Movie Monday

I was having a pretty bad day today but emailing with Stink-o-riffic has pulled me out of my funk, at least a little bit. So I'm ready to write about the four movies I saw in the past week. And it was a pretty good week.

Paper Clips
I was very, very impressed with this documentary about the Holocaust and I highly recommend that you throw it on your Netflix. It is about a school in Tennessee that decides to try and collect six million paper clips to honor the six million people who died in the Holocaust. The 8th grade classes from 98-05 (I believe) are part of this project. What I found the most interesting is the theme of prejudice and stereotyping. The teachers in the documentary admitted that they have prejudices against Northerners and that Northerners have stereotyped them as well. What they tried to do was address this in their school (all white except 5 or so) by having the students learn about others, setting aside their prejudices. The filmmakers did a nice job of having the audience address his own prejudice toward Southern "red neck hicks." They point out that the area where this school is located is close to many historical sites, including the founding of the KKK. I don't want to give away too much more of the documentary, but I will say that I got pretty teary-eyed. Push this one to the top of your queue.

Despicable Me
I will admit I had no idea what this movie was about, except that there was a bad guy with a huge nose and he had little minions that looked like tater tots. It was so much better than that! I did not think that I was going to like this movie after about 10 minutes into it. People were laughing at dumb stuff and I was afraid that the rest of the movie would be like this. Then it got better. To give you a rough synopsis: the bad guy with the big nose, Dr. Gru, is falling down in the ranks of super villains and needs to do something BIG to get back on top. He plans to steal the moon. I won't tell you anything more, but suffice to say, it is good. This is a great movie with terrific writing and a good heart. The minions seem to be awfully violent at times, but are also equally cute.

Iron Man 2
Meh, it was okay, but I liked the first one better. Mickey Rourke makes for an excellent Russian villain and Sam Rockwell plays a great dorky jackass, but I didn't much care for Scarlett Johansson. She seems to have been picking lackluster characters that don't suit her ability recently. Another criticism I have of the movie is that it seemed to be really hard to understand the dialogue at times. Pepper and Tony constantly talk over each other, making it hard to discern what's going on. Rourke's accent was very thick as well, making things difficult to understand. It seemed like they made this sequel trying to make more money for themselves without trying to get the winning chemistry of the first one. It was a decent action flick, but also worth passing by if you're not that interested.

Letters to Juliet
This was a movie that wasn't out for very long. I didn't know much about it, but it looked like a cute chick flick. I was surprised to see as many men in the theater as I did. I went to The Riverview, a second-run theater in Minneapolis, just over the Mississippi River from St. Paul. This is one of my favorite theaters because the audience is usually pretty interesting and fun. More often than not, theater-goers will clap at the end of a movie shown here. I was not disappointed this time. First I felt bad for all of the men whose wives and girlfriends had dragged them out to see this movie. Then I settled in and enjoyed the ride...and so did the men! There was a husband and 15-20 year old son with two other women and two teenage girls in front of me. They ALL laughed during the movie! So here's the plot: a girl and her fiance travel to Verona, Italy before they get married. He is opening a restaurant and wants to meet with suppliers. She gets bored with tagging along and visits Juliet's house. When she arrives women are crying and writing letters, which they then place on the wall of the house. After everyone is gone, a woman collects all of the letters. Sophie, the girl, follows this woman and finds out that there is a group of four women who answer all of the letters. Sophie is a fact checker for The New Yorker, but wants to become a writer. She's very excited. The ladies help her out and she finds a 50-year old letter in the wall. She responds to the letter and the rest of the movie is fabulous! I very much liked the acting from Amanda Seyfried and Gael Garcia Bernal (swoon!), but Vanessa Redgrave steals the show. Newcomer Christopher Egan is also yummy and fun to watch. This should be out on DVD soon, if not already. It's a great flick for the secret romantic in all of us.