Author: Dennis

Closer

by Dennis••0•Posted inFilms

Closer [2004]

Director: Mike Nichols
Actor: Clive Owen, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman

I’m not too sure how I feel about this movie. At the end of the film I was left with two impressions; a) that it was a good movie, and b) that I hated all the characters in it. There’s just something about their actions that leave me disliking each and every one of them. It’s not like they’re flawed like any human being, because some of them make some bone-headed, ultimately self-destructive choices that no sane person would make. That said the acting is solid, and especially Clive Owen rocks this movie.

It’s about four people, two couples, who meet eachother independently of one another, seemingly by coincidence, and all fall in love with eachother. Not in a good, let’s-join-a-hippie-free-love-for-all-commune kind of way, but more in the adultery kind of way. Law falls in love with Roberts, while in a relationship with Portman. Roberts gets in a relationship with Owen and promptly starts a relationship behind is back with Law. Owen turns evil. Portman turns saintly (almost), and everyone ends up unhappy and awkward with one another. It’s a crazy four-way relationship that benefits nobody.

Good movie, but kind of depressing.

Film Reviews

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

When Jim showed me the light and I finally closed my boards, there was one thing that kind of bugged me; different people had written a shitload of movie reviews in one of the threads called “Movie Suggestions.” I always liked reading other people’s reviews, and I definitely want to hear more about other people’s opinions on films. (I used to not care so much, now, with the amount of shit being published, more and more I find reviews to be a handy way to filter the cream from the crap.)

So, I made a little movie review section on my website. It’s a little crude, as it is, but I hope people will take a look at it and give me some useful suggestions. You can find it here.

One of the things I need to do is change the star-graphics on the ratings-system, since I stole the graphics from another website, and I’m sure they’re going to be none too happy about it. I also need to make it possible to add comments to the reviews, in the same way you can do that with my journal entries. That requires me to make a generic table for all kinds of posts, like I already did in the Shadowrun section of my website. Another thing I need to do is modify the scripts I made to auto-generate the webforms, to accept a label, other than the database name, which is particularly ugly in the section where you can submit a new movie to the collection of movies you can add reviews to. All that in due time. I’m happy with it as it is, since it kind of pushed me to make the webform scripts more sophisticated and versatile.

American Psycho

by Dennis••0•Posted inFilms

American Psycho [2000]

Director: Mary Harron
Actor: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Reese Witherspoon, Willem Dafoe

Where to begin; I read the book by Bret Easton Ellis for my English class when I was 14 or 15 years old, and I remember finding it incredibly boring. There are whole pages in the book devoted to Patrick Bateman’s (main character) description of his new hifi system, and I admit to skipping certain pages to get to the good bits. Obviously I didn’t have the patience, or perhaps I just didn’t get it. But now the story appeals to me a lot, since it’s a sincere accussation towards the materialism and greed of American society in the mid-80’s.

Wallstreet operatives were considered to be rock and roll superstars, which is still the case a bit, but certainly not in the way the way they were venerated as much as in the 80s. Films like Wallstreet and Glengarry Glen Ross are good examples of that. Boilerroom is a more recent example. Their splurging and excesses are widely shown in the film, and it seems to go hand in hand with a profound shallowness, and Patrick Bateman is the pinnacle of that shallowness. He is not really a person, so he keeps saying, he’s a man, made of flesh and blood, but he has no identifiable human emotions, except greed and disgust. He is an avatar of the Wallstreet greed and excesses as described in the film. It’s only a small step from that, to the definition of a pyschopath; someone who has no moral responsibility or social conscience. Someone who has a hard time relating to others.

Patrick Bateman has all these things, and the only way he feels anything is when he resorts to homocidal tendencies on a massive scale. His urges are getting out of control and it all slowly spirals out of control.

Great film with great acting on the part of Bale and Dafoe. The pace is great, and the styling is almost perfect. Bale looks appropriately plastic, with his perfect skin, $70 haircut and Valentino suits.