I watched this movie twice. I liked it. I am a man. These statements may seem mutually exclusive, but I’ll let you in on something: the movie is very real. True, it’s built to fly off shelves into the houses of tween and teen girls, and it tells many girl stories in the same way Love Actually tells many love stories … but the story-telling is surprisingly not kitschy. In a movie like this, you would expect lame declarations of love, weak plot sketches, poor acting … but there is a distinct absence of all of these problems.
This movie resonated with my “finding yourself” issue I have been constantly considering and writing about during college. The intensely human stories were kept in fresh and constant rotation as the plot shifted from girl to girl around the world. Also: Greece is ridiculously beautiful. Note to self: travel there someday.
Terrible movie for parties, good for many other situations. And guys, if you watch this and then tell everyone about it with the intention of convincing people of your “sensitive side” … get a life. I’ve seen it done, and it is lame. If, though, you happen to end up seeing this movie, give it a good chance: it will surprise you with its insight into life.
I just heard this cool song “Men of Station” by a band called 13 & God on our sweet awesome local indie station The Current. Whilst googling to find the name of this band, I ran across a review with a great, albeit complicated, turn of phrase:
Many people have little time to spare for Anticon’s [the music label’s] experimental vision of what “sounds good” in hip-hop, preferring to lump strangely-voiced people talking in some bizarre poetic dialect of MCing over bleak beats in strange time signatures under the satisfyingly belittling moniker ‘nerd rap’ before heading off down the club.
You can buy their self-titled album on Amazon, but you can’t listen to a sample of the track “Men of Station” unless you use iTunes. I’m like a big advertisement for every online service you can imagine!
I generally like the movies Ben Stiller is in. He can be over the top as in Zoolander, but when he needs to be (as in Meet the Parents) he’s believably funny. He mixes those two together in this mostly-hit but sometime major-miss movie about dodgeball. It’s a good movie for any gathering of people under 25 … and it would be much more classic if they dropped the sexual orientation humor around the chracter Kate. Seriously … they could have pulled all that, put in a couple more funny jokes (it’s obvious they had the writers to do so), and improved the staying power of the movie tremendously.
That said, this is still a very funny, silly movie. Vince Vaughn is just warming up for the lightening delivery he brings out in the movie Wedding Crashers. Lance Armstrong’s cameo is funny, defining the “random non-actor” genre for cameos.
Peter La Fleur: Hang on a second. You wanna become a cheerleader to prove you are not a loser?
Justin: Yeah. Why?
Peter La Fleur: Nothing. High school’s changed a bit since I was a kid.
White Goodman: Donde esta la biblioteca, Pedro?
Peter La Fleur: What?
This movie takes wickedly stylized film making and a perfect soundtrack and uses it as an extraordinary backdrop for a plot featuring extrapolated technology, kung-fu, and a look at a future of our world. The sum is much more than the parts. This movie could have been terrible - different directors, different actors, attempting to make it more “pop” and less gritty … there are so many wrong turns that are so frequently taken with futuristic movies of this type. This movie avoids these problems: how, I do not know.
This is the movie you want to see to start a discussion of philosophy. This is the movie you want to see to start a discussion of kung-fu.
This is the movie you want to see if “good/bad” aren’t nuanced enoughs distinctions for you in a plot.
The Matrix would screen poorly to an all-girl slumber party. It would screen wonderfully to just about any other audience over 14. Go watch this if you have not yet.
I loved the off-beat sense of humor in this movie, which definitely indicates it is true to the book. Though, there is a definite sense of the movie attempting to cram in all of the events in the book into a movie that just can’t accomodate it. Not having read the book, I still got the sense that there were undercurrents of humor that were shoehorned in to appease those that had read the book, but which fell flat when deflated in an attempt to fit them in.
An interesting note: I thoroughly enjoyed the graphic design/user interface of the actual hitchhiker book when shown in the movie … I think that concept really came alive when put on screen in a sleek and futuristic way that is difficult to write. This, of course, didn’t make up for the other shortcomings mentioned above, but it is a testament to the movie maker’s committment to bringing this book to life. Also, I liked the narrator. Very good.
I’d recommend this if you want to convince someone to read the book. Good for a group of people who like puns and the absurd … if you like Monty Python’s Holy Grail, you’d like this.
Quoth Nils: “Ok, you know what has to stop? This whole “update once a week” thing. How about daily, or tri weekly? Come on!” A valid point, sir, though homework has been brutal. Here I am, back for a little bit, though I will again be absent from tumbledry for some time in preparation for another test. Have no fear, though, updates are set to appear in the following days, so you all will not go without. Truth be told, I have been in the process of reinventing my homework attack method. I must thank many people in my life for being ever-so-patient with me throughout this process: it is certainly not an overnight change. I will be struggling and learning throughout the rest of this semester, but it is in this much more strictly time-managed direction that I must point my life. I’ve been almost fearful to outline this goal of mine, for fear that doing so will somehow jinx my efforts, but I find that describing what I am trying to do gives me a better idea of how to do it. I’m getting there.
I am reminded of the famous Ben Franklin quote: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” Sqaunder-free, then, I strive to be. Cheeeeeeesy, stuff. Focus on my general message, not my rusty writing.
I’m like the old guy in the rocking chair telling all the kids in pampers, ‘Get off the chair! Do not break that! I thought you were suposed to be napping.’