Deja-Vu
Another movie review…
We got Deja-Vu throuh BigPond Movies, and it waited on our shelf to be watched for a good number of weeks. We finally got around to it and… hmm. Interesting.
I really enjoy Denzel Washington movies. He’s a great actor. We had no real idea what this movie was about before we watched it, which might have been our mistake. The movie’s mistake is largely that it doesn’t really know what genre it wants to be. In general it is basically a detective story – quite an interesting one, too. And very clearly post Sept 11, too (as are many movies of this type, since they so often make use of the idea of rogue terrorists, or the safety precautions necessary to hopefully deterring them). But then it goes into this weird scifi thing, involving time travel and bizarro paradoxes (paradoces?) that just got, well, weird. And bizarro.
In theory I liked the idea behind the film, but I don’t think it was done with enough panache. Or gumption. Or balls, perhaps – “we like this time travel idea, but we don’t want it to be tooo out there, so reel it in a bit…”.
I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I could recommend it to anyone as a great movie. You’d have to be a mighty big fan of Denzel, or want to see how to mix (or not) standard detective work with scifi in a movie. Or, you know, at home by yourself with nothing to do on a rainy night. Possibly with chocolate, popcorn, and/or alcohol.
The Jane Austen Book Club
I am not, generally, a fluffy movie kind of gal. However, I agreed to go see this movie with two of my very good friends (I realised the other day that I’ve known them for 10 and 11 years! Amazing!) at the Moonlight Cinema. Sadly, Al had to pull out at the last minute, so it was just K and me: right up the front, with blanket and very tasty food, and a bottle of moscato.
Overall, I must admit to enjoying the movie: five women get together to read the six Austens, through various means and for various purposes. A bloke joins them as well, for the obvious reason – getting into the pants of one of them, although it was more refined than that.
A couple of things occurred to me, which I thought I’d share here – mild spoilage:
1. The bloke is a sci-fi buff, and has never read any ‘classics’: in fact, the bloke first meets up with the woman for whom he joins he bookclub, he’s at a scifi con (SwanCon! woohoo!). One of the funnier moments of the movie comes when he first turns up with all six books in one: in case they’re sequels. This is such a classic scifi idea; it makes perfect sense to me. It’s also very interesting to see that this scifi buff is perfectly capable of reading, understanding, and communicating ideas about ‘great literature.’ There’s also an interesting sideline in him convincing the woman to read scifi, at first Ursula le Guin. She refuses for a long time, before he shames her into reading them and she, of course, loves it.
2. Singleness is a huge issue. One of the women is middle-aged-ish, and another is going through a divorce; one is in a troubled marriage, one is a lesbian with fairly tempestuous relationships, and the other has been married six times (currently divorced). So how to deal with being single, and what this means for a woman, is explored a bit (although not great depth). This is not my issue, and as far as I was concerned this was simply part of the movie. The interesting part, I realised, was that there was no mention of Grigg’s singleness. He was in his mid-thirties, at least, and single, but this was never an issue. Not once. Because it’s ok for men to be bachelors, but women are spinsters – bachelorettes just don’t cut it.
3. The last thing to mention is the conclusion. I quite liked the end – I am totally fine with happy endings, even sappy endings, sometimes. The thing that bugged me here was the scripting! It was appalling! There were so many other possible ways of communicating the same idea – even I could have written something better! Anyway… grrr. Nearly spoiled a good movie.
Randomly Yours, Alex 