Movies

I saw a really strange film last night, Thumbsucker. I buy the movie magazines every month and the two I buy gave it quite a good write up, and it sounded very interesting. Can't say I thought it was particualarly interesting though, just another run-of-the-mill quirky teenage drama about growing up and troubles of youth blah blah blah. For this genre, you can't get better than Donnie Darko, although it wasn't trying to be weird like DD was. It reminded me a bit of The Secret Lives Of Dentists, which is 2 hours of my life I'll never get back. Man, that was one boring lousy film.

I'm not having much luck with film choices, I saw another (very weird) one called Innocence. Some French film about a junior girl's school where new students turn up in coffins. It was all pretty baffling and couldn't quite work out what it was all about. I suspect there was lots of hidden meaning and symbolism which missed me. There was a lot of child nudity in it as well which I thought was a bit disturbing, and I can see the paedo's lining up to rent this one.

Another really strange one I saw, which I have been meaning to for ages, was Irreversible with Vincent Cassel and Monica Belluci. Really powerful, very shocking. I thought the two main scenes were stunning, the violence in the club (Club Rectum!) and the rape scene. Horrible to watch, but you have to say brilliant acting and bold film making. I have to admit I did skip through the rape scene though, I'm not really into watch some woman getting done for 9 minutes. Trouble is, the film really tailed off after that. It was shot in reverse, like Memento, but the last hour was pretty dull, showing the charcters and build up to the two scenes mentioned earlier. Memento was great, because the story became clearer the longer the film went on and there was a real whammy at the end. With Irreversible, the whammy was at the beginning and the last (first) half of the film was irrelevant.

Finally, saw a beautiful one called Italian For Beginners. It's a Danish Dogme 95 film and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not really into art-farty stuff, but this one really struck a chord. It's basically a love story (which generally I hate) but was quite barbed. Happy ending mind which made me all warm inside. Good performances, nice story, I recommend and will certainly re-watch.