Based on the true story of a legendary Australian criminal who wrote a best-selling autobiography in prison while serving a murder sentence.
Eric Bana is the guy that played The Hulk and Hector in Troy. He’s famous in Australia as a comedian. Didn’t know that. Anyway, this movie came out in 2000 in Australia and 2001 here. I can’t remember where I kept hearing about this movie, but I did somewhere so it ended up on my Netflix list.
This guy is completely insane starting from when he is in prison. I missed a bit of what was going on in the beginning since I was getting used to the Australian accents. It has slow dragging parts and then picks up when violent stuff happens. There is a lot of blood in this movie.
At some points, it is hard to tell what is real and what is made up since when Chopper relays stories about what happens, he changes things so did he kill someone or did somebody else? He claims he only ever hurt the scum of the earth but it isn’t like he was pure himself. His reasoning is…interesting at times.
My husband wondered if this guy was still alive and apparently he is still alive and insane. He has his own website. Reading it, he sounds just like the character in the movie so Eric Bana did a good job. Wacko movie.
Rating: B-
Creepy ghost story taking place in a Spanish orphanage during the Civil War.
When I added a bunch of movies to Netflix, I had some foreign films here and there. Unintentionally, three of them showed up at the same time. By the time we reached this one, Jer was done reading subtitles. We have had this movie for four months. I was about to send it back since I didn’t think we would ever watch it when Jer finally wanted to watch it.
I’m glad we did. I enjoyed it. It is a Spanish movie that takes place during the Spanish Civil War at a school for orphaned children. There is a ghost that haunts the school of a kid that was killed. It is creepy like The Others, but it isn’t gross. It isn’t as scary as The Others either, but it is creepy.
There is also a little side story that explains the title of the movie about deformed babies with their spines on the outside of their bodies. The school doctor shows the main character the fetuses inside jars filled with rum or something like rum. He would sell this to the locals in town because people believed it would cure various illnesses. I dubbed this baby juice.
Rating: B+
After having her life saved by a stranger, a nurse just can’t make herself go back to her old life.
This is the second movie by the director of Run Lola Run. It also stars Lola from that movie, but her hair isn’t bright red. It’s blonde here. She plays Sissi, a nurse at a mental hospital who is involved in an accident. Bodo saves her life and after that she feels the need to get to know him. She can’t go back to her old job and her old life.
It’s a very slow moving movie, but in a good way. It is really nothing like Run Lola Run except the music is great in this movie as well. It’s similar to Run Lola Run music, but slower-paced. Even with it moving so slow, you don’t get bored. It’s an odd movie, but it pulls you in. You really want to get to know these two characters and I really liked the ending. It was nice and weird.
P.S. This is a German movie so it has subtitles and all that stuff.
Rating: B+
A family deals with their grief after their son is killed.
Ok, I was warned about this movie. I knew it would be slow but jesus! It was slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. It was that slow. So slow I think I might have fallen asleep or I could have just been staring off at a wall. I couldn’t really tell the difference.
It is supposed to be a movie about grief. A family has to deal with the death of their son but bleah whatever, I didn’t care about them. The only one in the movie that I actually cared about was the one who died. Everyone else was not sympathetic at all. You didn’t get to like the characters first. They were annoying to begin with so I didn’t care if they were grieving. Even when the movie has the most satisfying ending it could possibly have given the circumstances, I still didn’t care. I just couldn’t believe it was still going on.
Oh, and it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress. Apparently everyone in the Academy was on crack that year.
Rating: D
A brilliant mathematician deals with schizophrenia, falling in love and secret work in cryptography.
I didn’t want to watch this movie for the longest time. I thought it would be too sappy and it wasn’t really true to the guy’s life. I think the bad part of it was the scenes they showed at the Oscars were the sappiest scenes. Also the whole thing about the real guy the movie is based on having an affair with other men at one point in his life was left out of the movie.
All of that aside, I actually enjoyed this movie. First, the sappy was only in that one scene. Ignore that scene and it is a very entertaining movie. While watching it, I could not find a place for the whole gay/bisexual storyline to really fit in because it had nothing to do with the movie. It wasn’t a biography on the guy. It was a movie that was telling a story. The story was this guy finding his place in the world, dealing with schizophrenic and falling in love. Those are pretty big themes to be dealing with and another one might have made the movie topple.
So, I’m glad I watched it. Russell Crowe did a good job and he still reminds me of Kaile. They make the same faces sometimes.
Rating: B+
Fed told us that we had to watch this movie and I must say that Fed has excellent taste. This movie was awesome. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a emotionally disturbed kid that has hallucinations of a six-foot tall bunny rabbit named Frank that tells him to do things. He’s in therapy because his parents are concerned about him. It is a very funny, involving story. It grabs your interest right away and keeps it there.
I was so enthralled by it that I watched all 20 deleted or extended scenes in the extra sections. The deleted scenes are usually there because there is a good reason for it, but they were good scenes that I thought would had added even more to the movie.
Rating: A
Tags: donnie darko, jake gyllenhaal
Covers the covert operation in Somalia in 1993 with Army Rangers and elite Delta Force.
I never had the urge to see this movie when it was out in theaters. A bunch of people at work talked about it before it came out and they couldn’t wait to see it. Then they saw it and talked about how intense it was. Some loved it, others just were worn down by the non-stop action. I still had no interest in it.
Then I found out that both Ewan McGregor and Orlando Bloom were in the movie. I had to see it then. Ewan McGregor does one messed up American accent. It just isn’t right and well, I like his accent. 
I can’t tell you if I liked the ending or not because Jer and I both became bored half way through. This is the most boring war movie I have ever seen in my life. First, you are introduced to about twenty people in the first 15-20 minutes of the movie. Then the fighting starts. You don’t really know anyone, let alone remember anything about their characters. The only way I could tell people apart was because I saw them in another movie or tv show before. Then someone would die and you wouldn’t care because you didn’t know anyone. Or you couldn’t care because there was so much dirt on their faces that you couldn’t tell who was shot.
We turned it off halfway with the slight intention of watching the rest later. Three days later, we just gave up and returned it. Now I have seen tons of war movies (Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Casualties of War, Hamburger Hill), but I usually don’t like watching them again and again because there is some part that disturbs me about it too much. Those were all more interesting than this movie.
Actually even though some of those movies were really good, the only one that I can watch again and again is Full Metal Jacket. Awesome movie. Saving Private Ryan is good, but I don’t know if I can watch it again. Too draining.
Rating: D
Another movie that I took nice little naps through but did try to watch the entire thing. I think the main problem in this movie was I fell asleep during important parts.
It is a Norwegian film where a 25-year-old women is recently married to a 40-year-old looking guy. They live off in the country to get away from the city. They are happy. Then the guy runs into an old pal that just got out of prison. He invites him over for dinner and he seems to just stay after that. There is some dark secret past between the two guys, but I fell asleep when they were about to talk about it. gah!
I think even if I did know about it, I wasn’t thrilled about the movie. All the characters seemed quite annoying.
Grade: C+
Tags: dragonflies
Minoes is from the Netherlands. A cat drinks from a strange barrel and then it finds out it has turned into a human being. A reporter is on the verge of being fired since he is too shy to find out any stories to write about. Minoes (the cat lady) climbs into Tibbe’s (the reporter) window when it is raining (she’s been running along rooftops) the same day he has found her up a tree (a dog was chasing her). She tells him stories that the other cats know (cats know what we are saying!) and he tells his news stories that way.
This was geared towards kids, but was a very cute fun movie. The cats spoke at times, but it actually wasn’t disturbing. I didn’t expect it, but it wasn’t scary like those animals talking in commercials. It was much better done and very funny.
Grade: B+
Tags: minoes, undercover kitty
A sheltered young woman wants to help others acheive their dreams.
Amelie is about a young woman who led a sheltered life as a girl. When she is older she wants to perform good deeds and improve the lives of those around her. She is quite a dreamer and comes across another dreamer but she isn’t sure how to fix her own life in the process.
This is a nice romantic fantasy movie. The colors in it are very rich. It looks so pretty. It’s FRANCH so there are subtitles. It’s directed by the same guy that directed Delicatessen (one of my top five favorite films of all time). This one is a lot more mainstream compared to Delicatessen but I can still see some of his directing style in this film as well.
I would recommend this movie to anyone.
Rating: A
