This is not your conventional holiday film. It doesn’t exploit emotions for the sake of drawing tears from the audience, nor does it shove the whole holiday theme down our throats, this is an independent film with a holiday theme that tends to focus more on the actual character within the general theme of the holidays. What’s shown is an array of colorful and somewhat eccentric character dealt into an engrossing story of family and values. If you’re sick and tired of the usual holiday fare, check this out. It’s a great story about family and holidays. “Pieces of April” we learn is symbolic of the main character April’s attempts at making amends with her family. It’s alluded that she was a troubled girl so, not only does the story become a quest for April to finish her meal, but it becomes a quest to prove to her family that she’s reformed.
Tag Archives: Romance
Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) (2001)
“Spirited Away” has had the unfortunate distinction of being compared to “Alice in Wonderland”, and while they bear similarities in themes, characters, and oddities, but Miyazaki’s animated tale is highly superior. Miyazaki takes us into an incredible land of creatures, landscapes and spooky villains, along the injecting truly heartfelt emotions, and thematic undertones. Miyazaki’s animation and storytelling bear an aspect sorely missing in American animated films, which heart, and true sincerity. Chihiro and her parents are on the way to their new home, and while driving they stumble upon a weird tunnel. Curious, they enter the tunnel and end up in a magical field and begin journeying into a village. But when Chihiro discovers her parents have been turned into pigs, she finds that there may be no going back where came from.
New York Minute (2004)
Why anyone would still find the Olsen Twins even remotely appealing is still beyond me, unless you find spoiled, rotten, rich girls appealing, then perhaps they’re for you. Luckily, “New York Minute” was a flop and I had a good laugh, but let’s face it, they laughed all the way to the bank. It’s clear judging by the movie that the Olsen’s have zero talent, and they prove just because you can buy yourself into a movie doesn’t mean you should be in one. Nonetheless, this is not a movie to be taken seriously even by someone as uptight about movies as me, but as harmless as this tries to be, you can’t also escape the fact this is a basic rip-off of “Ferris Bueller”, a much much better movie with an actual believable premise, where as this is basically driven on the vanity of the Olsen twins.
Comfort and Joi [Paperback]
A dissection of film theaters which are compared to airport terminals, general disillusionment with movie-going and how the magic is gone, musings on pop culture and lack thereof, the disappearance of our pop culture traditions that spawned a generation of well cultured masses. All in one-hundred and thirty pages? How is that accomplished? In one utterly engrossing passage, Dougherty riffs on how directing and making a film, which was once such a demanding task, is now reduced to a mere mundane ability thanks to technology. Author Dougherty makes two things clear during this novel; that Joi was both an actress with great potential who never reached the upper echelons of Hollywood royalty she had the potential to reach due to circumstances that were both beyond her control and due to her own behavior, and she was very beautiful.
Ray (2004)
Ray Charles was a man who took the limits of his skin color that kept him down at the time along with his disability and used it to his advantage with his pure musical genius, his ability to reach beyond the musical genre and discover all sorts of facets of music experimenting. The film directed by Taylor Hackford is a bittersweet inspiring tale of Ray Charles’ life, love, and struggle with drug abuse. Charles played by Jamie Foxx in an amazing performance, is portrayed with the humanity and flaws that give this film the reality it needs and never pulls back. Charles himself picked Foxx after a rigorous test of piano skills and approved him personally, and the film manages to convey all of Foxx’ skill in its entirety.
XX/XY (2002)
See, here’s the thing with this movie that threw me for a loop, something that I was shocked at, there is inevitably a difference between the first half and second half of the movie. There is so much of a difference between the first and second half that it makes the two split “XX/XY” feel like two movies. Much like the recent film I’ve seen, “Club Dread” which had such trouble mixing two elements it felt like two movies, “XX/XY” suffers from what I now have created called “two movie syndrome”. What’s two movie syndrome, well it’s a film in which the first half and the second half are so different that it feels like two movies, so I’m stuck with the unfortunate duty of reviewing two movies, the first half and the second half which are so different in color, tone, texture and dialogue, that I was so shocked when the second half approached and it was inevitably a rip of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”, in a good way, and then there was the first half.
Miracle (2004)
It’s one of the most amazing stories in sports, the stuff that legends are made of, and it’s a riveting underdog tale whether you’re sports fan or not. The king was dead, there was an oil crisis and the nation was basically in turmoil, until the story of this one Olympic hockey team took the world by storm and gave the nation just a little hope that is sorely was in need of. I’m what people call “Not a sports fan” (made that up myself), so it’s never usually on my list of things to do when sports movies come out, but for “Miracle” I was intrigued. Simply for the fact that this wasn’t just a sports story, it was an underdog tale, a tale of hope in a time without it, and a tale of people coming together to take on their enemy on the ice.