Change Your Image
princess_t_storm
Reviews
Ghost Town (2008)
average (decent) rom-com
ghost town is basically your standard romantic comedy. not much drawing outside the lines of rom-com conventions here. which is to say it has it's fair share of saccharine moments and attempts at tear-jerking. if you've watched many rom-coms it's pretty safe to say that there's nothing here that you haven't seen before.
which isn't to say that the movie is bad- just that it's predictable and treads some well-worn ground. you could do a lot worse if this is the kind of movie that you like. the presence of ricky gervais, tea leone, and greg kinnear help make this film more likable and elevate it to watchable status. so, not a bad comfort film.
possible spoiler alert follows:
i must add that i did not find much humor in the scene where our protagonist gives his love interest's boyfriend nitrous oxide in order to make him talk. in my opinion it only served to take away some empathy that i felt for his character as it was unethical and wrong. i think leaving that scene out would have helped the film a bit, as it was an odd scene to have in the film because it did not match the tone of the rest of the film.
Nobel Son (2007)
so bad
i was expecting this to actually be good because of a positive review by a critic who knows film and writes for my local paper. i'm surprised at just how bad it is. first off, the lighting leaves much to be desired. it's far too dark throughout the film. i'm sure this is on purpose, for some reason. second, the editing. lots of scenes in this film are shot like a music video, with quick editing and electronic music playing over it. it also doesn't cover up the flat direction that i believe is at the heart of this film. third, the music again. it's not just played in the quick-edit montages but throughout more static moments in the film. it does not help the film, in my opinion. also, i don't believe that it adds the sense of excitement that i think it is probably intended to. although with a film this uninvolving and flat i don't know that there's any music that could have helped. but the electronica seemed a bad choice.
also, there's little to no character development. i really didn't care what happened to any of the characters after a while, so i stopped watching. all in all, i found this film to be a sub-mediocre disappointment of an attempt at quirky black comedy. i give it a 2 because it has some good-to-decent acting despite the uninspired, flat direction.
Paranoid Park (2007)
wow. shockingly, offensively bad.
first off, i'm amazed to see that this film has got a rating of 7 on this site. at first i thought it might be industry people logging in to IMDb and jacking up the rating. but after looking on rotten tomatoes and seeing that this film has something like a 76% approval rating, it seems that maybe folks have just been duped again into mistaking pretentious crap for profundity. i mean, this film is simply awful. the acting is simply terrible, but the rest of the film is worse. at least the acting provides some (unintentional) laughs.
the plot involves a teenage skateboarding boy who is being questioned along with his friends for a murder that happened by a park where they skate. and that's about it. the rest of the film consists of the aforementioned terrible acting, terrible dialog, slow motion shots of people walking, of people's faces, of people skating, often set to music that does not fit the scene. perhaps that was done to be "cool" or experimental or hip. or perhaps it was done in hopes that it would fool people into thinking that it is somehow profound, but it does not work. nothing in this film works. it's pretentious garbage. i can't not recommend it enough.