Misery (1990)

I am a sensitive person when it comes to horror movies. I try to make myself see as few as possible, but sometimes I am just too curious, and, well, curiosity killed the cat. At least I have made a deal with myself to never catch up on the list of Stephen King adaptations I haven't seen yet. Misery is only half as scary as The Shining which is a movie I swore I will never ever see again.

The movie Misery is not as brutal as the book. It is another Stephen King adaptation which the author wasn't happy with, and if you only know the book and thus expect a die-hard splatter movie with chopped off limbs then I must tell you: NO. You are not going to see that.
Bestseller author Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) has a car accident and is rescued and taken care of by nurse Annie Wilkes (played by Kathy Bates) who turns out to be an absolutely devoted fan of his books, especially the Misery series. When she finds out that her beloved character dies in the latest volume, Annie is determined to make Paul change the ending - under any circumstances...

The horror in Misery is mostly silent (think Silence Of the Lambs rather than Saw) and yet omnipresent due to the incredible performance of Kathy Bates. (For those of you who are not sure who Kathy Bates is: the other nice rich woman besides Rose in Titanic. Hilary Swank's mother in P.S. I Love You. The hippie woman sharing the hot tub with Jack Nickolson  in About Schmidt.) You gotta love that woman. One minute she has an absolutely contagious smile, and the next minute she seems to be a demon straight from hell. Few actresses can pull that off so easily, and giving Bates the Oscar was one of the most appropriate decisions Hollywood has ever made. If you want to see great acting in a horror movie which is suitable for the more sensitive movie addict (;-) ), you should give Misery a try.


RATING: 4/5

Pina (Pina - Tanzt, tanzt, sonst sind wir verloren; 2011)

I knew who Pina Bausch was before I saw this movie. But I didn't have much of an idea of what exactly she had been famous for.
After seeing it, I realized what it was she did. And I understood why she became such a legend.

Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was a dance performer, choreographer, and dancing/ballet teacher and she was undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. She even influenced David Bowie. Do I need to say more? ;-)
This movie now is Wim Wender's monument to her art, a documentary showing extracts from four of her pieces. Some of her dancers  tell their story of how they became part of Bausch's ensemble, the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Pina is clearly not a movie for people whose preferred movie genre is only horror, or only action. You gotta be able to sit down, relax - maybe with a glass of wine, maybe even by yourself - and allow yourself to really sink into the wonders of Pina Bausch's art and the beauty of epxressing yourself through art in ways that at least I had never even thought were possible.

Kimberly Jones of The Austin Chronicle described the movie as an "utterly transfixing, exhilarating spectacle", and she couldn't have found better words. The fantastic score underlines perfectly what Pina was aiming at: creating a medium for expressing yourself and connecting with others through dancing. Wim Wenders made a movie that is overwhelming and incredibly fragile and tender at the same time. If you thought you knew what dancing meant, watch this movie and think again.

RATING: 5/5

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (Blau ist eine warme Farbe; La vie d'Adèle; 2013)

This is a movie that I had huge expectations in, almost as much as in Hunger Games pt.2 (which is a great movie and even better than pt. 1, go see it if you haven't yet!). It was hard to go into the movie theater without being prejudiced before and having some ideas (and hopes) about what the film would be like because of all the stuff I had heard in advance (very graphic sex scenes, one of the best movies of the year).
I won't give away too much of the story, just so much: I am disappointed.

The whole movie is three (!) hours long. The first hour shows mostly the daily routine of 17-year-old Adèle (played by Adèle (surprise!) Exarchopoulos) at school.... *sarcasm on* yes, how very interesting! *sarcasm off* By the time she finally gets together with beautiful, mysterious Emma (played by Lea Seydoux, the female villain from Mission Impossible 4) who is a total cliché of the flamboyant art student, you are very likely to have yawned a few times or shifted in your seat wondering when the movie was finally going to develop a plot.

Coming to talk about the oh-so-graphic sex scenes. Journalists have not exaggerated when they described those scenes as hot, BUT.... author Julie Maroh  - the woman who whote the comic on which the movie is based - described those scenes best when she compared them to porn, saying that "the gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and found it ridiculous" while guys will probably be "feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies". EXACTLY. There is not much more to say about it. Many times I was thinking I was watching internet porn or something. It is very clear where director Abdellatif Kechiche got his "inspiration" from. I am not saying porn is bad or evil. I am saying, however, if you want to make art, you should aim higher. It's actually what you owe the lesbian audience whose love life you are trying to picture.

Apart from those three things (length, boringness and ridiculous sex scenes), the movie is better than many other lesbian movies. It avoids the typical shallowness and uptightness, and the actresses do a very good job. The (straight) people I saw the movie with liked it much better than me, so maybe the movie is more enjoyable for a straight audience.


RATING: 3/5

Blue Jasmine (2013)

This is my first post on a movie that is still in theaters - and my first post on a Woody Allen movie, whose Blue Jasmine is his best movie in a long time.
The movie has been compared to A Streetcar Named Desire... I would compare the leading role to Jane in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane in terms of totally not caring about your appearance anymore, having hallucinations, drinking... What I am trying to say is that Blue Jasmine is especially worth seeing for the incredible performance of leading actress Cate Blanchett who is going to win the Oscar in february 2014... my prediction. ;-)

Woody Allen has made great movies such as Midnight In Paris, or - of course - Annie Hall (Der Stadtneurotiker), but also movies that leave you wondering what the point in seeing the movie actually was (e.g. Whatever Works). David Denby wrote in The New Yorker that Blue Jasmine is "the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years". This is true.
With the help of flashbacks, Jasmine Francis remembers the life she lived in New York as the wife of wealthy businessman Hal (played by Alec Baldwin) until she lost all her properties and had to move to San Francisco to live with her much poorer sister Ginger (played by Sally Hawkins). One could thus say that there are two plot lines. During the movie we see Jasmine struggle with having to find a job and being too ashamed about her situation to be honest with potential boyfriends - and we also learn how crippled the relationship between the two sisters is. The end culminates in a fight between the two sisters in which Ginger reveals her true feelings for Jasmine.

Woody Allen has made a movie that looks behind the facade of rich people and leaves us feeling sorry for them. Jasmine lives in a marriage full of lies and self-humiliation (especially on her part). She desperately tries to hold on to that life, and is unable to ask for help. In the end we can only pity her and come to the conclusion that Ginger, who works as a cashier in a small grocery store, is much happier in her life than Jasmine has ever been.

Blue Jasmine is a very exhausting movie to see - but in a positive way.

RATING: 4/5

OLDIE OR GOLDIE? >>> Citizen Kane (1941)

What you need to know:   

- Citizen Kane is a black&white drama directed by Orson Welles who also plays the main character Charles  Foster Kane, an extremely wealthy media mogul.
- The story starts with Kane's death. Just before he dies, he whispers the word "Rosebud". The rest of the plot describes journalist Jerry Thompson's research to find out the meaning behind that last word.
-  in 1998 AND 2007, Citizen Kane was voted Best American Movie Of All Times by the American Film Instititute (movies after 1996 were not considered).


What you also need to know:

- Citizen Kane is the most boring movie I have ever seen. Really. I always refer to it as "114 minutes of my life I will never get back". XD  It just didn't seem to end. Oh boy.


Gold information you can use to annoy stuck up teachers and filmfreaks who think that "Citizen Kane is such a deep, fascinating movie, holy cow!":

- When Kane utters his last word, there is nobody in the room besides him. Which means that nobody even had the chance to hear him say "rosebud". Which means that there is absolutely no logical reason why  someone should want to find out what the word means. Which means that the whole story is bullshit.
Here's to you, American Film Institute! ;-)


RATING: OOOOOOOOLDIE.

Precious (Precious - Das Leben ist kostbar; 2009)

I finished the movie Precious a few minutes ago. I knew it already, since I saw it in the theatre 3 years ago, and still I am experiencing the dire need to give someone hell because this world can be a sick place sometimes. It is needless to say that Precious is a very upsetting movie that some people will find unbearable to watch.

Clarice “Precious” Jones (played by Gabourey Sidibe) is an illiterate, heavily overweight, African-American teenage girl who lives with her mother in the ghetto of Harlem, New York. She is pregnant with her second child. The father of both children is her mother’s ex-boyfriend – Precious’s own dad. Her mother (played by comedian Mo’Nique who won the Oscar for this role) is unemployed and abuses Precious physically and emotionally mostly because her ex-boyfriend was less interested in having sex with her than in raping her daughter (yes, seriously).

When her principal finds out about Precious’s second pregnancy, she takes her out of school and wants her to attend an alternative school project. This project finally opens a window and Precious slowly begins to learn that there are actually people who care for her.

Precious has been compared to The Color Purple, and yes, there are a few parallels. Both movies are Cinderella stories set in an African-American background.  I would say that Precious is just as cruel – but surprisingly less of a tearjerker – and appears to have a more realistic ending. It is one of the few movies which are hard to describe as “great!” because it is just so depressing and sickening. Why should you watch it then? Well, because it is wrong to close your eyes at other people’s suffering. And because this is one of the movies with a perfect cast and impressive acting performances.

That’s why.

RATING: 5/5

Disney's Fantasia (1940) / Fantasia 2000 (1999)

I am a die-hard Walt Disney fan. The first movie I ever saw was The Jungle Book - I must have been around 4 years old - and my parents did a wonderful job of introducing my sister and me to the wonders of Disney's art. However, I had never even heard of Fantasia until 2009.

Fantasia is number three (!) in the row of Disney movies and surprisingly long (120 min). It consists of nine  animated sequences set to pieces of classical music such as Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, or Rite Of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. The adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's Night On A Bald Mountain might be a little scary for children.

It would be shameful to give away the content of each episode. What I can give away, however, is that you are going to see something so beautiful that it will make you gasp and think, how on earth can human beings create art like this?

When you look up Fantasia on wiki, you will see that not all of the reviews were positive. The movie has been described as "an overwhelmingly ambitious orgy of color, sound, and imagination", but also as "grotesquely kitschy". While I would agree that one or two sequences are at least bordering on being cheesy,  I think that the others are simply an ode to the magic you can create with pen and paper. As a Disney lover, Fantasia is a dream come true.

RATING: 5/5

Fantasia 2000

Fantasia 2000 is the sequel to the movie I just talked about.

This time, each sequence is introduced by celebrities such as Bette Midler or Quincy Jones. The highlights are the adaptation of George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and the adaptation of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Apart from these two, I would not consider this movie a must-see when comparing it to its older brother. Describing it as only mediocre would be wrong, though.

Fantasia 2000 is less cheesy than its predecessor, but at the same time lacks a great deal of the original's magic and charm. Fans of Fantasia should probably see this movie so they can say they know them both. As for people who only know the new movie, I would highly suggest they watch the first one.

RATING: 4/5