‘Big Fish’ Download and Reviews
“Big Fish” Movie Details
Big Fish tagline: An adventure as big as life itself.
 Big Fish DVD Cover |
Actors:
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Norther Winslow |
“Big Fish” Movie Review
“Big Fish” Plot Summary
A story about a son trying to learn more about his dying father by reliving stories and myths his father told him about himself.
Beautiful and Unexpected
As a lifelong Burton fan, I approached this film with high hopes, and no trepidation whatsoever. Honestly, I have never met a Tim Burton film I haven’t liked for one reason or another, but Big Fish is only the second to make me cry (Edward Scissorhands being the first). I was expecting a deep storyline, wonderful cast of characters, and little confusion from time to time, but I got so much more than these things. We have all had a ‘big fish’, it’s the one that grows and grows until it takes on a life of it’s own, before long you don’t need to tell the story anymore, because that fish is just one step ahead of you. Bloom didn’t lie, he told his own version of the truth, a heartwarming, romantic, and enthralling truth. The cast was nothing short of stellar (especially Billy Crudup making one of his rather rare on-screen appearances). The characters made Big Fish what it is, each and every one influencing the progression of an incredible story you can only hope holds some truth. The elements of love, friendship, and family are embedded in the symbolism and dialogue. The visuals are captivating and awe inspiring. No one does it like Tim Burton, and Burton will struggle to ever create a film to match this…I would (and do) recommend it to everyone.
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‘A Good Year’ Download and Reviews
“A Good Year” Movie Details
A Good Year tagline: Everything matures… eventually.
 A Good Year DVD Cover |
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| Directors: Ridley Scott | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| IMDB Rating: 6.8/10 out of 20,739 votes |
“A Good Year” Movie Review
“A Good Year” Plot Summary
A British investment broker inherits his uncle’s chateau and vineyard in Provence, where he spent much of his childhood. He discovers a new laid-back lifestyle as he tries to renovate the estate to be sold. add synopsis
Incredible and Uninvolving
Watching this fantasy of cashing out to live a life of food, wine, sex and sunlit idleness in Provence, you don’t suspend disbelief for a minute. Right at the outset we are shown that Russell Crowe’s character is exactly what his beloved uncle calls him when he cheats at chess as a boy — ‘a little s**t.’ Now grown up, he enjoys making money by cheating, not so much for the money, though that’s nice too, but for the sheer pleasure of dominating others by being smarter, tougher and more ruthless than they are. Since, he’s surrounded by agreeably available women in London (the movie tries to make a running joke of flashes and cleavage shots) it is clear that he needn’t sleep alone. Nothing Crowe does makes us believe that he is less than perfectly satisfied with the life he leads, or that he would give it up to take up with a Provencal girl and contendedly guzzle home grown wine on the terrace. Nothing convinces that he and she are made for each other, or that she should see him as anything but a good looking rich foreigner who’ll be an enjoyable but short-lived roll in the hay. Because Crowe’s boss writes him a thumping severance check when he turns down a partnership and leaves the firm, his choice is too easy to be interesting. His buddy the real estate agent has it right. After six months he’ll be bored to death, up to his ears in some financial shenanigan, and probably fooling around on his honey just to prove to himself that he can get away with it
The subplot with the American cousin never gets its feet untangled because the conflict between them over who deserves the property and what to do with it isn’t fully developed. She’s supposed to be smarter, tougher and more knowledgeable about wine than her youth and good looks indicate, but she doesn’t get to do very much with those qualities. Crowe’s character can’t stand losing. It would have deepened him, and explained his change of life, to have this kid see through him, take him on and beat him at his own game. It would have been a more dramatically satisfying romance to have him try to seduce her, fail, and then fall in love and have to win her. The film hints at those possibilities and immediately backs away
There’s a lot else wrong with the picture. We never feel that Crowe is actually in serious trouble over the financial maneuver that gets him suspended for a week because he never acts like a man who’s job is on the line. There are a number of pointless sexual innuendos involving secondary characters that don’t go anywhere except, perhaps, the cutting room floor. The rental car foul up is formulaic, not credible and therefore not funny. The smack at a couple of clueless American tourists with Southern accents is smug, gratuitous and irritating. Albert Finney’s role of Bacchus as an English gentleman gone native is written by the numbers and phoned in on screen. The flashback structure allows Scott to pull out of the hat whatever rabbits he needs to keep the plot moving, like Crowe’s childhood ability to imitate his uncle’s handwriting and his one childhood encounter with the woman he falls in love with. That actress, by the way, is too young for a character whom we learn is about the same age as Crowe
The only really enjoyable performance is Archie Panjabi (who played Parminder Nagra’s older sister in Bend It Like Beckham) as Crowe’s hip, all knowing secretary. Her work I’d like to see more of
Bottom line is that this is an unsuccessful variant on the formula High Pressure Guy Finds Self And Love In Laid Back Town. Cars and Doc Hollywood did it better. The Luberon region photographs beautifully, but that’s it.
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‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ Download and Reviews
“The Bourne Ultimatum” Movie Details
The Bourne Ultimatum tagline: This Summer Jason Bourne Comes Home
 The Bourne Ultimatum DVD Cover |
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| Directors: Paul Greengrass | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| IMDB Rating: 8.2/10 out of 133,204 votes |
“The Bourne Ultimatum” Movie Review
“The Bourne Ultimatum” Plot Summary
Jason Bourne dodges a ruthless CIA official and his agents from a new assassination program while searching for the origins of his life as a trained killer.
Fantastic Conclusion
The final installment in the action thriller franchise is just that probably the hardest hitting of the three films. It goes further to play the anti-Bond theme. Bourne doesn’t like what he is doing and wants to know about his blurry past. Everything about this film hits it on the nail from the cinematography to choreography/stunt work to the script to acting
The film starts out in a flurry as Bourne is running from the Moscow police. The story seems to pick up right where the first film left off. Or does it? The time is a little muddled here, but we get the fact that Bourne is remembering things. A sudden flashback while trying to clean himself up nearly gets him caught, but he makes it and doesn’t kill anyone. They aren’t his target. From there we get more of the intrigue of his past with a new player, Noah Vosen, who seems to know everything about Bourne and will protect it at all costs. Pamela Landy is back as well as Nicky Parsons who seems to have a past with Bourne as well
The cinematography is in your face following tight on practically everything. The car chase is even more intense if that seems possible than the ones from the first two. And the veteran cast chasing Bourne is superb with a nice part by Albert Finney. It also has slight political overtones in relationship to rendition and other government policies, but that is minor and integrated very well within the plot. All in all this is the best of the trilogy conclusions this year, if not the best action trilogy ever.
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‘Erin Brockovich’ Download and Reviews
“Erin Brockovich” Movie Details
Erin Brockovich tagline: She brought a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees.
 Erin Brockovich DVD Cover |
Actors:
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Julia, the Waitress |
“Erin Brockovich” Movie Review
“Erin Brockovich” Plot Summary
An unemployed single mother becomes a legal assistant and almost single-handedly brings down a California power company accused of polluting a city’s water supply.
True Fairy Tale from Toxic Tort Country
Lightweight legal drama with a feel-good ending enlivened by a sparkling script and good chemistry between the leads. I say legal drama, though the courtroom scenes are brief, because it is largely an account of the real Ms Brockovich’s legwork (in more than one sense) that brought about the largest toxic tort settlement to date. The victims were the unlucky inhabitants of a small Mojave desert town, Hinkley, California, many of whom were seriously affected by the release into their environment of a poisonous industrial chemical, hexavalent chromium. The villain was Pacific Gas and Electric, the power utility. Erin Brockovich, a single mother with three young children who had bullied Ed Masry, the aging accident lawyer who had just lost her road accident compensation case, into giving her a paralegal job, found a file relating to a Hinkley land purchase by P G &E, which had some unusual features, and started digging. She rounded up over 600 claimants, stacks of evidence (including the proverbial smoking gun), and achieved a remarkable reasonably prompt result – $333 million in damages from a $28 billion dollar corporation
The fictional account of this engaging story naturally goes out of its way to tug on the heartstrings so we get lots of Ms B’s private life financial worries, job-hunting blues, childcare problems and the ups and downs of her relationship with George, a sweet-natured biker. The real interest in the story is in two things. One, her remarkable people skills ranging from flashing her ample cleavage to get co-operation from a records clerk to establishing real empathy with the abused victims of P G &E, a skill few lawyers possess. (Like a lot of good lawyers she does possess an excellent memory.) The second is her relationship with Ed, the old crash and bash man, who she irritates into winning the case of his life, long after it seemed forensic glory had passed him by. Ed is not driven by lust (he’s a bit old for that) but is shamed into action, and after a while he realizes that Erin has got what it takes, even though he treats her shabbily on occasion
Julia Roberts as Erin and Albert Finney as Ed are a curious combination. It was odd to cast Finney, an English actor with a strong regional accent, as a Southern Californian ambulance-chaser with maybe a middle eastern background. Julia Roberts makes the transition from romantic comedy heroine to a more character-driven role with ease and she and Finney bounce off each other very satisfactorily without Finney seeming to want to lay a hand on her, despite her provocative dress sense. Stephen Soderbergh, who dealt with kinky Southern sex in `Sex, Lies and Videotape’, has made a pretty orthodox piece here, but it is well done and many of the minor characters are well filled out. Aaron Eckhart is very appealing, if a little too good to be true, as George. One of the real judges in the case repeats his role on film and Erin herself appears briefly as a waitress in a fast food outlet who has no trouble remembering complicated orders
Poor old P G & E. really get it in the neck. Although they are exposed as having attempted early on to defeat the Hinkley inhabitants’ legal rights by a tactical confession of their sins, the subsequent conduct of the matter by their representatives indicates a very stupid bunch indeed not even smart enough to be called evil (compare `Silkwood’). Unlike John Travolta in `Class Action’ who had Robert Duvall as his Big Corporate nemesis, Erin and Ed lacked a worthy opponent. This rather reduces the dramatic tension, but the real-life Erin and Ed obviously know they are on to a good thing they are now doing their best to drive up power bills even further by suing P G&E over another toxic tort elsewhere in California.
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