Twilight Lexicon Discussion Forums

Last night I watched The Devil Inside and I thought it was horrible. I thought it was going to be a really scary movie, but it wasn't scary at all! The documentary style film was very shaky and ended up getting me very dizzy ! I do not recommend it!

pyrosis wrote:I watched the million dollar hotel by Wim Wenders again the other day and was reminded why it is one of my favourite movies ever.

I may have to check that one out; I've liked a lot of Wenders' films.

Tonight I watched Rush Hour, a fast-paced action comedy that was Jackie Chan's first major Hollywood hit. When the daughter of the Chinese consul in Los Angeles is kidnapped, the consul insists on bringing Inspector Lee (Chan) of the Hong Kong police over to help with the investigation. The FBI tries to sidetrack Lee by assigning LAPD detective Carter (Chris Tucker) to babysit him and keep him out of the way, but the two maverick cops--well, you know the rest

This one has two things going for it--Chan's ever-incredible stunts and fight sequences, and the surprisingly effective chemistry between him and Tucker. The script is riddled with implausibilities, and Tom Wilkinson and Elizabeth Pena, among others, are wasted in supporting roles. Chris Penn, who can rise above the most mediocre of material, does have a pair of effective scenes.

Grosse madchen wienen nicht/Big Girls Don't Cry, my movie tonight, is a very good coming-of-age film about a pair of German teenage girls. Steffi (Karoline Herfurth) and Kati (Anna Maria Muhe) have been best friends for years. At a nightclub one evening, they spot Steffi's father with another woman, with whom he proves to be having an affair. Steffi conceives an ill-advised scheme for "revenge" on the woman, which has repercussions that test both girls, and their friendship, to the limit. Herfurth and Muhe, both of whom have gone on to nice careers in German cinema, are outstanding in this generally realistic and believable drama.

I watched X-Men last night on tv. I enjoy that movie highly. Although, as I watched it my friend Livvie and I decided there was some definite miscasts in that movie and proceeded to recast some key characters with actors we thought would do better.

Tonight I watched a decent little B-film noir titled Fear in the Night. Vince Grayson (a young DeForest Kelley) wakes up from a terrible nightmare in which he has killed a man. But his dream has somehow left him with bruises, and in his room he finds physical evidence suggesting that his crime was real, not imagined. With the aid of his brother-in-law, policeman Cliff (Paul Kelly), Vince struggles to figure out what has happened to him. This is a tightly-paced, low budget picture with a nice lead performance from Kelley and some interesting cinematography from Jack Greenhalgh.

The last movie i saw was Sherlock Holmes a game of shadows
Which is the newish one xxx
I thought it was good
But I saw it quite a while ago like two weeks xx

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I'm just home from seeing the new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. As a fan of both John Le Carre's novel and of the BBC miniseries adaptation, I was mildly disappointed in this one. The intricate plot of Le Carre's novel has been stripped down to bare essentials; I was able to follow the story pretty easily, but I've read the novel and watched the BBC adaptation several times each. I can't judge how someone new to the story--in the early 1970s, retired MI-6 agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is pressed back into service to smoke out a Russian mole in the Service--would do trying to understand what's going on onscreen. In the central role, Oldman simply can't compete with Alec Guinness in the BBC series, at least for me. There are some distinguished names in the supporting cast, but the truncation of the story gives little opportunity for most of them to make an impression. Exceptions: Tom Hardy, it should be no surprise, does very well as Ricki Tarr, while Benedict Cumberbatch is an excellent Peter Guillam.

We Bought a Zoo. I enjoyed it. I laughed and I got teary eyed.

My movie tonight was The Court Jester, a sort of parody of Errol Flynn-style swashbucklers. When England is under the rule of the usurper King Roderick (Cecil Parker), only one man may be able to restore the true king to the throne--former carnival entertainer Hubert Hawkins (Danny Kaye), who is a put-upon member of the outlaw band led by the Black Fox. But when the band needs to infiltrate Roderick's castle, they need someone who can impersonate the king's new jester, and Hawkins is the only man for the job. If he can survive numerous perils, including a duel with the king's right-hand man Ravenhurst (Basil Rathbone, of course), he may win the heart of the Fox's right-hand woman Maid Jean (Glynis Johns). This one starts a bit slowly but it has some very funny moments, and one truly inspired one, the famous "vessel with the pestle" sequence.

Clockers is an ostensible murder mystery, but director Spike Lee, as usual, has a bigger story to tell. Darryl Adams, a small-time player in the Brooklyn drug scene, is dead. Victor Dunham (Isaiah Washington) has confessed to the crime, but Detective Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) has his doubts; he doesn't believe that a solid family man like Victor, with no criminal history, could have done the deed. Rocco quickly sets his sights on Victor's younger brother Ronald, known on the streets as Strike (Mekhi Phifer in his feature debut). Strike is a "clocker," or street-level pusher, working for the main local supplier, Rodney Little (Delroy Lindo). While the police procedural elements drive the narrative, Lee's real purpose is to document the horrific impact that drugs have on inner-city communities. And he delivers; this one packs quite a wallop. Besides those already mentioned, there are good performances from John Turturro, Keith David, and Michael Imperioli.