It's Complicated

I took my Mom with my friend and her Mom to see the latest Nancy Meyers homage to women over 50. Complicated, perhaps. Compelling, somewhat. Comical, definitely. I must admit that my favorite part was watching My Mom and my friends Mom giggle and slap their knees in unison. Warmed my heart actually.

Meryl Streep, in my opinion the most gifted actress of all time (or my time), never fails to disappoint. Alec Baldwin, stealing scenes once again, is very funny. Steve Martin is sweetness personified and is hilarious in the weed smoking scene. The supporting cast from the trio of BFF's, to the children and most prominently the oldest daughter's fiance played by John Krasinski, are all solid. The weak link here was Alec Baldwin's trophy wife, Lake Bell but I suspect this was on purpose.

Here's a review from Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/29190864/review/31461042/its_complicated

Remmi gives this film two thumbs up but it doesn't take much more than an adequate film with coke and popcorn to keep this film buff happy :)

HO HO HO

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my RP pals. I hope 2010 is filled with peace, happiness, love and good health for you all.

Remmi xo

Surprising mention from the Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/the-10-most-irritating-people-of-2009/article1403090/

From today's Globe and Mail on line. I must say I'm a little surprised....

Bachelorettes for Jake

Happy Holidays to all. I just took a look at the bachelorettes for Jake. All I can say is this group may prove interesting. Too may Barbie dolls. That being said I have picked on looks and occupation alone my top 4. I will wait to see personalities to see if things change. In no particular order they are as follows.
1. Elizabeth from NE
2. Gia (she seems like someone who cause some turmoil)
3. Rozlyn
4. Sheila
I am sure that by the time the show airs someone at FORT will have the F1. I am looking forward to a well scripted season. That being said feel free to weigh in with your opinions. Let the games begin.

Golden Globes

http://www.goldenglobes.org/nominations/

The nominations were announced today. Looks like I have a few movies to see before awards season! I like to see all of the best movie contenders prior to the Golden Globes and the Oscars.

I saw "Brothers" on the weekend. Heart wrenching but well acted. I recommend it and suggest you bring a secret stash of tissues if you decide to see it.

ABC's description of Jake's season and my take on it

Description:

In this season's premiere, "Episode 1401," Jake returns to the Malibu mansion where he first met Jillian.

M says:

Great. A house full of memories of his intense love for Jillian. Was there not another among the surfeit of Malibu Mansions that Fleiss could have rented?
Tonight his life will start to change forever Whaaat? "His life will start to change forever"?? Sounds like a painfully slow and boring process...

Description: as 25 gorgeous bachelorettes have traveled across the U.S. to meet him

M: I wonder how many are from Texas...

Description: and they will do anything to become his wife and share a life with him.

M: And some of them will even do anything just to be on tv.

D: The party takes off quickly as the women swoon when Jake makes the rounds and greets each bachelorette.

M: Nothing like swooning women to make a party take off quickly...

D: One charming woman confesses her fear of flying,

M: She should be more afraid of what Fleiss is going to do with her editing...

D: and an alluring teacher causes a stir when she dons a revealing flight attendant's uniform and steals Jake away from an unsuspecting single mom.

M: Alluring and revealing: One. Unsuspecting single mom: Zero.

D: After an athletic hottie grabs Jake...

M: Wonder where she grab him...

D: to play touch football, it's blondes vs. brunettes in the first sexy, barefoot-in-eveningwear football scrimmage in "Bachelor" history!

M: As opposed to all those other less sexy barefoot-in-eveningwear scrimmages in Bachelor history?

D: The competition intensifies when Chris Harrison introduces the "first impression" rose, and announces a twist: the ladies not only must impress Jake, but also last's season's happy couple - Jillian and Ed.

M: Why? Are they all going to move together to a polygamous commune??

D: The former Bachelorette and her fiance join Jake to help him with his tough decision,

M: That's because Jake can't decide between the women -- he's desperately in love with them all.

D: and they will also share a special announcement with him.

M: Wonder what that will be? That they don't wear underwear?

D: Finally, Jake must eliminate ten of the 25 women the first night, leaving 15 to compete for his affections, and in the end, his heart.

M: That's right. Don't compete for his heart until the end. Keep your options open and just go for his affections for now. (Do they actually pay someone to write this drivel?)

D: Romantic and adventurous dates will reach new heights this season,

M: New heights? Compared to the drama and scandal of the past two seasons? What can top Jason's dumping Melissa for Molly, or Ed's departure and return? How about Wes' supposed girlfriend and Ed's real ones? New heights? Jake? Naah...

D: Secrets are revealed, emotions run deep and one bachelorette crosses a line that should never be crossed, with devastating results.

M: Other lines that should never be crossed: stripping down to bare buttocks and diving in a pool, crying and blowing your snot into a kleenex and then immediately offering your mouth up for a kiss, being on the show while sexting other women.


D: Will Jake finally find the special woman who is right for him or will this nice guy's dream of love end in heartbreak?

M: Didn't it already once? How many more weeping over balcony scenes can viewers take?

Oh, I can't wait for this season....

Reid Gossip!

http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2009/12/06/exclusive-new-couple-alert-reid-rosenthal-kristen-dalton-are-a-twosome/

I think they would make a stunning couple if the news is true :)

Best movies of the decade

Best of the Decade
by Richard Brody, New Yorker magazine

It’s been an unusual decade; I spent much of it hunched over spiral notebooks and laptop computers in libraries and cafés and at kitchen tables here and in France while writing a book (remind me to mention the bathroom, in a house in Normandy, that I rigged out as a nocturnal study), and didn’t maintain my usual diet of cinephilic delights. Which is why, though few who issue their best-of-decade lists can claim to have seen all releases, many have likely seen more than I have this time around, so I’ll put an asterisk to the adjective above and note: the twenty-six best movies I’ve seen (and will resist the temptation to issue a separate list of the best films I haven’t seen). The top ten are in order; the remaining sixteen are grouped according to incidental connections.


1. “Eloge de l’amour” (“In Praise of Love”) (2001, Jean-Luc Godard): Lives up to the promise of its title: one of the most unusual, tremulous, and understated of love stories, as well as the story of love itself; a depiction of history in the present tense, as well as a virtual thesis on the filming of history; a work of art, as well as the story of the work at the origin of art; Godard’s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema.


2. “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007, Wes Anderson): As ever with the films of Wes Anderson—the best new American director of the last twenty years—love and death, comedy and tragedy, comfort and adventure, understanding and opacity, style and substance fuse in a modernism of personal and reflexive cinema and a classicism of grand and subtle literary emotion.


3. “The World” (2005, Jia Zhangke): The best new non-American director of the last twenty years, here revealing, at great risk, China’s, and his own, painfully ambiguous place in the world.


4. “A Talking Picture” (2003, Manoel de Oliveira): The great September 11th movie, from a spry ninety-five-year-old who sees not only the century’s long view but seemingly encompasses Homer’s.


5. “Regular Lovers” (2005, Philippe Garrel): Or, Nixon in China: The events of 1968, depicted by one of its cinematic heroes as an intimate epic—and, with a self-deprecating fury, as a lovely but unsustainable burst of youthful lyricism.


6. “Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M.” (2001, Claude Lanzmann): This discussion with Yehuda Lerner, who took part in the uprising against the extermination camp’s guards, is as profound a dialogue on the morality of violence as the cinema has seen.


7. “Fengming: A Chinese Memoir” (2009, Wang Bing): From one of the decade’s two best new directors, as well as its best new nonfiction filmmaker. If I had seen Wang’s “West of the Tracks” in its entirety, I’d have put it here instead; I saw only about a third of its nine hours, but this feature, converging recent Chinese history with the sufferings endured, at the hands of the regime, by one free-thinking couple, does quite as well.


8. “Knocked Up” (2008, Judd Apatow): Suddenly, all contemporary comedy seemed old-fashioned. From Lubitsch through the Farrelly brothers, the funniest guys in the room were behind the camera; Judd Apatow discovered, or rediscovered, the trick of the great silent clowns—to put funny people on screen—and to make it personal. (If Eddie Murphy had, say, directed “Norbit” in addition to starring in it, it would likely find a place on this list too.)


9. “Moolaadé” (2005, Ousmane Sembene): Women, resistance, and centuries of oppressive tradition, seen with the fiercely clarifying wisdom of age. The subject is genital mutilation; the phalanx of respected women eager to do the dirty work is truly frightening.


10. “The Other Half” (2007, Ying Liang): The other of the decade’s two best new filmmakers, the one who does dramas, bringing a laser-like analytical eye to the crossroads of private life and oppressive authority. His anger builds to an apocalyptic outpouring with few parallels in the history of cinema.

After the jump, sixteen more.

“Saraband” (2003, Ingmar Bergman): Emotions of shattering power; family, memory, death, and the black sun of a creative force that not only won’t die but consumes anyone it can attract.

“Woman on the Beach” (2006, Hong Sang-soo): A filmmaker dramatizes, with a scathing and comic self-deprecation, the egocentric romantic turbulence on which his art is nourished.

“Colossal Youth” (2006, Pedro Costa): Modernization and bureaucracy confront poverty without pity. Loamy popular tradition and timeless legends have their pathologies too, and Costa unearths the ironies and contradictions of progress and its simulacra through his careful, loving work with the residents of one poor Lisbon neighborhood in ferment.

“Le Monde Vivant” (“The Living World”) (2003, Eugène Green): Green, an American in Paris whose work seems like the dream of a virtual love child of Robert Bresson and Elaine May, dresses a faux-medieval legend in baroque language, classic romanticism, modern clothing, and prophetic virtue.

“L’Enfant (“The Child”)” (2005, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) The ostensible street realism of the Belgian brothers’ story of betrayal and crime doesn’t merely rise to a Bressonian pitch of redemption—it poses Bressonian questions throughout and offers sharply modern, secular answers.

“Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep” (2002, Miklós Jancsó): At age eighty, the most controlled choreographer of the nineteen-sixties and seventies cuts loose with a contemporary historical fantasy that includes himself and his screenwriter, Hitler and Stalin, and a moment with Beethoven’s universalist dream that is one of the most touching scenes of the decade.

“Cassandra’s Dream” (2008, Woody Allen): Few aging directors so cogently and relentlessly depict the grimly destructive machinery of life, and every time the word “family” is uttered, the screws tighten just a little more.

“Gran Torino” (2008, Clint Eastwood): Few actors have taken themselves out with such a rueful bang.

“Frownland” (2008, Ronald Bronstein): A punk-like ferocious rage contained in a chamber-music-like precision; film stock run rugged like cold stone, light turned cruel; humiliation and degradation portrayed with tenderness and, ultimately, surprisingly, hope. Dore Mann’s agonized performance is one for the ages.

“Hamilton” (2005, Matthew Porterfield): Beside “Eloge de l’amour,” this is the movie I’ve watched the most times this decade. The twenty-six-year-old director has a preternaturally precise and poetic camera eye as well as tenderness for and understanding of the complexities of everyday lives.

“Funny Ha Ha” (2003, Andrew Bujalski): Mumblecore is real (neither more nor less so than, say, Italian Neo-Realism or the French New Wave—the fact that the term raises questions doesn’t mean that those questions have no reasonable answers) and Bujalski started it. He raises personal cinema to a new height, by way of an aesthetic that blends control and improvisation in delicate, tenuous balance. A remarkably analytical sensibility.

“Hannah Takes the Stairs” (2007, Joe Swanberg): Love and money among the young and bright; Bujalski co-stars as the one artist in a production-office bullpen who is on the verge of a breakout, which doesn’t make things go easier with Hannah (Greta Gerwig, in a performance of astounding inventiveness), who may even be smarter and wiser but is still seeking her place in the world. No less than Bujalski’s own film, a picture of a generation.

“Sex Is Comedy” (2002, Catherine Breillat): The most frightening, disturbing, and seemingly plausible view of the emotional cost of artistic realism in an age of erotic freedom.

“La Captive” (2000, Chantal Akerman): One of the heights of modernist melodrama; it’s as if, thanks to Proust, Akerman, a master of the tableau, discovered a third dimension. The joy of discovery is palpable, shot by shot, and she had young actors, notably Sylvie Testud and Stanislas Merhar, who seem to be savoring it equally.

“Where is My Romeo?” (2008, Abbas Kiarostami): I haven’t seen “Shirin,” and if this short film is any indication, it would be here; but this short film, constructed on what is said to be the same principle, deserves it, too.

“14th Arrondissement” (2006, Alexander Payne) (in “Paris, Je t’aime”): “Sideways” is terrific, but Payne’s short film offers both emotional poignancy and profound cinematic smarts in an amazingly clever and original sketch.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2009/11/best-films-of-the-decade.html#ixzz0YUfVw2Ui