Movies I saw this week

Hi. I have a lot of movies, and this week I actually watched a lot of movies. My reviews follow.

To start off, Rachel and I went to the movie theater on Sunday. We saw Post Grad with Alexis Bledel. Kind of The Graduate for a new generation. She's just graduated college, doesn't get her dream job because of course there are 15 other young people interviewing for it, then we meet her eccentric family, she spends the summer at home trying to figure out what to do with her life, then she gets offered the dream job, but in the end she runs away across the country to be with some guy. It was a pretty cute movie, but the plot was so scattered; a lot of things were left unfinished. My favorite thing about The Graduate is the groovy Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. I think any sort of soundtrack could have made Post Grad a lot better.

And now for the movies that I own (a lot of them I just bought this week--I wanted new movies, so I went to Fred Meyer and bought 10)

Adventureland
Adventureland did not turn out as I expected. For a movie about an amusement park, I expected it to be more silly and well, amusing. But that makes it sound like I didn't like it. I really liked it, but it was a lot more serious than I expected. It had a great soundtrack (movie was set in 1987).

A Mighty Wind
This is not a new movie. It's from the same people who did Best In Show. It's a fake documentary like Best In Show. But this time it's about a bunch of folk musicians, centering on the reunion of Mitch and Mickey. I actually like folk music, and this movie did a really good job making fun of it (in a good way). I know one of the songs, and maybe even two of the songs, were nominated for an Oscar. A nice bit of silliness, with some fun songs thrown in.

My Fair Lady
I have never stayed awake for all of My Fair Lady, and this week was no exception. I like a lot of it: costumes, some of the songs, etc, but I don't really like that whenever Rex Harrison sings, he's more speaking than singing. Best example: "When there's a woman in your life..." So I think I've seen it three times now, but can't tell you how it ends. Oh well, maybe next time.

Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road is the name of the street where Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio live sometime in the 50s/Cold War era. The couple are charming again, and almost make me want to endure the 3+ hours of Titanic again. They're struggling with the life they're supposed to be living: nice house in the suburbs, he has an important but boring city job, she stays at home, they have kids. People say how perfect their life is, but they just don't like it. They decide to shake things up and move to Paris, and the same people now say they're nuts (like mental institution nuts). And that's the movie. I love it. I think everyone today can relate to their desire to blaze their own trail. Add to that some cute costumes`and a tragic ending, and you've got a really powerful movie.

Hannah Montana the Movie
I love this movie. I doubt there are many people around that love both Revolutionary Road and Hannah Montana. After I saw the movie in the theater, I bought all of Hannah/Miley's CDs. One of the major messages of the movie is that life's a climb: "Doesn't matter how fast I get there/Doesn't matter what's waiting on the other side/It's the climb". Another line in the same song is "Always gonna be another mountain, I'm always gonna wanna make it move" It just speaks to where I am in life right now, even though I'm not a pop star who is reconnecting with her country roots and serving as a role model for a googleplex of tweenage girls.

Dan in Real Life
I saw this movie for the first time early on in my relationship with Chad. It's a really fun movie. Steve Carrell is funny, as usual, but also really sweet, like in 40-year-old virgin, but much less gross. He's a widower with three daughters, they go back to a small coastal village for a family-reunion-like gettogether, and he meets a girl one morning when he's in town fetching the morning paper. Turns out the girl is his brother's girlfriend, but totally not right for the brother, so through the whole movie we root for Dan to get the girl, but still honor his family. It's a good date movie because it's a sweet romantic comedy, but the comedian that is Steve Carrell keeps the boys interested.

The Reader
More fantastic Kate Winslet. She actually won the Oscar for this one. The movie is set in post-war Germany, which I've always been pretty interested in (what could it have been like to be German in this time period?) A young man has an affair with an older woman. He likes to read, and she likes being read to, so that kind of sets it off. It's very sexy (though I could have handled seeing less of Kate Winslet's nipples). Then we learn of this woman's past, and we follow the young man through life and how much this woman affects his life. Very thought provoking. Very good.

The Boy in Striped Pajamas
So I followed the very good post-war movie with a holocaust movie, which was a risky move. The Boy in Striped Pajamas made me want to shoot myself. We follow an 8-year-old boy. His dad's a high-up Nazi. They move to the countryside so dad can keep an eye on "the farm." The boy thinks the air smells weird (the stench of burning flesh coming from chimneys he can see from his bedroom window) and he's sad he had to leave all his friends in the city. But he's clueless about the war that's going on around him. One day he's exploring and meets an 8-year-old on the other side of the fence. He wears striped "pajamas" and they talk about 8-year-old boy things and they become friends. At then end of the movie the Jewish boy brings the German boy a spare pair of "pajamas" and he digs under the fence, and it's not long before the two boys get gassed. The end. I thought it would be interesting to view this tragedy through 8-year-old eyes, and it was, but it was pretty disgusting (not graphic at all, but gross). The tagline for the movie is "Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us" So I thought it would offer some hope that humans are not members of a cruel race. No such luck.

Zack and Miri
I needed some fluff to wash away the pajama movie, and Zack and Miri succeeded admirably. The original title is Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but they weren't allowed to put that on the DVD box. It was hilarious, and not too gross. Of course it was a little gross, all the jokes were about sex or porn and they threw around the F-word a whole lot, but I thought it was funny.

There you go, my week of movies.