I enjoyed the whole depth behind this movie. This is a family who aren’t very close to begin with, and each character is completely opposite to the next one. Kate Hudson is enjoyable as the flirtatious man-eater. Her plot was probably the best one as she manages to fall head over heels for this snake. Frances O’connor gives a radiant performance as the meakish bookworm of the family who also becomes interested in Adam and gets involved in a lurid affair with him. Adam is also a very interesting character; I think Adam is more of a symbol in this movie than an actual character. He is the quintessential man that each of these people picture and often he gives them what they want or desire through intricate planning. We never truly learn anything about him and whenever he does talk about his past, his stories are altered for the people he’s with simply to charm them and win them over through pity and sentiment.
Tag Archives: Arthouse
Sidewalks of New York (2001)
In this charming intertwining tale of love, lost, and sex, director and writer Edward Burns stars as a posh New York salesman Tommy who falls for a City school teacher named Maria (Rosario Dawson). She is being annoyed by her door man/musician ex-husband Ben (David Krumholtz), who is re-discovering love with the help of Ashley (Brittany Murphy), who wants to be with him, but is stuck in a tawdry affair with Griffin (Stanley Tucci), who is stuck in a dead end marriage to the highly opinionated liberal real estate saleswoman Annie (Heather Graham) who is falling for Ed Burns’ character, who is being coldly snubbed by Maria. Wasn’t that a mouth full?
Cherish (2002)
This is an excellent movie, I must say. At first I was a bit hesitant to watch this, because the first five minutes drag on with slow moving dialogue and character development. This movie tries to make a clear point of the fact that she is indeed a lonely desperate character, and they use her vulnerability and desperation against the audience as we witness her injustices but can do nothing about it. Finny Taylor is top-notch at both directing and writing this great black comedy and gives us a minds eye view into this character. The character Zoe often hides herself and escapes into music throughout the movie, so much so she is well-known by a DJ at a local radio station.
An American Rhapsody (2001)
The movie is actually very tense in the beginning as we start in black and white bringing the feel of “Schindler’s List” as we watch the young couple attempting to escape the country of Hungary. I love the emphasis on each of the characters; Tony Goldwyn is great and has great chemistry with Nastassja Kinski. We then go to color where we see the two attempting to adjust to fifties American suburban life, and they slowly do. When they get their daughter Suzanne back, it’s all the more interesting, because she not only must adjust to a new country, but to a new life and family she never knew.
Piñero (2001)
This is possibly the most grueling movie I’ve ever had to endure because it’s simply dull; I thought biographical movies were supposed to be interesting yet this isn’t. Benjamin Bratt plays Miguel Pinero in this documentary/biographical tale of the Puerto Rican poet who rose to fame with his poetry and inevitably fell from grace by a brutal drug addiction and liver disease and died at forty in the late eighties though revered by culture and poets everywhere. If Pinero was a much of a genius as this movie proclaims him to be then he gets the short end of the stick because this is simply a lot of nothing.
Amelie (2001)
In this French comedy, we meet Amelie (Audrey Toutou), a reclusive beautiful young girl who relies on her imagination to take her into her own magical worlds. When she discovers an old tin case in her wall containing relics of the past belonging to someone, she decides to make herself a deal: she finds the owner, if they are happy with discovering the relics, she will do nothing but good deeds from now on, if they aren’t happy, she will return to her reclusive life. Well, the owner loves the relics, and now decides to take her screwy life filled with screwball characters and do good deeds for them. This movie garnered tons of Oscar nods when it appeared on the scene, so when it came on, I was more than anxious to check it out.