Sunday, March 11, 2007

Movie Reviews

I'm loving our Netflix subscription. (Thanks Mom and Dad!) We've seen quite a few movies in the last couple months. Some good, some not so good. And we've been able to catch up with The Sopranos. Only two months have passed and we're already into Season 3!

On to the movies...
Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Catherine, the daughter of Dr. Roberth Llewyn, played by Anthony Hopkins, a recently deceased mathematician at the University of Chicago. Hal, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is Hopkins protege and soon becomes Catherine's love interest. Catherine struggles with the years of her life lost to caring for her aging and senile father. She fears she too has succumbed to the deterioration of mental status that her father eventually died from. While Catherine faces this fear, she also comes to grips with her amazing mathematical prowess, also inherited from her father. Hal coaxes Catherine to embrace her mathematical genius. The title of the movie is a play on words, having to do with mathematic proofs, but also the proof Catherine searches for in her own life.

The movie was not as predictable as one might think. I'd give this 3 out of 5 stars.


This was truly a star-studded cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Marky Mark Wahlberg (I guess he doesn't like to be called that anymore), Jack Nicholson and a brief appearance by Martin Sheen (not playing anyone in the President's cabinet, surprisingly). This movie was a mafia-cop story. Of course, you've got to have a dirty cop, an undercover cop in the mafia, and the elusive mob boss. Not too much shooting until the end. It's a good mafia-cop story. Was this truly the movie of the year? I don't know if I'd go that far.

3.5 stars out of 5



I'll be the first one to check out the latest Brad Pitt. Besides 12 Monkeys, there hasn't been one I haven't like. Really a versatile actor - from The Mexican to Oceans 11 and 12 to Seven, he's got quite a repertoire of films. This is yet another role to add to the list. He plays a stranded tourist in Morocco where his wife has inadvertently shot. At the same time, a few other story lines play out. The Mexican nanny is faced with deportation while caring for Pitt's children, and then the deaf Japanese teenage struggling with the death of her mother. I'm still left scratching my head about how the Japanese teen fits into this story. This movie had the same feel as Crash, where multiple lives intertwine, but this one didn't seem as clear. Pitt did have a very good performance in this movie, but after finishing the movie, we decided many things could have been left out and it was toooooo long.

2.5 stars out of 5

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