Brian's Thoughts on Movies

"Tell her that you love her.  You've got nothing to lose and you'll always regret it if you don't"  Daniel (Liam Neeson) to Sam  Starting last year with Atonement , I opted to start a tradition of posting romantic movies on Valentine’s Day.   So here is one about Love Actually.    Beware, spoilers are below. There is a surprise performance of the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” during a wedding in writer/director Richard Curtis’ ensemble romance, Love Actually, which could be the theme of the film.     Love Actually is, like most of Curtis’ films, a romantic film with a lot of music.   Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, and writer director of Notting Hill and About Time, favors romantic stories and here has gleefully compiled ten different stories.   Each story has some minor overlap with at least one of the others, but they all stand on their own.   Some of the stories are brief glimpses into the lives of their subjects; others are much more defi

"Trust quality of what you know, not quantity"  Myagi  With the arrival of the Cobra Kai series on Netflix I opted to show my kids the original films as a lead up to watching the new show.   Spoilers for all follow.                                      The Karate Kid (1984) John G. Avidsen (who directed the first three films) and composer Bill Conti, two of the people who made Rocky such a success, brought Robert Mark Kamen’s screenplay to life with a similar underdog story.   Daniel LaRusso has an accent similar to Rocky and also spends the second half of the film building to a tournament he seems to have little chance of winning.   I had doubts about seeing this again as it had been years since the last time I saw it.   I wondered if Myagi would seem like a caricature and if it would be uncomfortable watching an overmatched kid be bullied so much.   The bullying scenes are not just Johnny and the Cobra Kai’s beating Daniel up but they also work to isolate him at school.