We just watched Good Fellas, my personal favorite gangster movie (yeah, my favorite isn’t the Godfather, but then again I’m not a dude, which seems to be the largest demographic for die hard fans for that movie) on Blu Ray. It looks and sounds pretty good, I’ll tell you that.  The only thing we noticed was that some of the imperfections of the older film showed through. Like a lot of times, the screen looked “dirty” so it much be the degradation of the film itself was hard to fix in it’s conversion to Blu Ray.

This movie really holds up, but then again, maybe that’s because it’s a period piece that covers an era from the sixties to the eighties. As you all probably know, the movie stars Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco as his wife, Karen.  Ray Liotta plays the real life mob guy turned informant after he feared for his own life, Henry Hill. The movie tells the story of Henry’s modest Irish-Italian upbringing and his early induction into the gangster way of life when he used to run errands and do work for them as a kid.  He loved the gangster life and all the respect and perks that came with it, and so he stuck with it through his adult life.

Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci, the quintessential gangsters, play the main antagonists in this movie, and surprise, the most violent minded. Joe Pesci’s just a complete nut while DeNiro plays more of a careful, cool and calculated murderous personality.  We see Hill getting pinched for the first time, and we also see them all go down for a crime they didn’t even think would matter too much, but it turned out the guy they roughed up had a connection at the FBI, so they all ended up doing time after that.

Where Hill got into trouble was that after being told not to do anything, he starts running cocaine and guns and makes a lucrative business for himself and his wife. When he gets caught, he flips and agrees to enter the witness protection program because he believes that those that were closest to him in the mob have designs to do away with him and his family.

The movie is and will always be a mob classic. Liotta is great, and Loraain Bracco is great as his money hungry wife.  We haven’t watched the extras yet, but from the sleeve it sounds like they added some great extras to the Blu Ray, like interviews with the whole cast and also with Henry Hill himself, so we’re looking forward to watching those!

So, I have FINALLY SEEN La Vie en Rose, a movie that I’ve been wanting to see ever since Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for best actress a while back. Well, I finally got off my caboose (well, ok I sat on my caboose to watch it), and popped it in our Blu Ray player the other night.  I had this one all to myself. My husband said it really wasn’t up his alley, and I know his taste and I knew it wouldn’t be either, plus I’d rather be spared the disparaging comments about how lame it was had I watched it with him – after all, it is somewhat of a chick flick I suppose.

First of all, Marion Cotillard, who is a beautiful woman in real life and really dolled herself down for this role, is awesome in the role, if not a tad bit overzealous in a few scenes. I don’t know anything about Edith Piaf, the French singer who this film was about or her mannerisms, but I did look up pictures of her, and the makeup artist for this movie deserves an award as well (did they win one maybe, I don’t know), because she is completely transformed into a different persona for this movie.

Her mannerisms are great, you really get a sense of what this woman was like. They paint a picture of a hardened woman very well.  She had a really hard childhood, and her temperament shows that, as well as her hardened attitude toward those that are closest to her.  From her growing up in a whorehouse if France, to her being sent away from the whorehouse where she made close friends with a hooker named Titine to live with her father at the circus where he worked as a contortionist, we see that she has been tossed around by people who don’t truly care for her -except Titine, who treated her as her own daughter.

She begins singing at the age of nine. She has amazing pipes from the beginning, that much is clear.  However, her presentation lacks as she comes of age, with a hunched over appearance and not very ladylike presentation otherwise, it’s amazing to hear such a voice come from her.  This movie also shows her struggles with alcoholism and a lost love. She begins an affair with at married man named Marcel, a boxer, and we see for the first time she is genuinely happy.  When he dies in a plane crash coming to see her, we see that she is vulnerable and human for the first time, but she’s still got such a hard edge that honestly she’s hard to like throughout this movie.

I think the movie does a good job of painting a tortured life for such a huge talent.  The actress who plays her definitely deserves the Oscar. However, even though this film is Oscarworthy I’ll tell you that it’s one hell of a depressing watch!

Well, after having the movie “Orphan” sitting around our house for two weeks waiting to be watched, we finally got around to watching it.  This movie started off ok. It actually had a little bit of promise as something that might be better than what I was expecting, which honestly wasn’t much. Just the cover of the movie alone made me think it might be over the top and hokie.  Well, it started off well. Had some great actors and actresses, and the acting was really good by the children in the movie, which is hard to come by.

Usually, I hate to say it, kid actors are over the top with cuteness.  These kids, especially the adorable little girl who plays the deaf daughter, were great, and very believable.  Th e script for the movie also wasn’t bad. There were some lines that were really conversational, that made you laugh, like one particular scene in which the husband and wife who have adopted the seemingly cute little orphan named Ester, were discussing her dropping the “f” bomb which was funny.

The little girl who plays the psychopath Ester is great too. She is believable as a child who is just a little misunderstood at first, but then as the film progresses, we see this girl has serious psychopathic tendencies.  Let me tell you where I think this movie could have done better. First of all, there is a twist that totally reverses everything that made this movie scary. The whole time, you believe that this is a malicious little evil child, and let’s just say the twist takes the scariness out of someone so young being so demented.  Without giving away the twist, that element of revulsion at a child being this psychotic is taken away, and therefore some of the movie’s credibility, and also it’s believability.

Peter Saarsgard is good as the unsuspecting father, and the part of the movie that pits husband against wife is really great, it adds more tension and shows the manipulative powers of this little girl Ester as well, making her all the more formidable of an enemy.  Now, in the end is where this movie goes way off the deep end, literally and figuratively, since part of the scene of course has to do with an overshadowing of the whole movie, the pond in the back yard.

Overall, the acting is good, but the story falters near the end when all believability is tossed out the window and this takes a turn into cliche land.  I’d give it a three out of five stars, simply because the actors were talented, and the story dared to be a little edgy and different in some areas.

I think that Sasha Baron Cohen, the creator of the Ali G series and the subsequent Ali G movie, followed by the Borat movie, then followed by another one of his alter ego’s Bruno, should be awarded an Oscar. Not really for the fact that he makes award winning parodies that make you want to alternately squirm and bust a gut laughing at their outrageousness, but for having the mammoth balls he must possess to actually pull these farces off, and with what type of very intimidating, closed minded people he does it to.

Bruno is his latest movie, based on one of his characters in his Ali G show.  Bruno is a gay man from Austria who wants desperately to be famous.  After he is booted out of his native Austria for embarrassing himself by ruining the set of a fashion show from wearing an all velcro suit, he decides that he wants to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles California. He heads with his faithful assistant to the land of make believe where he runs into some of the casting directors, scouts and movie stars that may help him get a leg up to where he wants to be.

This movie showcases the shallow nature of Hollywood, and boy does it make a few people look bad in the process.  In one scene, he is interviewing Paula Abdul, and he has no furniture in the house he is interviewing in, so he calls on some spanish speaking workers to behave as their chairs.  He also has Pete Rose in this situation. Watching the looks on their faces and the astonishment is worth it alone, but it’s interesting to note the reactions and the sheer irony of the situations he puts people in.  For example, Paula is talking about how she loves helping people while she’s making a Mexican immigrant extremely uncomfortable by using him as a chair.

I don’t think this movie is for everyone. The shock value is probably beyond what it was in Borat, but if you have an unabashed sense of humor and you don’t embarrass easily, then prepare to pretty much pee your pants at the situations in this documentary/movie.  Once again, he goes far out there to make us laugh, and to prove a point.

I’ve never read anything by the romance novelist Nicholas Sparks, and now, after watching the movie Knights of Rodanthe, which had two actors in the lead whom I genuinely admire, and who I loved in their previously steamy, doomed movie prior to this, Unfaithful where Diane lane and french actor Olivier Martinez have some intensely erotic scenes, I was disappointed by the sappiness and predictably tug at your heart strings ploys used in the movie.  I can’t say much for the book except that I have no desire to read it after seeing the movie.  Lane and Gere are still talented, and I think they did their best with a crappy script, but this movie disappointed with it’s movie of the week quality for me.
They could have taken this same concept, of the middle aged woman who finds herself raising two kids after her husband has left her for a younger woman, meeting serendipitously at an inn off the coast of North Carolina during hurricane season, a divorced and emotionally inept man (Gere) with whom she invetiably finds peace and attraction with, if only briefly for the time they share together.

The chemistry between the two actors was still pretty good, although it seemed a bit forced sometimes, and even the actors themselves didn’t seem moved by the dishonest dialogue.  I would have liked to have seen this movie done much grittier, but I supposed they had to keep it PG to get the audience they wanted in there.  I must admit, I did pull out the handkerchief at the end, but that’s only because the end to which their romance comes is so abrupt and forced, and you almost feel cheated into crying because the buildup wasn’t justifying this sort of ending.

Ok, well, I’m kind of bummed to give you my review of Battlestar Galactica’s The Plan movie that was recently released on DVD.  We rented it on Blu Ray, which had some nice extras on it, however I can’t really give this movie a glowing review because I felt that there was  more footage from old seasons than anything.  Let me give you an idea of what I’m talking about.  Lee Adama and Starbuck were not even in any new scenes, the few scenes they appeared in within The Plan looked like they were just pulled from stock footage from past seasons of the show.

I guess I went into this movie with false pretenses, thinking that we were going to get some new insights on the cylon perspective.  That’s sort of how the movie was advertised, so we did go in thinking we’d gain some new understanding of things that happened, and while there were a few revelations, there was nothing new or groundbreaking that we probably didn’t already have some clue about from logical deduction in the first place.  For example, we find out that Sharon Valeri, aka Boomer, was triggered from a sleeping agent to an active cylon by Father Cavil using a small elephant figuring and putting it in her hands to make her active.

We see how she sabotaged the ship, and how she was triggered to snap out of her humanity and into cylon mode when she shot Adama.  We sort of get a little better showing of how cylon Leoban becomes infatuated with Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff (can I tell you again how disappointed I was that she was barely in it, except for from old footage?)

Father Cavil is probably the only one with any real meaty role in The Plan, and we do get a better understanding of his character’s struggles against his own models, how there was essentially a good and bad model of him, one that believed the humans were supposed to live and it was a mistake to attack them, and one that believed humanity should be exterminated once and for all for all of it’s grievous “sins”.

All in all, I have to admit, it was nice to get that familiar chill up my spine when the movie started, excited to see my favorite old characters at it again, but ultimately this was just a big rehashing of the same recycled footage with a little bit of gratiuitous extras.

Larry David is a comic genius of sorts.  If you watch the HBO show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, which stars big time television producer and legendary co creator and writer of probably the biggest sit com hit ever, Seinfeld, as himself, then you know what I’m talking about.

Not only is his comic acting and timing spot on, who would have known after he spent years behind the scenes in his earlier days as a TV producer, but the man has talent for writing the most hilarious, albeit totally irreverant and uncomfortable scenes in the history of TV.  Sure, he touched on the uncomfortable, ego driven humor in Seinfeld on regular tv, but on “Curb” he can touch on that with a whole lot more leeway.

I’ve always said that Curb is like Seinfeld, only much dirtier and much more potentially offensive to the wrong viewer.  Yes, some people would be TOTALLY offended by some of the dialogue and situations in this show, so the easily offended should be warned. However, if you love edgy, quirky humor with a healthy dose of irreverence, you absolutely need to check this show out – period!

This season, Larry has concocted the ingenius idea of doing a Seinfel reunion as the background story.  Trust me, these characters still have the timing they used to, and they’re even funnier “behind the scenes” as themselves, where of course, they are just as quirky, only in slightly different ways than their television personas.  The second half of the season centers around Larry being approached again to do a Seinfeld reunion show.  He is hesitant, because he hates reunion shows. He thinks they’re always forced and phony. He’s right. There are also multiple references to them “blowing” the series finale, since so many people complained that it really wasn’t as good as it should be.

Larry cooks up a hair brained idea that doing the reunion show might be able to get him back together with his estranged wife, Cheryl, played by another great actress with great timing, Cheryl Hines.  She’s started acting again and is interested in starring as George Costanza’s ex wife in the reunion show.  Of course, having an ulterior motive (his M.O.), he agrees to do the reunion show. So, basically you get two shows in one, they do a Seinfeld reunion without actually doing it, it’s ingenius really, and trust me, it’s funny as hell.

This season was just like the others, filled with bust a gut humor, where you’re laughing so hard you’re crying.