Brian's Thoughts on Movies

                                                                    “On my good days I can almost pass for a normal person but on my bad days I feel like I can’t find myself”   --Julianne Moore in Still Alice Julianne Moore is with very few exceptions, consistently the most interesting person in any film that she appears in.   I remember first noticing her as Annabella Sciorra’s best friend in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.   Her character, Marlene, a hard driving realtor, is introduced by her husband saying “She’s on the phone”, when he arrives for a dinner party and Marlene is in the car on a car phone, which made a pretty funny ...

Vanilla Sky, made in 2001, directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise, is a remake of the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes or Abre los Ojos and its American remake directed Cameron Crowe, one of my favorite directors, and starring Tom Cruise.   For this entry I would like to look at both films, highlighting their similarities and some of the unique aspects of both.  As always I will be discussing the films in detail.  Some film fans despise remakes, especially American remakes of European thrillers arguing that the American versions have bigger budgets but lose some of the intimacy of the original film. A famous example was the film The Vanishing, a film about a young man searching for his lost girlfriend.  I saw the American remake starring Kiefer Sutherland first and I felt it was intriguing through the ending seemed a bit implausible.  The Dutch original, ended about 15 minutes earlier and was much darker.  Oddly both were directed ...

     “I don’t think the dead care about vengeance”-James Bond (Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace) A friend of mine asked me the day after the trailer for this film debuted, “What the hell is a Quantum of Solace?”  It was a bold choice to pick this title of a Fleming short story, which was one of the few Bond tales that has no espionage.  In it the unnamed Governor of the Bahamas passes a couple of hours after a dinner party telling Bond a story of a British man who falls in love with and marries an airline stewardess.  The stewardess has an affair that she flaunts and the man, initially wrecked by this, later devises a cold revenge.  Fleming goes on to describe that they do not have a “Quantum of Solace”, which is a mathematical formula to designate a level of respect, friendship and love between two parties.  If a quantum of solace is high then the relationship is successful.   If the Quantum of Solace is at zero the relationshi...

The Star Wars prequel trilogy, which was one of the most anticipated series of films ever,  has become one of the most maligned set of films, mostly by people like myself who grew up watching the original trilogy, when that type of film was completely new.  Overall my thoughts are this on the prequel trilogy.  The films are technologically superior to the original films but less inspired.  The original universe looked lived in whereas this one is much shinier and glossy largely because it was created with digital effects as opposed to practical ones.  If the original films take place during the Depression then the prequels are the Roaring 20s.  George Lucas has received many nasty comments and has even been the subject of a documentary (The People vs. George Lucas) as a result of the prequel trilogy and also the Indiana Jones film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which he produced as a late entry to the Indiana Jones series.   Crystal Skul...