowered? Was Kim Fowley nothing more then a child molester or just preparing them for the world they were entering? In this movie the answer to all these is, sort of, maybe.
The only slightly saving grace of the movie is Dakota Fanning who is good as Cherie Currie, but she is given such a limp script that it can only help a little. Yes, she is believable as a drug addict, but who cares.
The movie is never shocking (Jett peed on an assholes guitar! But they don't bother to show his reaction or if there are any consequences) it's not provocative(Fanning is wearing underwear on stage, never seen that before) . It is not a feminist movie in the slightest since it never shows a glimpse of any political or social messages. Sadly, it isn't even very fun to watch.

Movies about rock bands are notorious for being bad, but this movie isn't even good bad. I would much rather watch THE DOORS for a good laugh then any scene in THE RUNAWAYS.

I think someone should remake a movie about this band and make it worthy.