Another Cinderella story - 2008

It’s the usual story but an early-teen-version, and not a particularly good one, no. Mary (Selena Gomez) dreams of becoming a dancer, but of course  she’s treated like a little slave at home. Dominique (Jane Lynch) is apparently some famous pop-star, but also an insufferable woman (good the actress, terrible the character). She and her two daughters are  ridiculous and annoying, not funny. Famous pop-star/dancer Joey (Drew Seeley) comes back to his old school, which is also Mary’s school, of course. Everyone’s crazy about him, not just Mary, which is not that big a surprise given his fame. He has lost the passion for dancing, until he meets a mysterious girl. He doesn’t know how to find her but she lost her mp3-player or something, so he searches for her and she’ll have to prove she’s the right one by knowing the playlist :-/  Many embarrassing moments here.

Anyway, they get to know each other and fall in love, but a mean girl makes her believe he’s fooling around so she leaves him but at the school dance they dance together again and everybody likes her. Stuff like that. Mostly boring, actually. Plus, I didn’t like Mary and Jake together because he looked so much older, which doesn’t always bother me but it did here because she was so young and that changes things. Still, that wasn’t the main problem, just a little side one. Too many ridiculous scenes, and even the dance scenes were not very exciting. 

The best scene was when she went to watch a dance lesson, secretly. The dancers inside looked at a mirror, and behind it there she was, seeing everything and dancing along; basically a fake-mirror like in police-interrogation-rooms: WTF is a mirror like that doing in a dance class???

Anyway, that was a good dancing-moment, unfortunately it didn’t seem her at all.

I liked Mary’s best friend Tami (Jessica Parker Kennedy). Little else, though.

Just my luck - 2006

Ashley (Lindsay Lohan) is the luckiest girl in the world, Luck is always on her side, while Jake (Chris Pine) is her opposite, always such bad luck it’s amazing he’s still standing and going. He works for a band as their manager, and one night he goes to a party to meet a famous man who could promote his band, and by chance meets and kisses Ashley. For no reason at all her luck becomes his, and she finds out how life is without it and obviously doesn’t like it. She doesn’t even know who he is, so she tracks down every masked man that was at the party and kisses him to restore her luck. She kisses them as soon as she finds them and them tries her luck on a scratcher. He’s not on her list though so when she meets him the first time she doesn’t realize he’s the one she’s looking for. He helps her because he understands her situation, offers her his old job and she accepts because she needs it, and they get to know and like each other. Still when she discovers he’s the one she kisses him and gets her luck back. Now her life is what it used to be, but somehow she doesn’t enjoy it as she did before because she misses her time with Jake and is worried about him. The concert he got for his band isn’t going too well, with his bad luck, but she runs to him and kisses him again and everything goes as smoothly as can be. At this point she likes him and doesn’t want to steal his luck again so she leaves him and goes away, but he runs after her and tells her he doesn’t care, he wants her not her luck, stuff like that, and they kiss a lot, then they both kiss a young girl, Jake’s neighbour and friend, giving her their luck. Good for her.

Well, it was kind of nice for a while, and there was Samaire Armstrong in it playing Maggie, Ashley’s friend, and I liked her very much, sad that she had a small role. 

All considered, it didn’t leave me with any kind of wish to see it again, nope. 

ITA baciati dalla sfortuna

Red eye - 2005

This movie was surprisingly good. Who would have guessed, the little small talk at the beginning threatened to lead to the usual boring movie, but it wasn’t! As soon as they board the plane the fun begins, so to speak. Nice thriller, enjoyable watch. 

The plot: hotel manager Lisa (Rachel McAdams) goes to the airport to go back home and she meets Jack (Cillian Murphy) and they start talking, and it seems a friendly thing, guy-meets-girl and that kind of stuff. When they finally board the plane the real plot starts. She asks him what he does in life and he says something appalling. I don’t remember the exact words, but it clearly had the word ‘assassination’ in it, which is not what she expected. She thinks it a joke but he soon clears things up for her: he has a hitman outside her father’s home ready to kill him at his order, unless she does what he asks of her. She must make a phone call, an easy thing with atrocious consequences. She must order to change rooms for Keefe’s stay (a politician played by Jack Scalia). Both he and his family will be killed if she makes that call, but her dad will be if she doesn’t. Difficult situation. She tries to find a way to alert people of the situation numerous times, but every time she’s caught and stopped by him. After the landing she pushes a pen into his throat but he doesn’t die or bleed, he simply has trouble talking, but my ignorance in the medical field is great so I don’t know how believable this is ( anyway, in some films the heroes get stabbed and shot and beaten and thrown all over and still manage to climb and fight and run at speed, so..)

She runs away, he runs after her, but she gets away. She has his phone so she calls the hotel to tell Cynthia to warn the Keefes and the security men and she does, and the men act quickly and everyone is saved when the whole room is blown up. This was very much appreciated, every security man gets out alive :-)

After that the phone goes dead so she drives to her father’s home and sees the hitman right outside the door. He shoots at her but she kills him by driving him over with the car she stole. 

Once in the house she checks that everyone’s safe at the hotel. Her dad called 911 so it might seem like everything’s good and over, but it’s not. Jack shows up at her house and tries to kill her. She knows the place better and puts up a fight. It was a lovely scene, well made, when she was waiting for him with a bat but he didn’t show. For a moment it was actually funny  :lol: then you go back to the thrill and the fight. Of course she wins, with a little help from her father, who finally regained conscience. They kill the guy and it’s all over. She goes to the hotel, hugs Cynthia, hears Keefe’s thanks, than has to bear a couple of clients always complaining, even asking her to fire good, brave Cynthia, but obviously she sides with her :-)

One little thing: when he also got hurt in the leg but kept pushing on, for a scene he was like a caricature :-/

Nice movie, actors all ok, every one of them. Loved Cynthia and the little girl on the plane. 

McAdams and Murphy were good. 

Jason Bourne - 2016

Well, it was loyal enough to the other movies, same music, same action, same Bourne… it’s a real pity this movie was so boring. I think an actual plot would have done this movie some good. The hand-to-hand combat scenes were its highest point, I’d say, in perfect Bourne-style, using makeshift weapons. The car-race scenes can’t compare to the previous ones, unless you measure them by how many things they destroy. Most of all the plot was boring. Sorry to say this movie didn’t give me any emotion.

I loved the first one, was surprised when I loved the second one, and even more surprised but quite glad when I liked the third movie too. But this one… Jason is not so driven as he was before, the real hero of the movie (Nikki Parsons) died early and the new female character of the movie is Heather Lee (there MUST be one, it’s the politically correct thing to do). She works for Robert Devey (Tommy Lee Jones) who seems to be the big bad boss here, but Heather (Alicia Vikander) helps Bourne all the way, even saving his life by shooting Devey. I never thought for a second that she was another Nikki, she was so cold and ambitious it was obvious she wasn’t doing it for him. 

There’s a new asset (Vincent Cassel) just one this time, who has a personal grudge against him. I didn’t like him because he was a soul-less monster. He killed innocent people without hesitation, and without need. 

A lot of effort went into making good action scenes, and they were good indeed, but this movie had a weak plot and no heart. 

Jason Bourne was of course Matt Damon.

Nikki was again Julia Stiles

The next three days - 2010

Not bad: I’d say 35% drama, 35% of planning, 15% action, 15% nonsense. The thing I liked most is how slow he is. Not the movie, but the character; it takes him weeks to do it all, until the last part of the movie when he has, no surprise, three days and in “the next three days” he has to do it.

We meet John and Lara Brennan (Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) only for one night before hell breaks loose. That night she says she had a fight with her boss, and we see that she’s not exactly an easy-going person. They have sex in the car after dinner at a restaurant (come on, they’re not teens anymore :-/ ) then they go home. Next thing they know she gets arrested for murder. Her boss has been killed after the two of them had a fight, Lara’s prints are on a fire extinguisher found at the scene, neatly against a wall (Columbo would have had people go mad trying to explain that) plus a man came into the parking lot, saw her drive away and then saw the body on the floor. 

Three years of following legal procedure bring them to Lara being convicted. Nobody believes in her innocence, only John. There’s nothing else to do now so John starts planning a way to help her escape. 

He looks on the internet and finds a man who escaped from prison and can give him precious advice (Liam Neeson) then he starts his serious planning. He needs false documents of course, but the first man he asks steals his money and gives him nothing. So he starts surveilling those guys, studying the situation, then he goes to the bad guy’s home to steal back his money.

Now he has a lot. One guy heard him talking about needing false documents and goes to his house to make the deal. This time it works, the guy takes the money and gives him the papers.

All this time he has said nothing to Lara, she has no idea what he’s planning to do. 

Lara is more and more bad-tempered with him, which is understandable in a way, she’s stressed out by this situation, but of course it’s also because the viewer may doubt her. I mean, watching the movie I only had his belief in her innocence, but no actual proof that she didn’t do it. I never believed it for a second, but it could have been, because for him it wouldn’t have made such a big difference, he wanted to have her back, he never considered she might be guilty. 

When she attempts suicide, he decides he has to act quickly. He makes himself a universal-key watching youtube videos and tries it to open the jail elevator, ma that was too easy and they were prepared for such a thing, so it didn’t work. It worked at home but not there, and the key breaks in the lock and he has to leave it there. He’s questioned about it but he denies knowing anything about it and they let him go (I suppose they can’t ask him for his fingerprints..).

He has to come up with something different to get her out of there. He breaks into the medical supplies van and he changes the medical papers of his wife. She’s checked regularly because she’s diabetic (or do they do it with everyone? Don’t know), and she gets transferred into a hospital. John shows up there with a gun, he stops the guards and takes her away, losing a lot of time because she didn’t want to, and they run away. 

dfs

They go to pick up their son but he went to the zoo with his friends. They don’t really have time to go there because the roads will be blocked in no time by the police, but she absolutely refuses to go away without her son, she’s like crazy and she opens her car dor while running, she kind of throws her head out, he takes hold of her, and they’re rather close to getting killed. They stop to breath then they go back to the zoo to find their son. Now they are together and he goes to the train station knowing very well that all trains have been cancelled (or delayed) because of him, so he offers to drive an elderly couple home (well, not old old, but older than them). The police are looking for a couple with a child, so when they see the car full of people they don’t stop them. 

Next stop is the airport, where they use their faked passports to take a flight to Venezuela. Nobody knows where they went, that is nobody else but his father; it was a good scene when he found out, and of course the man will keep the secret. 

The success of the plan depends too much on luck for my taste. At the airport there’s a change of guards and the new one sees the pictures just in but has not seen them, and at the roadblock they didn’t have their pictures either, things like that. One more thing, he must have thought of everything in the last few days, after he took the bad guys money , because he bought a new car for the escape. 

Anyway, the movie was well made, nice to watch and all that, but I did not like Lara, and I wasn’t crazy about the escape plan either. 

Conclusion, I don’t think I’ll watch it again, no.

P.s. For the viewer piece of mind, at the end of the movie we are shown clearly that Lara was innocent and had nothing to do with it…

Deep Impact - 1998

Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) is a 17 year-old boy who discovers and takes the first picture of a comet heading towards Earth. We follow various characters, but the plot is the same: after the mission to stop the comet fails, they have no more hope; the president reveals that every Country in the world has been building underground safe shelters, so there will be a lottery to choose the Americans that will be accepted inside. Many people have been pre-selected because considered important for some reason. 

Not a bad movie, it had its moments for sure, although not one that I want to watch again. Jenny Lerner (Téa Leoni) is a journalist who ‘accidentally’ bumps into this story, kept secret at first at the President’s order (Morgan Freeman). Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) is an old astronaut, on a mission to save Earth. 

Rittenhouse (James Cromwell) resigns from office to stay with his family because he knew what was going to happen before the population was informed. That was a great scene.

Beth (Laura Innes) is a journalist with a little daughter. When the time comes, Jenny is one of the preselected people who can save themselves, but she gives Beth her place; she stays to die with her father.

Leo was preselected too, as well as his family, but he has a girlfriend, Sarah, and doesn’t want to leave her, so he marries her hoping that her family will now be safe too, but she’s not in the least. Leo has to go with his family, without Sarah, but at some point he goes back for her. She has left with her family so he takes a bike and goes looking for her. Mega traffic jam, they’ll never move from there, but Leo finds her immediately. Sarah’s parents are grateful to see him and urge Sarah to go with him and take with her her little baby-brother. They know they’ll die but now they have hope that their son and daughter might make it.

One thing that I liked, although not really realistic in this world, is that there were no scene of mass hysteria.

The astronauts are still in space. They have families and loved ones on Earth so they give their lives in an attempt to save them: a suicide mission, crashing their shuttle into the big comet, destroying it into small bits. They save the world. Only the small comet crashed, killing millions of people, but not Leo and Sarah, they made it.

Robin (Vanessa Redgrave) is Jenny’s mother, and Jason (Maximilian Schell) is her father. Jon Favreau plays Gus Partenza, the first to die. Denise Crosby played Sarah’s mom.

Contact - 1997

This movie has some interesting points and Jodie Foster is always good, but Matthew McCoghnay’s character is completely useless, there was absolutely no need for any kind of forced-love-story in this movie. 

Foster plays Ellie: as a girl she loved to talk to people far away on the cq, and she grew up to be a brilliant scientist, listening for messages from outer space. Not many believe in her project, but a mysterious rich man gives her money to continue her research. Finally she receives, along with her team, a message from space: a transmission of Hitler at the Olympics games, received and sent back with instructions to build a strange machine. The mysterious rich man also gives her a code to understand the data, and the machine is build. Nobody knows what it is really for, and there’s a competition to decide who will have to try it; Ellie applies of course, but a veteran is chosen over her, obviously. Good. Still, there’s a rebellious organization that is against this whole alien-thing because they don’t have our same God and stuff like that. Fanatics, to be clear. Ellie recognizes one of them in disguise but it’s too late to stop him. He has a bomb and the entire machine is destroyed. It’s not over though, because the rich guy had another machine built for him, in secret. So she enters it and goes on this journey… It basically is a big construction with a ball where she enters, only room for one person. The journey starts with the ball falling… and all the people there see is the ball landing in the water, directly, without going anywhere, and they think the mission has failed. She says otherwise. When the ball was dropped, she went through a lot of space tunnels, long tunnels, and she meets someone. An alien appears to her taking her father resemblance. She says it was a beautiful experience that lasted 18 hours, but when she comes back they tell her it all lasted a second. There’s an inquiry on the mission, many people don’t believe her, but she insists with her story even if she can’t prove it to them.

The entire sub-plot about God was also useless, just like MM’s character. Useless and pointless. It always annoys me the argument “I don’t believe in God because I’m a scientist”, it is so silly! How can they say that? Incredibly silly.

The man who fell through the Earth by Carolyn Wells

I was enjoying it until that stupid ending. It was a nice mystery, for a while. A respectable businessman, Amos Gately, is found dead. Coming out of his own office, Mr Brice had seen the shadows of two men fighting and heard a shot. He was , from that moment, very much involved in the matter. His stenographer Norah was also interested, along with other characters: Olive Raynor was not a relative but had lived with him a long time, he was her guardian; and her friend Amory Manning, who disappeared the same night the body was discovered. When Olive asked Brice for legal counsel, he strongly advised her to hire a famous investigator, Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise. He came with young Zizi to help him. Olive asked Brice to check the hospitals to try and find Mr Manning, and Brice came across a curious case: a man was brought in, believed dead, but at the morgue he showed signs of life. At the hospital he was taken care of, until his strength came back, but he remembered nothing of who he was, only that he ‘fell through the Earth’. 

Going on with the investigation it comes out that Gately was a spy, a traitor of his Country, selling Government secrets to Germany. The others involved in the espionage are all arrested. 

Now, when first Brice spoke to Wise about the man who fell through the earth, who called himself Rivers while waiting for his real name to come back to him, Wise asked “can he be the missing Manning?” and Brice said “not a chance, the two men are totally dissimilar in looks and in build. Manning is heavy, almost stocky. Rivers is gaunt and lean (…) I tried to make out a resemblance but it can’t be done”. When he met Rivers himself, Wise asked for a picture of Manning and got one (on the front page of a newspaper). Wise studied the picture and compared it with the man before him. “Totally unlike, he said disappointedly. Not a chance, said Rivers-I wish I could step into that man’s shoes”

After all this, 40 pages later he recovers his memory and reveals it all: he killed Gately and he is Secret Agent Manning! After all those ‘not a chance’ and ‘totally unlike’, now he simply says he wore a disguise! He used to dye his hair black but when he disappeared falling down a manhole (it was a snowy, stormy night) the water washed out the dye ( !!!) destroyed his clothes, took away his spectacles, and at the hospital he was always clean-shaved, without his usual big-beard-disguise.

He also  spoke differently and even his friend Olive did not recognize him…. come on, what about his build and his voice?!?

Anyway, it’s an old book, dated 1919, still I feel tricked.

Olive and Rivers are in love, and to make you at ease that Brice is not interested in Olive that way, Carolyn tells us that Brice likes Norah. 

Doctor Who Time crash

There is another little special, in the  season 4 Dvd. It's called Time Crash, written by Moffat, and is a lovely little piece in which our Ten meets Five, played by Peter Davison, and it's very funny and nice. Ten of course knows immediately who the other is, but Five can't know him. Ten is having fun, and making fun of the other eccentricities, and then he says: "You know, I loved being you. Back when I first started, at the very beginning, I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important—like you do, when you're young. And then I was you, and it was all dashing about and playing cricket and my voice going all squeaky when I shouted. I still do that, the voice thing, I got that from you. Oh, and the trainers. And... [putting his glasses on] snap! 'Cos you know what, Doctor? You were my Doctor" and I love this speech so much. I love it because those last words will always be my words for David, because he will always be My Doctor, but also because he discribed the First Doctor that way, because the first was older than all the others, which might look strange, and here we have a perfect explanation, or description. "trying to be old and grumpy, like you do when you're young" : brilliant!!!

Voyage of the damned - 2007

 "Voyage of the Damned"is episode number 0 of season 4,  the Christmas Special episode with the flying Titanic hitting the Tardis, the one with Kylie Minogue. A good episode, sad and funny. She plays Astrid Perth, and she falls for the Doctor of course, and he likes her, he invited her to travel with him, but sadly she died saving him. The funniest thing was when they go down on Earth and there is nobody around, and the Doctor is surprised, then they talk to Donna's Grandfather and he says that people went away, because London at Christmas is not safe, and it was funny because after 'the Christmas invasion' and 'the runaway bride' who didn't think that??? It was a good special, not my favourite but good enough, David's always adorable, and the Doctor is always wonderful, and he really breaks your heart when he says 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry'. That little speech at the end, when they are still on the titanic, when Mr. Cooper talks about the only other survivor was that man that wouldn't have been anybody's choice, and he says something like that if the Doctor could choose who lives and who dies, what would this make him, a monster? Well, remember this when you will watch "The waters of Mars" special...