A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

Movie roundup

// July 16th, 2007 // fun

Yeah, so it was a jammed-packed movie weekend for Mike and Jina. Not like it’s different from most other weekends, but this one included TWO, count ‘em, TWO trips to the theaters.

So without further delay, the movie roundup:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (4 stars) – I love Potter books/movies, so I was praying I’d like this one and I really did. I thought it was one of the best ones so far. It was dark, scary-ish (mostly for kids) and better acted than any other Potter movie. They left out a lot from the books, but they parts it kept were amazingly faithful. The same director is doing the next movie as well, so that’s great news!

Paris je t’aime (4 stars) – Paris je who? Yeah, a few weeks ago, if you mentioned this movie, I’d blink a few times and go “wha huh?”. We saw the preview for it during Once and also on Ebert and Roper. Great movie, but not a movie as much as a collection of very short stories…like 12-16 of them, I can’t remember. Famous directors, like Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and more, all direct the little segments. You have actors like Maggie Gyllenhael, Natalie Portman, Elijah Wood, Bob Hoskins, the girl from Maria Full of Grace and more.

They are all love stories in one way or another…romantic love, parental, love of a city, etc. It was really, really interesting how these directors can convey such emotion and stories in the span of 5-10 minutes.

Last King of Scotland (4 stars) – There was a lot of hype about this movie, but one review I heard that rang true when I watched this was that Forrest Whitaker was the best thing in it. His acting was passionate and spot-on. The rest of the movie, including the Scot who plays his doctor…were good, but not great to me. The events were tragic, but the focus was mainly on the doctor and he was kind of a clueless kid. I think the main lesson he learned was that the world is not a game, but real. Which Amin reminded him of at the end.

The Dead Girl (3 stars) – It’s always fun when you get take-out on a Friday night, pop-in a movie and sit down to eat and enjoy a flick when a nice mutilated, bloody corpse shows up in the first few minutes. Well, it’s my fault because this movie was all my idea to rent. I have an ability to like a movie for what it did well, even if I didn’t actually enjoy it. This was kind of the case. There was this dead body and five stories surrounding it told in different segments. They were all great, but utterly depressing and sad.