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Showing posts with the label melodrama

WONDER WHEEL - REVIEW

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Wonder Wheel was Woody Allen's 2017 film starring Kate Winslet and Justin Timberlake as two people with a bit of an age gap who start an affair before one of them decides to get together with the other one's younger daughter. If this plot rings any bells, by the way, you've successfully pinpointed the first troubling aspect of this movie. As the world increasingly struggles to separate artists from their, often less-than-remarkable, and sometimes just plain odious, personal lives, it was a bit of a blind gamble for Allen to release a film like Wonder Wheel. A film that, if not consciously, subconsciously evokes the allegations surrounding the celebrated auteur and his daughter Dylan Farrow. Then again, if you've convinced yourself that you have done nothing wrong, why would you bother avoiding certain subtexts? On the surface, Wonder Wheel is your typical Tennessee Williams-style melodrama about people making bad decisions leading them to some ironic tragedy.

FUNNY ABOUT LOVE - REVIEW

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Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Funny About Love was a romantic drama/comedy from 1990 starring Gene Wilder and Christine Lahti as a couple who struggle to have a baby and slowly drift away from each other as a result. Like Woody Allen's Husbands & Wives or Kramer vs Kramer , Funny About Love aims to tell a very real story about real people who have real marital problems as we see a genuinely sweet relationship come together then reach a dead-end and finally split apart. It's not too surprising that critics weren't too keen on this one (Roger Ebert hated it) upon its release since the first act of the film tells a harmless enough, pretty adorable love story then purposely takes a detour to uncomfortable places, something which probably lost a portion of the audience who was enjoying the light-hearted aspects of the film and expected another Mr Mom . Indeed, the main couple's attempts at conceiving a child and their eventual split are awkward to witness but if you&

CAST AWAY - REVIEW

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Because making a straight-up Robinson Crusoe movie would have been too easy, director Robert Zemeckis went for Cast Away instead: a modern-day retelling of the familiar tale of a man stuck on a desert island. With only the love of FedEx to keep him warm at night. Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is the put-upon castaway whose FedEx plane crashes in the sea in one of the film's best, most effective sequences. We then follow him as he slowly but surely comes to terms with his new life alone on the deserted island he randomly found himself on. With only coconuts and the odd (raw) fish to eat, he struggles at first but eventually starts to learn some key survival skills which end up saving his life in the four years he ends up spending on the island. That and the company of a personalised volleyball he calls Wilson, one of the film's biggest characters and most genius product placement ideas. Hanks' very own physical transformation during the making of the film certainly add

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS - REVIEW

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From the makers of Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers comes Millennium Actress , the story of an ageing actress telling her life story for a TV interviewer and his cameraman as the latter two imagine everything she went through by transporting themselves into her stories. It's a cute idea in that it links the present with the past without having to resort to constant flashback and forths or one long drawn-out voice-over. This is a much more slow-burning film than Satoshi Kon's aforementioned works, which makes sense when you realise it's essentially a melodrama. Similarly to how Perfect Blue merged real life with the world of film, Chiyoko's story dips into her various acting jobs without transition so every so often we end up with her on the Moon, in medieval times or surrounded by geishas in the middle of a certain scene before we realise we've followed her into that world. The interviewer and his camera guy act as both comic relief and as a link to the pres

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS - REVIEW

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Edward from Twilight , that nazi from Inglourious Basterds and Legally Blonde walk into a circus... Sounds like a joke, right? Well now it's a film. With a title like that and Trapeze -style melodramatic visuals, I have to say I expected something pretty hilarious and in all fairness this wasn't big or fun enough to be hilarious, only amusingly idiotic I'm afraid. Still, there's loads to enjoy here! You've got Christoph Waltz who excels once again as a demented villain with a genial way of playing with people's emotions. One second he's a giddy, loveable weirdo, the next he'ssingle-handedly beating up an elephant (a strangely Polish and peaceful elephant at that). He's, in a word: mad. Which is great! If only everyone else had put in some heart and effort into their roles we could have had something half decent here. A less vampiric Robert Pattinson once again delivers what, at first, seems like a dark, brooding performance but soon enou