Brian's Thoughts on Movies

The Secret in Their Eyes The Secret In Their Eyes is a haunting Argentine drama/thriller which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 2009.   The protagonist, Benjamin Esposito, is an investigator for one of the regions of the District Attorney’s office in Buenos Aires.   His closest friend is a coworker named Sandoval who is a drunk who cannot get his life together, but also provides some of the funniest moments in the film.   Into their lives comes Irene, their new supervisor who Benjamin falls in love with. The film cleverly takes place in two time periods.   It opens and closes around the year 2000 but probably 70% of the action takes place between 1974 and 1976 when a rape and murder of an innocent woman ends up changing the lives of all the main characters.    Unlike most films that rely on a flashback structure, The Secret in Their Eyes cuts between the two time frames throughout to show how certain scenes that occurred in the past affect the present, pr

We Bought a Zoo Cameron Crowe is a unique director.  In his stories the lead character usually goes through a once in a lifetime experience that shapes the rest of his or her life.  Crowe usually writes his own films and two in particular, Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, have been heavily inspired by his own life.  He only releases a film every few years.  I think Crowe likes to take time to insert his own voice into his films. Crowe’s films are among some of my favorites.  Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky are near perfect in my opinion (though Vanilla Sky is a bit polarizing, I think it is brilliant and an improvement over the original Spanish film Open Your Eyes).  I can pop in any of those films and come out of them feeling great.  Say Anything is one of the best teen films I have ever seen.  Singles has a lot of entertaining insights about dating in the 90s and is Crowe's only film without a central character, though Bridget Fonda in particular stood out

Liam Neeson is one of my favorite actors and has been for since I saw him in a memorable part in a very unmemorable movie “Next of Kin”.  Neeson played Patrick Swayze’s redneck brother, working separately from him to find out who killed their other brother.  I could not stop watching him and his character was so much more interesting to me than Swayze’s, who was the lead.  Later when I found out he was Irish I was very surprised. During the 80s and early 90s Neeson was a solid performer in supporting parts in good films, such as The Bounty and The Mission.  He played a clever Nazi in a film I liked, though many others did not, called Shining Through.  Neeson always has a lot of presence and his characters usually have a strong sense of dignity.  When Spielberg cast him as the lead in Schindler’s List, I knew this would be a memorable role and it was.  After the incredible success of Schindler’s List Neeson played the lead in films for a few years, such as Kinsey, Nell (which

Skyfall teaser The teaser for the James Bond film Skyfall was released this week and I have a few thoughts about it.  First of all, as anyone who knows me is well aware, I am an enormous Bond fan and have especially liked the character based approach the films have taken since Daniel Craig first played the part in 2006. Bond is such a rich character that when the films focus more on his story than on plans to conquer the world the audience experience is more profound.  Skyfall was delayed for about a year due to MGM’s bankruptcy issues and the extra time seems to have given the principals time to polish the script, in much the way the four year wait between Die Another Day and Casino Royale benefited the latter. In 2009 the seventh season of 24 debuted a year late due to the writer’s strike of late 2007-2008 and the result was one of the best seasons ever. As a true Bond fan I value quality over quantity and I would far rather see a superb Bond film every four years, as Casino

Blackthorn One of my favorite films is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The film to me is nearly flawless, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford perfect in the first real buddy picture, a film that starts out light and funny and gradually grows darker as reality catches up with these two characters, based on the real life outlaws of the early 20th century. At the end of the film (Spoiler Alert-skip the rest of the paragraph if you haven’t seen it) the two, who have been hiding in South America for eight years, are surrounded by Bolivian Army and charge them, (the screen freezes mid charge but the shots are heard implicating they were shot down. This was a dramatization of the true event, which was a shootout in 1908 in a house but included no charge. Blackthorn assumes that Butch somehow survived that shootout due to a case of mistaken identity, and in 1927 is in his sixties living under the name “James Blackthorn” raising horses in another part of Bolivia. Sam Shepard plays Ca