What The Bleep Am I Watching? II

We had a two days religious vacations (for mourning!). My cousins and I had a lot of time to watch some movies. Most of the movies were mess, I was wondering why should I write about those bad movies in my blog? And I found the reason: The benefit is first, getting rid of them and throw them away from my mind, second, to alarm my readers to not to waste their time on them. Yes I care about your time, I am careful you know.

Here are the movies:


Borat (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Larry Charles
My Rate: 0/5

I don't know why it has such a high rate in imdb (7.8 now)! Did people really like it? It's the story of a Kazakh TV reporter who is sent to US to make a documentary of life in US for Kazakh TV. All I saw in the movie was that Borat (and Kazakhs) are illiterate and uncultured and that makes jokes about them. It's not about culture shocks it's about insulting people who are not like Americans as showing them villain villagers who sleep with their sisters, who defecate in the street, who fall in love with prostitudes and blah blah. Never waste your time on this film.

The Grudge II (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Takashi Shimizu
My Rate: 1/5

It's the story of a ghost in a haunted house taking the lives of everyone in her way, no matter if he/she is guilty or did something wrong about the ghost. It's a crap too.

Apocalypto (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Mel Gibson
My Rate: 2/5


I never liked Mel Gibson films even his most polemic film: The Passions of Christ. In this film he is back again to the most destructive and wild part of human species, his greed. And again with lots of violent and gore images. It's about a small Mayan tribe who are ambushed by some other wild tribe and slaved for some frightening purpose. It's full of action and killing and I don't like watch and enjoy them Mr Gibson, why should I?





La Doublure (The Valet) (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Francis Veber
My Rate: 3/5

Francois is a valet, living in a small shared apartment with his colleage, he has a girlfriend and is going to propose her to marry, but suddenly he falls into a famous and rich supermodel's love life with a CEO (Daniel Auteuil). He is payed to play the role of the supermodel's lover for some days to feed the paparazzi media.

That was my best movie this week. It's another happy French film about love and relationships. Lovely Paris locations, beautiful Parisiennes, and women's tricks to take over their men make this a quite funny and relaxing movie. I recommend it if you like French movies.

Another Boring Romantic

50 First Dates (2004)

IMDB

Directed by: Peter Segal

My Rate: 1/5

I hardly get through the romantic movies, this one is no exception because not only it's a romantic movie, but also it's not well written, made and played.

It really doesn't fit to Drew Barrymore to be an innocent girl who has lost her short term memory, as it doesn't fit to Adam Sandler to be a sacriticer lover boy who tries to help her. It's a short 5 minutes story that is told in about 90 minutes, the same jokes or romantic issues are used over and over, and they're not really funny or very much affecting.

The only matter that made me give it a 1/5 was just the last 2 minutes of the movie which was in a different atmosphere of the whole movie in a nice miseenscene and a nice message: Love your partner as it's your first day! That's all of the movie.

Easy Laughter

Meet The Fockers (2004)

IMDB

Directed by: Jay Roach

My Rate: 3/5

If you want to have a good and easy laughter after a busy and boring day, that's a good choice. It's a collection of jokes on a marriage situation and relationships played by some great actors like Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Take it easy and enjoy it.

Illusion

Primal Fear (1996)

IMDB

Directed by: Gregory Hoblit

My Rate: 3/5

Aron Stampler (Edward Norton) is a young boy accused for the butcher of a famous archibishop in Chicago. Martin Veil (Richard Gere) a well known lawyer takes his advocate role in the court for free, because he thinks he is innocent.

[Spolier]

This is a complete court movie with all the necessary elements. Dirty money, sex scandals, hidden evidence, powerful lawyers, and of course a dual personality psychopathic defendant.

[/Spoiler]

I think this is the first important movie that Edward Norton has appeared in, and he has done it great. So that a couple of years later he takes a similar role of a dual personality man in David Fincher's masterwork, Fight Club. The same situation for Richard Gere, he plays the same role some more years later in one of the great musicals of history, Chicago.

Overall, it's a good film with great acts, but quite predictable for me because I had seen a British film many years ago with quite the same situation and the same ending. I can't remind the name, that's a shame it was a very good film that was shut totally indoors.

Dependent To Our Own Creatures

Ten (2002)
IMDB
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami
My Rate: 5/5

It's seems a familiar film to me, because the situations are very familiar for every urban Persian. It's filmed in just one single location: In a car. The driver is called Mania, an educated (maybe an artist) woman, divorced and re-married, she has a son , called Amin, who lives with his own father. She is allowed to pick him up from his father's and have him for one night from time to time. Amin does not accept his step-father.

It's in 10 episodes and in each, Mania has picked some woman up in her car and they struggle about relationship issues and the relationship crisis in today Iran. Mania tries to be free, to be not dependent to anybody, not to obey anybody, that's why she divorced from her autocrat ex-husband.

The spectrum of people is different from and old woman who pilgrims a holy place 3 times a day (a symbol of the old religious people in Iran) to a street girl who thinks that Mania is a man and jumped in her car (a symbol of today lost, dizzy and futureless youth).

The discussions are very interesting. They show how people manage themselves to be dependent to something or somebody. How different the generations are in today Iran and how lost we Persians are. "And finally we are dependent to our own creatures. Dependent to our children, to our religion, to our philosophies"*.

* This quote is taken from a book called Souvashoun (a Persian theatrical piece showing the tragic death of Siavash, a Persian ancient hero whose story is told in Shahnameh) written by Simin Daneshvar.

Be The Change

This is a quote from Nelson Mandela I grabbed from Anousheh Ansari's spaceblog:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

The Warm Thrill of Confusion

That was a dream for 10 years for me: can I attend a Roger Waters concert? Can I feel "The warm thrill of confusion"?

And one day some friend tells, hey, Roger has a concert in neighbourhood, and everything comes in its order, everybody helps to get you there. And the dream is coming true.

Special thanks to one of my dearest: A. for her great help. I know, I'm sure, one day I'll see her face to face and return her great favour in the best way I can, and I mean it.

Now I'm waiting for the last confirmations...

And... It's OK!! Yoohoo!

M. Like Minor, Major And Mother

M. Like Mother (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Rasool Mollagholipoor
My Rate: 4/5

Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), a violin player, is a victim of Sardasaht chemical bombardment by Saddam Hussein during Iran-Iraq war, where she was a volunteer in Red Crescent. The story takes place after the war when she is pregnant from her husband, a diplomat in foreign ministry. The doctors tell them that their baby will have lung and limbs defects because of chemical effects on Sepideh. She wants too keep the baby but her husband convince/force her to do an illegal abortion but after all the baby is born...

It was the first Persian film which caught my attention since Afkhami's The River's End in 2003. Everybody was telling that you'll cry a lot during this movie, and it's true. It contains lots of dramatic scenes showing the love of a mother, which suffers from lung cancer, for her handicapped child, unable to breathe without the help of an oxygen capsule in his knapsack. It's a heaven for Farahani to show her great acting ability as a young and beautiful actress, but that's where the film fails beacuse of excessive amount of such scenes. It doesn't stop showing the handicapped boy living hardly, being a lame and simultanously carrying the capsule, but it takes the camera to the handicapped sanitarium over and over.

You can cut many of such scenes with no damage to the whole plot even make it more affecting. A couple of scenes like the first one showing the boy, buying bottles of milk for his mother and neighbours, and the bathroom scene can completely have the meaning and affect the audience, there's no need to bombard them with sympathic scenes and that overly used sad violin theme.
As a Persian film, I think it's very well made and not like the other Persian films you can see different beautiful camera angles and movements, like in the bathroom scene, or in abortion scene. The acts are also good, especially Farahani's role as mother.

Talking about the subject, I should say it tries to cover lots of subjects which has made it quite jammed. The chemicals used against Iran, mother's majesty in Persian culture, men's hegemony over women in Iran, fall of Saddam, abortion legality, post-war veterans having no future and hope, street girls, handicapped people pushed to the corner,... I liked it to be a minimalistic film.

What the bleep am I watching!?

What the bleep do we know!? (2004)

IMDB
Directed by: William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

Gog's Rate: 0/5

Personally, I find docu-films very interesting. I saw sometime ago a poster promoting the film: "What the bleep do we know!?", and yesterday, I finally got to see it. At the very beginning of the film, I had the feeling that I was watching something very good, but at the end everything goes wrong and the film turns into a complete nonsense.

The film consists on two parts, but I'll only speak about the excerpts of interviews with people who are supposed to be serious scientifics. Only at the very end of the movie, the spectators can read their names and achievements.

The film starts speaking about quantum physics. It's quite an interesting topic, and it's explained in a way that most of the people would understand it. The second part it's about physiology: how does our brain construct proteins, and how do these proteins affect the cells in our body. These two parts have a couple of controversial points, but everything is (in my modest opinion) right. The third and final part, speaks about religion and God, and many other things that do not have any relation with science.

The film tries to convince the spectators, that using only the power in our mind, we can proyect our reality (as in quantum physics, there's nothing until you try to measure it). It tries to establish an analogy between life and quantum physics, that is a complete stupidity.

The positive thinking theory is well-know in psychology (see for example: Daniel Goleman's "Emotional Intellegence" or Maxwell Maltz's "Psycho Cybernetics"), and it's proven to work. What really annoys me is that this basis it's used to tell us about religion, to criticise religion, and to present some american new age sect (School of Enlightenment or similar), whose leader is also interviewed in the film (a blonde woman who seems to be an ET).

I fell in the trap, If you ever see this movie, stop the tape after one hour. It's a friend's advice.

Note: Check this link and you'll get convinced: wikipedia

Crisis? What Crisis?

If you're not familiar with Christmas, I'd say it's a religious celebration, that brings joy to all christian families, as we commemorate the birth of Jesuschrist, the 25th of December. It's for sure easy to understand, as there're similar celebrations in (almost) every religion.

The fact is that Christmas is not a nice time to me. I really hate that people are pushing the boat out for it. If you read newspapers or watch the tv, you'd hear that the economic situation is getting worse, that the prices are raising, that the mortgages are higher day after day or that the unemployment rate is quite high, but people do not stay at home.

Everything is more expensive in Christmas, but the commercial areas in every city (and I've seen a few cities this Christmas) are incredibly crowded with people and there's enormous traffic jams in the highways. The cash registers are ringing louder than ever, nevertheless. Every year is the same, or maybe it's going worse year after year.

I 'd like to criticise the spirit of "modern" Christmas, in which people are so eager to waste their money, no matter what they're looking for or no matter how hard will be January. After two weeks buying tenths of presents, the finest food, and moving from one city to the other, families are supposed to have not much money to spend.

Now, in January, almost every shop makes the prices lower, or offers discounts: they're having sales, and thousand of bargain-hunters are invading (yes, in January too) shopping centers, commercial stores and shops. I ask myself, where the hell do people earn so much money? crisis? what crisis?

Double Dutch

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

IMDB

Directed by: Luis Bunuel

My Rate: 3/5

A woman's eye is cut by a razor blade in the very beginning of the film! Then some irrelevant other sequences are shown: A man trying but unable to reach that woman in a room, because of the burden of a dead donkey, two priests and a grand piano around his neck. In another scene that man has an ant colony in his palm. This couple are walking at the beach in the end!

This (17 minutes) short film has no story line. It's just sequences of some grotesque surrealistic scenes which can mean everything or nothing to the audience. Probably the easiest scene is that I mentioned, when the man tries to reach his desire, religion (priests) and tradition (piano) don't let him. But what's the donkey?

Anyway I think I should study about surrealism and of course Salvador Dali who has cooperated with Bunuel in the screenplay, to understand the film. These two have made another film in 1930 called L'Age D'Or (The Golden Age). I have seen it too, but it has a more clear story line than this one and it was slightly more reachable.

A Two Minutes Masterwork

I sometimes listen to my old mp3s randomly and in most cases I find something great to add to my Bests folder. A few days ago, I found a masterwork: Supertramp's Breakfast In America. It's a great song from the 1979 album with the same title. Supertramp is a Dutch rock band formed in 1969. A rich music and delightful melody composed of saxophone, keyboards and guitar with a joking, easy and free lyrics, and of course great scatting of the singer makes it my these days playlist top. It has quite the same feeling when you see the movie Amelie Poulin or listen to its soundtrack. Some sense of freedom, relaxation and delight.

There are other great songs of them like Logical Song, School and Bloody Well Right which I love.

Here's the lyrics to the Logical Song, you know where to find the music!

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical,
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.

But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the worlds asleep,
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man,
Wont you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.

Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Wont you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!

Bad Movies

Attack of Killer Tomatoes (1978)
IMDB
Gog's Rate: 3/5

I really love these films done during the 70s and the 80s with almost no money and almost no ideas. I have just seen "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" (John de Bello, 1978), a film in which tomatoes are growing and spreading around the US.

While I was watching the film, I thought it was not as good as some genre-classics, like 'Revenge of the Nerds', 'Airplane' or many university campus, zombie or horror films, but the truth is that, by the end of the movie, I (partially) changed my mind. The jokes are terrible, but the idea used to finish the film is great.

The point is that there's some similarities between this film and "Mars Attacks". I just mention this after Monkey's article: "Remember, Remember, the 5th of December". Everything is influenced, inspired or directly taken from somebody or somewhere else. Maybe you don't know, but many actual filmmakers are great lovers of low-budget movies (we call z-series in spanish). I'm sure Tim Burton or John Waters are great fans.

Anyway, old films like that with the tomatoes, have over me some strange sense of attraction that modern films don't. It's only me, or does anybody else feel attracted by low-budget movies?

For the consideration of all those people who think like me, please check out: http://www.badmovies.org/ and visit to B-Movie Reviews.