The Bad Batch - 2016

Stay away, it’s the most boring load of nonsense! Mind you, it’s rather beautiful if you consider the framing, she shots, the colours, those kind of things, but my goodness, it’s so long and boring, and it’s all walking and walking, half the movie is people walking with a bit of moving in cars or bikes, but let’s be clear, we see them start and we follow them all the way, step by step, meter by meter. When they’re not moving, there are long scenes of people standing still, staring... the movie is two hours long, and with a script that would barely fill one page. Had it been half that long, it might have been a good movie, for those who like that sort of thing. I didn’t like the ending at all.
The opening credits show names I know, like Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi: well, the first plays an important figure, yes, with a heavy accent and big mustache like a character from the 70s, while the latter plays a crazy man who in a couple of scenes we see blabbing nonsense and who is of no use at all. 
The opening credits don’t show his name, but it’s all over the internet that Jim Carrey is in it and plays the Hermit, otherwise I wouldn’t have known, with that big beard and everything. It’s a small but important role, and a strange one: he’s not part of any group, he goes alone where he pleases with his supermarket-cart full of his stuff, and saves the lives of the two protagonists. He never speaks, and I found it bizarre at first but then I smiled when he gave a snowball to the character that had just told him that he was lost and didn’t know which way to go..
The story: undesired people are thrown out of Texas without compliments, they’re called the bad batch and are left in the desert, a no-man’s-land where people try to survive as they can. 
We follow Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), who starts walking, finds and abandoned car and uses the mirror to put on lipstick, and tries to run when a car approaches but is taken. Of course, she was on foot running forward in the desert, it’s not like she ever had a chance. 
She’s chained to the ground while we hear the song “all that she wants”, and then a woman comes to saw her right arm and leg, in order to eat them. We see that there is a group of people who trains like bodybuilders, and there are weaker people chained down as meat. Arlen manages to kill the woman and escape using a skateboard, until she stops exhausted; luckily the Hermit finds her, and brings her to Comfort with his cart. The story moves to “5 months later”, where she’s been given an artificial leg (and a very good one, when she has it on you don’t notice the difference, it seems like her own leg :-p) and appears to be in otherwise good health. There is the crazy man Bobby (Ribisi) walking around shouting nonsense like ‘there’s only one thing you must never forget’ but he doesn’t know what it is.
Among the cannibals there is a guy with Miami Man tattooed on his chest (Jason Momoa); he makes a beautiful drawing of a child, his daughter, and then goes outside to kill a pleading and crying girl for dinner, while listening to Karma Chameleon. We see him slicing the meat, cooking it and eating it. 
Arlen is so upset about her new condition that she wants some kind of revenge; she loads a gun and goes out; she finds an injured woman and kills her, sparing the child and taking her to Comfort. 
She gives the child a pet rabbit and teaches her how to apply make-up, since she can’t do it to herself with only one arm. Together they go to a rave, where The Dream’s women give drugs to everyone. She takes the acid too, and doesn’t see that the Dream finds the child alone and takes her in.
MiamiMan is searching everywhere for the child, after finding the body of the woman, and he asks the hermit if he knows where she is. He knows, he saw the child following the girl. The hermit writes “find comfort” on the man’s notepad after he has drawn him - and very well too, that’s definitely something he wasn’t going to find anywhere! 
Arlen goes out into the desert, still under the effect of the acid, and Miami Man finds her. When she comes back to herself, he tells her that he doesn’t care about anything or anybody except that child, and that he’ll kill her unless she helps him find her. He trades her with another man for fuel, then he kills the man, and takes one of his arms, his scooter and the girl with him. 
He helps her during a sandstorm, then they talk (he comes from Cuba and went to Miami to work), and she shows him her tattooes, and then she takes his knife, tells him she hates him, because he’s a cannibal and therefore evil: “that’s what you are, evil”. He says she doesn’t see things clearly for what they are out there, but then a man comes and shoots him, and takes her back to Comfort. 
She goes right back looking for him but finds only his notebook, not him. The hermit finds him, not dead yet, and saves him. We see him catching a bird to give him something to eat and burn money in the fire. 
Arlen makes copies of the drawings of the child but nobody knows where she is, until Arlen sees her herself, with some pregnant women. 
The hermit brings MiamiMan to his scooter and leaves him there with a snowball. 
The Dream lives with all the comforts: a big house with comfortable beds and bathtubs, even with a swimming pool. He gives the child spaghetti to eat, and his women have machine guns.
Arlen goes to see him. The women make drugs in there. He tells her that there are people who eat his “sons and daughters” but here he won’t let it happen, and when she sort of says she’d like to stay he gives her a nice, big room; she has a gun hidden in her artificial foot, and uses it to take a woman hostage in exchange for the child. The Dream says “is this really necessary?” and I wondered the same thing. 
She goes away with the child, and what do you know, she sees MiamiMan riding straight in her direction - he wasn’t that lost after all. The child runs to hug him. He tells Arlen that she did her part and is now free to go back, but she won’t, she asks him if he wants to hang out or something. He tells her it’s not a place for her out there, and she replies that “I like it here”, but we know exactly what she likes, right there. The child starts crying that she’s hungry and she wants spaghetti, so while Arlen covers her eyes MiamiMan kills her pet rabbit and they sat around a fire to eat it. The adults looking at each other, the child almost crying. 
What an ending, huh? :-/
Now, will someone explain to me how this people get on, where they find all those things, the fuel, the functioning copy-machines and the electricity to make it work, the weapons, the music, and how can the Dream live so richly?
Those other guys seem to have no other options than eating people, and yet they have pasta and lots of stuff... there’s no money, and apparently no connection with the civilized world, so where does all that come from?
Also, has the Dream been there only a few months or what? There are a few pregnant women but there are no children around...
They make drugs for what purpose? They don’t sell it, it’s just to make people high for a night?
In spite of her words, Arlen looks at MiamiMan like someone thinking ‘where else am I ever gonna find someone looking like that??’, so there’s no doubt about what she likes, out there. 
Now, if you look at pictures of this movie, or at the trailer, it seems even kind of cool, because every shot is rather beautiful in itself: the framing, the light, it’s all very cool, if you think of it in terms of photographs or single shots, but as a whole movie it’s extremely boring.
I won’t ask why they needed famous actors like Reeves and specially Carrey, because it’s rather obvious that big names bring more audience (watch me, I see Carrey’s name, I watch the movie), but it’s still not clear why they had Ribisi in such a useless role. 
Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t get it, in which case, please enlighten me. I’d rather read interesting comments about it rather than watching it again.

Words and pictures - 2013

I liked the trailer, and the idea of words compared to pictures, and how a literature teacher and a painter/art teacher might see things in different ways, but unfortunately the movie didn’t fulfill my hopes and expectations. It was boring at times, the main characters were not very likable, specially Marcus, and the ending was too simplistic and unrelatable. 
We are presented with Jack Marcus (Clive Owen), a high school literature teacher who likes to play with words and also explaining their meaning although nobody ever asks for it. He was once a published writer but appears to have lost his creativity. Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche) is the new art teacher, who was once a successful painter in  New York but now she has a condition, rheumatoid arthritis, so she can’t paint like she used to. From the first moment they engage in a sort of battle: he plays words with her (trying to find words with many syllables) and she tells her students that words are not to be trusted and that pictures are better. Since they have the same students in their class - although they both teach advanced courses - they learn from them what the other says. Marcus starts a war, what’s better, words or pictures? 
The two of them only meet at school, but we also see them at home. Dina finds it hard to adjust to her condition, not only because of the pain but also because she can’t create anything that she likes anymore. Marcus drinks too much but doesn’t realize that he has a problem. He has a teenage son who would like him to meet his girlfriend, but gives up the idea because of this problem. He’s been banned from a restaurant for causing troubles, and is on the verge of being fired. Also, his literary magazine is about to be shut down. His only way of dealing with his problems is thru vodka. I’m not sure if he drinks because he can’t write, or if he can’t write because he drinks too much. Honestly I lean towards the second, but it’s just an opinion, nothing in the movie answers this question. 
To keep the magazine running, since he hasn’t written anything in a very long time, he produces a new poem, and when I read it I thought: wow, he seems so disagreeable and yet I like this poem, maybe he’s not so bad after all, but then it turns out that he stole his son’s poem..
There’s also a little side story, an obnoxious kid who keeps tormenting a girl, Emily. He’s really annoying, and when she finally rejects him out loud, trying to get him to leave her alone, he makes an embarrassing drawing of her and puts it on the school website. She’s very hurt. Of course when Delsanto sees the drawing he made of her she laughs at it, but she’s not a teenage girl..
All the class sides with her fortunately, and when proof is found the guy is suspended (I think). Good.
Back to our protagonists, Marcus is not fired because of the good things Delsanto said about him at the hearing. He goes to her house, thanking her, charming her. They kiss and they have sex, and then they talk and laugh together, and then he stays the night saying that he doesn’t want to go home. That’s ok by her, but during the night he gets up and finds a bottle in her fridge. He drinks it all, and then in his drunkenness he ruins her latest paintings, the only one she was finally happy with. In the morning she’s so hurt that she only wants him to go away without another word. 
Finally, almost at the end of the movie he realizes that he may have a problem and starts attending AA meetings; he confesses to the school board that he copied the poem and hands them his resignation letter, only asking to stay until the end of the school year. 
At the end there is the final debate, with the students comparing words with pictures and talking about the matter to decide what’s best (which anyway is absurd, they are different and both powerful, what’s best depends simply on the kind of person watching or listening). Marcus secretly had pupil student Emily finish Dina’s painting, the one he ruined, and then show it there in front of everyone. She doesn’t mind apparently, on the contrary she smiles and says that it’s a great thing that she started making art and then Emily finished it. I would appreciate her part of the job, although there should be two names on it now and not just one, but I wouldn’t like him showing it to everyone without my previous consent. 
Anyway, after the debate, Marcus and Dina talk a bit, laugh together and hug. Peace made. 
Personally, the debate was boring, it wasn’t clear if they were all in favour of pictures or if there was someone advocating for words; some students quoted famous authors, maybe that’s all they have to say about the matter. Personally, I love words. I love pictures too, and I think the movie failed to show how beautiful both things can be. Very few paintings shown, mostly of the same style (Dina’s). I mean, plenty of good enough painters even in my small town, they couldn’t find a few more to show?
Words are just as beautiful, and they can evoke sensations, emotions, dreams, but Marcus managed to make them boring.
I liked Binoche enough, and also Janet Kidder as her sister Sabine. 

Doing time on Maple Drive - 1992

This was a very good film, but it ended so abruptly, without a real closure. It left me emotionally suspended, because it doesn’t say what will happen next to the lot of them. I felt like someone hurt me, threw me a bandage and walked away. I was incredibly disappointed, a few more minutes should have been added to show something about them.. 
This is a family who doesn’t talk about things, who never shares true feelings. There are three grown-up children who are good intelligent people but deeply troubled; there is a father who tries to straighten them up and there is a mother who refuses to accept that there is a problem in the first place.  
In details, it’s a story of a dysfunctional family: father Phil who is very strict and mother Lisa who follows her perfect-housewife-and-perfect-mother path denying completely whatever doesn’t fall into that. They have three children who spend their lives trying to make them proud or at least trying to be  accepted by them. They are all troubled, but the parents don’t notice it. Oh the father notices that Tim gets drunk every day, but he simply deals with that by being glad that he has another son who he thinks is perfect; as Tim points out though, he is at a disadvantage because he doesn’t have another father to turn to, he only has one. Karen married the man she loves, but Tom is not happy in her parents’ home because he knows Phil doesn’t like him. Tim is always oppressed by this aura of superiority his father has. The other son Matt comes home with a fiancée, Allison, who is beautiful, rich, and deeply in love with him. Matt is also trying to be perfect to make his parents happy, but when Allison finds a letter and discovers that Matt is gay and leaves him, things go rapidly down. Allison doesn’t hate him, she’s a lovely girl and understands that as much as he says that he’ll try, there is nothing here that can be tried, he can’t change who he is and of course she can’t marry him, and Matt doesn’t know how to explain this to his parents. The night of his bachelor party, Matt drives his car into a pole in an attempt to kill himself. His ex-boyfriend Kyle comes to visit but Matt is not prepared to deal with this. He only tells his sister about Allison leaving him, without explaining the reason. When Tim confronts him, saying that there were no marks on the road and directly asking his brother if he did it on purpose, Matt walks out without a word and Karen yells angrily something like “what is wrong with you?”. Honestly, what is wrong with all the others, I wanted to say, because if what Tim suspects is true it is not something to simply ignore!!
I was very surprised that neither Tim or Karen ever had any suspicions, but at least Tim tried to talk about the accident. It’s more than the others did.
Matt knows he can’t go on lying and chooses to talk to his best friend Andy first. It’s very difficult, but he opens up and tells him that Allison left him because he’s gay. After a few seconds of silence, Andy reacts the right way, which is to keep talking to him about what they were talking about, meaning Matt’s problems, before stating that he is and has always been his best friend. 
Tom learns from a doctor that his wife is pregnant and is planning to get an abortion. She never told him this, and he knows she wants to do it because she’s afraid of what her father might say, because Phil is always talking about planning and about money.
When they find Lisa crying, things move on quickly. She starts accusing Matt of embarrassing them all, after learning that Allison left him. She worries about what people might say if the wedding is called off. Matt can’t stand it anymore and tells her and everybody that she knows the reason, she’s known since she walked in on him and Kyle two years ago. He says it out loud now, forcing her to listen. He tells them not only that he is gay, but that he tried to kill himself. She won’t listen, won’t accept his words, and only tells him to apologize to Allison.
Matt runs to his room and Tim tells Phil to “just leave him alone”, I guess because he understands Matt better than anybody else, but that’s as far as their brotherly relationship is shown to us.
Tom can’t keep it inside any longer and tells it like it is in Phil’s face, saying that he can’t destroy his family (Tom’s) as he destroyed his own (Phil’s). That’s a good scene, a good speech, and when Phil says he doesn’t want to talk about it now Tom says “when are we gonna talk about it? when someone actually dies? Would that be better?”
He prepares to leave but Karen talks to him and after they talk they hug and I guess he’ll take her out of there and they’ll have their baby and manage like many parents have done before them.
That’s the last we see of Karen.
Phil goes to talk to Lisa but she’s still angry, saying that Matt humiliated them, that she sacrificed her life so her children could have a future, that it’s all “about us”. Phil asks her what does she wants, if she’d rather have him dead, but she doesn’t answer, instead she goes into a rage pulling down all the photographs on their wall, saying “it’s a lie”, meaning that life on the pictures, and when later Matt goes to talk to her she not only says that she doesn’t understand, but also that ‘she doesn’t know and she doesn’t wanna know’. 
After a silent meal, Phil sees that Tim is picking up the pictures and putting them back together where they were, and silently helps him. That’s as far as their relationship goes, we don’t see anything more than that. 
Matt calls Kyle asking him out for a coffee and a good talk, and we can guess he’ll accept because he seemed still in love with him, but we can’t be sure.
Another significant scene was when Phil asked Matt if it was true that he tried to commit suicide, and then asked him if he really thought that ‘they’d rather have him dead’, and Matt says that he doesn’t know, it’s hard to tell... I so understand this, the pain of saying it and the pain of admitting it. 
At the end, Phil talks to Matt, trying to understand and telling him that he loves him. 
With my great surprise and disappointment, there was nothing more. I think both Matt and Tim deserved a little more, and although I understand that Matt’s problem is the key to the movie, I also feel that Tim’s problem was serious too. When Matt runs to his room saying "go to hell" to his mother in his anger, and Tim says to his father "just leave him alone", you can read the desperation in him.
They were both troubled, but while Tim gave up and survived by drinking himself to death every day, Matt had tried to live the perfect life; while Tim had already tried to yell and make his father understand (unsuccessfully), Matt had never said a word, piling it all inside him.
In both cases it was a matter of accepting who they really are instead of what they wanted them to be. At least Karen had Tom, but Tim and Matt deserved a bit more. I’m not saying much, just a scene showing brotherly support, or a smile while they walk out, or something. Both brothers should have gone away, and they should have kept in contact. Escape from that prison, and be who they are.
But an end like this was not enough, it wasn’t an ending at all. It left me in a very low mood all day.
..
The actors were all good. Jim Carrey was not yet the famous rubber-face, and I liked him a lot here. I think he’s a great actor, has a real talent for showing emotions on his face, I’m glad from time to time someone calls him to do something serious - not necessarily dramatic, serious comedies would be good too. It’s probably just because I don’t find movies like ‘dumb and dumber’ the least funny..
One last thing: it's Tim that 'explains' the title while talking to his father, saying "I've done my time on Maple Drive"...
Tim-Jim Carrey
Allison-Lori Loughlin
Matt-William McNamara
Tom-David Byron
Phil-James Sikking
Lisa-Bibi Besch

ITA nel segno del padre

Beauty and the Beast - 2017

Beautiful. It was almost perfect.. *sigh* if they hadn’t changed two little details that I always loved so much, it would have been wonderful, perfect... anyway, I liked it a lot. Emma Watson is a lovely Belle, a very good choice. 
The movie is incredibly faithful to the original Disney animated film that I loved so much when I was younger; there is everything: Belle walking down the village singing the Bonjour song, asking her father is she was ‘odd’, Gaston as pompous as ever, LeFou as in love with him as ever, Maurice taking a rose for her at the castle and the horse bringing Belle to him, the ‘demand’ that she join the beast for dinner, the way he scared her when she found the rose, the way he saved her from the wolves, and the big library!, and the disgusting way he ate his soup before and the funny way they both ate it later, and the time in the garden, with the “there may be something that wasn’t there before” song, and the ball and its preparation, and the mirror, and the townsfolk wanting to lock Maurice in an asylum... 
They changed only a few things. Some of them don’t matter, I accept them very easily - Gaston goes with Maurice to see where Belle is supposed to be but Maurice can no longer reach the castle, so Gaston thinks he’s an old fool. Maurice tells him he’ll never agree to him marrying Belle, so Gaston ties him to a tree and leaves him there to be eaten by wolves, but Agatha finds him and saves him. Fine by me, it was effective and it showed even more how horrible Gaston was.
The beast has an enchanted book that can take him everywhere, and Belle uses it to visit the home in Paris where her parents lived; when her mother got sick her father ran away with her to protect her, to ensure that she wouldn’t get sick too. I’m fine with that. 
The living-objects in the castle tell Belle about ‘a curse’, although they can’t tell her her part in it, but still she knows well ahead that he is a prince, and they also tell her that their prince was once a nice boy but then his good mother died and his bad father raised him to be like him... which serves to explain why he was an arrogant and heartless jerk who deserved to be cursed. 
There are two more songs, one from the little prince after he lost his mother and one from the beast after he let Belle go.. I didn’t much care for them but they were ok.
I don’t much like the beast’s singing voice, but he looks a lot like the original prince, so that makes it ok enough. 
I think there’s another song that wasn’t in the old movie, the one Belle sings after attending to the beast’s injuries.. That’s ok. 
At the end they show us that Agatha is the enchantress, and even if Belle was too late - and not ‘almost’ too late as in the original movie - she sees Belle crying for his dead love and breaks the spell, reviving the castle. I can definitely live with that (although I wonder, if the enchantress has lived all this time in the village and knows them all, why didn’t she ever curse them?? Or at least Gaston!
They added a joke at the end, when Belle asks him if he would mind growing a beard, and that was not only fine but a lovely thing to add, because she had come to love that beasty-face.
Then there are a couple more changes, and I can’t accept these: after Belle has brought the beast back to the castle, after he saved her from the wolves, and they have that lovely fight - “if you hadn’t scared me I wouldn’t have run away”, you know which one - she doesn’t thank him for saving her life. She will, later on, in a ‘supposed-to-be-funny’ scene, but she doesn’t here and now and that was a mistake, because it was important, I always loved that bit because it’s the turning point for him, the first time she was nice to him. It was the first time she had a sweet voice while talking to him, and the first time he didn’t growl at her but replied in a tender tone. 
The other thing: after the beast let Belle go, Cogsworth asks why did he do it, when they have so little time left to break the curse, and here it was Mrs Potts who said “because he loves her”, it wasn’t him. It may seem a technicality, a small detail, but there’s a difference between someone saying that a man is in love and the man saying so himself. They only hoped that Belle would love him so to break the spell, but they didn’t actually know how he felt. This was the moment when he confessed out loud that he loved her, he said it to them and to himself, and it was important. They shouldn’t have changed it. 
Other than that it was very nice, I liked it a lot. Belle was always my favourite Disney character and I loved her here too. 
It doesn’t ruin the movie, no, because there’s a lot in it that is as lovely as the original movie, and the ball was very lovely, and they kept the snow-fight, although they should have added a frightened face when he knocked her down, not a laughing one :-p
Even the credits were beautiful! Two/three little details and it would have been ‘perfect’. 
Belle-Emma Watson
Beast-Dan Stevens
Maurice-Kevin Kline 
Cogsworth-Ian McKellen
Lumière-Ewan McGregor
Plumette-Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Maestro Cadenza-Stanley Tucci 
Gaston-Luke Evans
LeFou-Josh Gad
Mrs Potts-Emma Thompson
ITA la bella e la bestia

The tall guy - 1989

A nice little thing. Funny enough, sweet. The best part of it were the scenes with Emma Thompson, but it was generally a nice thing. It stars Jeff Goldblum in an unusual role for him (at least judging from the movie I’ve seen): his character is all strange-funny faces, it would have been funnier with Jim Carrey.. actually he would have been great throughout the movie.
Even if the many faces he made were not really my thing, there were many other things that I liked about this movie. Thompson is great and her character is great; I like the way Dexter simply accepts many things of his life without shock or screams, like when he sees a naked man in his house (one of his landlady’s many lovers). He simply lowers his eyes and then asks her once who he is, and that’s it. I liked that, it’s very “live and let live”. I liked the kind of friendship between him and the landlady, when he would burst into her room talking about Kate, or when Dexter brings Kate home and she shakes hands with the same smile both to her and to her two lovers under the sheets. I didn’t laugh, but I liked it, I liked this light atmosphere of “live and let live”, if only more people were really like that instead of always judging and trying to change others. 
Let's just not talk about Dexter's superman-piyamas ...
It’s the story of awkward Dexter who wants to be an actor but he’s so tall nobody has roles for him, so for the last years he’s done the assistant of famous comedian Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson). He’s a bad case of allergy and is forced to see a doctor: he falls in love with the nurse who gives him the shots, and week after week he goes back and never speaks a word. He’s frustrated because he hates working with Ron, he has a phobia of injections and after two months he doesn’t even know her name. With the excuse of a trip to Marocco he goes back and this time he learns her name: Kate (Emma Thompson), but then she’s called away for an emergency and he’s given Fantozzi-like shots by a psychiatrist not very skilled in nursing, in what should be I guess a very funny scene but I didn’t find Goldblum’s faces very funny; to me it was a boring scene which lasted too long. 
He’s getting worse at his job too, and realizing that he might need to talk to someone about it he calls an ex-girlfriend he didn’t really like, just to talk, but she thinks they’ll get married. At their table they meet Kate: a few words and they hurry out. They walk for a bit and then he leaves her and runs back to the hospital, to finally ask Kate out. She jokes a bit with him but then she accepts. When they meet,  he’s late and she says she had a bad day at work and is too tired to go out, so she asks him to walk her home and then she tells him she’s all in favour of first-date-sex and tells him to meet her the next day at her place. He goes and they have sex, in a rather funny long scene in which they almost wreck the house in their passion :-p There’s only a little nudity (her breasts of course) and a lot of laughing and rolling :lol:  after that he gets fired because he was late for the show; Kate goes to live with him, and they’re happy together. He looks for another acting job and after a few failed attempts he gets a part in a musical on the elephant man, playing the title part. Kate is very excited for him, but doesn’t know that as the rehearsals go on, Derek has a little affair with another actress, Cheryl. We know it happens at least once for sure, but maybe more. Finally the opening night, where a super-excited Kate comes in an ambulance in full sirens to make it in time :-p The show has some good singing and some dancing, and some satire, although there’s almost no elephant that I can see. Afterwards there’s a long reception with drinks all around. When they get home, while still talking about the night Kate packs her bag. When he finally notices and asks her what she’s doing, she simply states that she’s packing and leaving to never return. Why? Because he had an affair! She’s a smart girl, and understood the truth. He tries saying the usual ‘it was nothing’ or ‘she meant nothing’, I don’t remember, but she replies that when he was with Cheryl it was her, Kate, who was nothing, and she deserves more than that. Good girl.
He goes on working in the musical until the night of some awards ceremony, where the hated Anderson is not only nominated, but wins a prize, and what is worse Kate is there with him. Dexter loses it, he walks out before the show and goes to confront Anderson. He ties him up in a chair and yells to him, but when Dexter learns that there’s been nothing between him and Kate (maybe he thought she meant ‘every’ first date?? silly man, she liked him, she doesn’t like Anderson like that) he ‘borrows’ Anderson’s car and drives to the hospital where he talks to her who is still angry; at least now he can answer something to her question about Why? does he want to go out with her. They save a man’s life together and then in front of everybody, feeling much like the elephant man himself I guess, he apologizes and asks for another chance. She finally agrees and it’s happy ending.

Unnatural causes by P. D. James

Not bad. Not my favourite but still nice, well written. It starts with Adam Dalgliesh having a serious dilemma, he’s not sure if he wants to marry Deborah Riscoe or not - personally I don’t like them together. I mean, I liked Deborah, but still, Dalgliesh arrested her mother, come on!
He’s leaving to spend his vacation at his aunt Jane’s place, at Monksmere Head. He likes to visit his aunt. Her neighbours are a literary community: Maurice Seton is a writer of mystery novels, Celia Calthrop is a writer of romantic novels. There’s also her niece Elizabeth Marley, who repays her aunt’s generosity with contempt. Sylvia Kedge is the secretary, Oliver Latham is a critic, and Justin Bryce... I don’t know, he’s there too. Sylvia is described as a cripple, with her “twisted ugly legs braced into calipers”, but she’s also “a qualified shorthand typist”. Seton likes to make accurate researches and experiments for his books, and it is his habit to stay at the Cadaver Club while in London: the club is only for men, women are not allowed because they’re consider a distraction..
Celia suggested to Seton an interesting way to start a book: “I pictured a body drifting out to sea in a dinghy with its hands chopped off at the wrists” which is exactly the way Seton’s body is found.
Detective Inspector Reckless is in charge of the investigation, Dalgliesh finds himself in the middle of it because he’s at his aunt’s wife when they come with the news, and his aunt is among the suspects. 
Seton’s brother Digby is his heir; he dreams of opening his own club. 
After the PM report, Reckless tells Dalgliesh that it was a heart attack, Seton died of ‘natural causes’... but Dalgliesh is sure that it was provoked, that he was murdered. 
There are a lot of interrogations, a lot of side stories: Seton’s troubled wife died of suicide after he wrote her a cruel letter; Oliver had an affair with her; Bryce accused Seton of murdering his pet cat; the hands where chopped off using a tool taken from Jane’s house. 
Towards the end there is a very big storm, and Bryce calls Dalgliesh saying they should go over to Seton’s house where Sylvia is supposed to be alone because there’s going to be a dangerous flood and she couldn’t make it on her own with her legs. Once there, Dalgliesh finds the situation dangerous indeed, and he also finds Oliver unconscious. He tries to help them both up to the roof. When Sylvia turns against him, both men have to fight and they manage it, despite Dalgliesh’s hurt hands and Oliver’s blow to the head. Sylvia falls down to her death. 
The little package that Dalgliesh took from her before she fell contains all the proof Reckless needs to close this case. Sylvia planned it all, and Digby was her accomplice. They know from a tape she had wanted to keep with her that she knew of his recurring nightmare, his terrible phobia, so they abducted him and sort of buried him alive, they locked him into a coffin, I think they sort of made one out of a sidecar, so that he actually died of a heart attack, but then “we had to take off his hands, those telltale hands with the knuckles torn to the bone where he had battered them against his coffin lid” ...
She also killed Bryce’s cat, and she sent that nasty letter to Seton’s wife - Seton did write it, but never intended to give it to her. 
At the end, Dalgliesh doesn’t need to reach a decision about his future with Deborah anymore because she sends him a letter saying that she’s tired of waiting for him to make up his mind and she’s accepted a job offer in New York, so this means they broke up. 

Shroud for a nightingale by P. D. James

I liked it. It’s my fourth PDJames book and my favourite so far. I like how she painted so many different personalities, how normal - meaning ‘real’ - they all appear, including her detective Dalgliesh, who has nothing to do with characters like Sherlock or Poirot other than dealing with investigations: he is very human in the fact that he has virtues and defects like everybody, and his only ‘eccentricity’ if we can call it that is the fact that he’s a poet, something rarely associated with the detective work.
As always James likes to describe more than anything else the interior of the houses, she really makes an effort so that you can ‘see’ or at least get an accurate feeling of what it is like. Sometimes it is a bit boring, and yet this is the kind of description, the kind of details that I don’t mind too much because it serves a purpose, to make you understand the kind of person that lives in there.  
The book story in details:
this book is peculiar because it starts and ends with a character that has very little to do with the story: we meet Miss Beale and her friend Miss Burrows as they wake up on the day of the first murder. We learn about their characters and their friendship, and in four pages I got so fond of her that I was relieved to read “as the two friends were to tell each other for years to come...” because that meant that neither of them were to become the book’s victim. We follow Miss Beale as she heads towards the John Carpendar hospital to inspect their nurse training school. Many people there are sick with the flu, which is rather convenient for us or there would be much more characters around :-)
At first, when the first girl is killed, only the local police is called, but when another girl dies Adam Dalgliesh is sent on the case. He interrogates all the people involved with the help of sergeant Masterson, a rather dislikable character for me, and works to put together all the various pieces of the puzzle. 
We meet Mary Taylor the Matron, she’s super-efficient and they all rely on her. Mr Courtney-Briggs who is the surgeon with a God-complex who likes to feel powerful and important. 
Nurse Pearce is the one that has to act the patient in a demonstration lesson; she is given disinfectant instead of milk and she’s the first to die. Nurse Fallon is the second victim, found dead in her bed: some say she committed suicide, but of course she didn’t, she was killed with some nicotine found in the spray used for roses. All the nurses and the Sisters at Nightingale House are interrogated. In a place where people live together day after day there is no real privacy and they all know each other’s habits. 
Pearce liked to have power over people and proclaimed to be very religious, but as it often happens with human beings the more they declare to be something the less they are..
Fallon was once engaged to a gambling-addict actor who committed suicide; he was Mr Courtney-Briggs’ brother. She also had a short sex affair with him. He was a rather private person, and her only ‘friend’ was nurse Goodale. 
Fallon was killed for convenience, to make it look like she was the intended victim or else that she committed suicide maybe out of guilt for having killed Pearce.
Nurse Dakers felt rather guilt after the girls’ deaths because she had once picked up some money lost by Fallon because she wanted to buy a warm coat for her poor mother to wear in the cold winter. 
The Burt twins, also nurses in training, did everything together. 
Nurse Harper was taken home by her father after Pearce’s death, after all they were wealthy enough and she was about to get married anyway, so there was no need for her to continue her training...
Nurse Julia Pardoe was the beautiful and popular and well aware of it. She has a boyfriend and also a story with Sister Hilda Rolfe;  Sister Rolfe was very tired of the place and wanted an apartment of her own but she stayed at Nightingale House because of Julia Pardoe, because she told her not to do it, because she liked it that way. After Julia tells her that she had sex with sergeant Masterson, Rolfe quits her job and went “nursing somewhere in Central Africa”. 
Apparently Dalgliesh never learns anything about Masterson&Pardoe; he certainly kept it a secret, knowing very well that Dalgliesh would not approve.
Sister Brumfett is called ‘the Matron’s pet’ because the two women seem to be very close, and Brumfett is a very loyal admirer of Miss Taylor. She was in charge of the sick ward. 
Miss Gearing was also one of the Sisters: she had a love affair with the married man and was with him the night that Fallon was killed. 
1944, Germany: in a hospital the mentally ill were killed, it was the law, Hitler’s law. September: 31 Polish and Russian human beings were killed. There was a trial, and young nurse Grobel, only eighteen, was acquitted, declared innocent. Now a dying patient recognized Grobel in one of the Sisters: the Matron. Sister Brumfett killed Pearce to protect Taylor’s secret. Fallon too. She also attacked Dalgliesh with a golf club. 
At the end the Matron kills Brumfett, takes her to the garden shed and sets fire. She has a confession letter written by Brumfett, in the hope that they would also believe that Brumfett was Grobel, but Dalgliesh guesses the truth. She asks him to hide the whole Grobel-story, but he can’t , he won’t, there are rules and besides that’s also the motive for the first two killings. When it all comes out at the trial, even if there are no proof of her involvement in Brumfett’s death, she quits her job, causing the end of the training school and Martingale House. 
At the very end we learn that Taylor killed herself because “I haven’t the temperament to live with failure”,  leaving two confession letters, one of which was addressed privately to Dalgliesh, and when Miss Beale goes back to the John Carpendar we learn that nurse Goodale got married, and therefore left the hospital; nurse Dakers stayed, now more confident in herself. Supposedly the Burt twins stayed too, but we only see Dakers and Nightingale House being destroyed.
I love how a simple phrase tells you that this is a British book : “despite her intellectual assent to more modern methods of combating shock, Miss Beale still put her faith in warm strong sweet tea” :lol: love her: warm strong and sweet, just the way I like it (and no milk thank you, no teppuccino for me..)

Don't say a word - 2001

Half good half bad, but not one I’m eager to watch again. I’m not even sure that I like Michael Douglas playing the gentle psychiatrist, honestly. Anyway, it’s the story of some thieves obsessed with a precious thing that they want. Only a mentally unstable girl knows where it is so they kidnap a psychiatrist’s daughter to force him to get the information (six numbers) out of the patient. 
The movie has a nice pace, is thrilling enough, the acting is not all bad, but in the new millennium I can’t stand certain things anymore. 
The problem is that the story is full of holes and absurdities. There are the usual things, like the fact that brutal criminals hurt and kill without a second thought and yet the heroes are never really touched. We all see these things in basically every action movie, and maybe it’s supposed to create suspense, to make you feel scared for your hero, and it was all very well in 70s movies, but now it’s just annoying. When Sean Connery played James Bond it was normal that the villain would never kill him right away, they always ‘left him to die’ giving him time to find a way to escape. It was a long time ago, we’ve seen lots and lots of movies like that, the world is changed and yet screenwriters never move on. Why should they try new ways when it’s easier to simply repeat the same thing over and over? :-/
Our heroes never get out of trouble because they’re smart or because the police save them in time, oh no that wouldn’t do because the heroes must save themselves! So they simply get lucky in the most stupid ways.
Patrick is about to shoot Conrad, but instead he shoots his man first, for no real reason, and talks to Conrad giving the cop time to arrive. That was absurd, and his other man doesn’t even flinch in seeing him shoot their ally like that, doesn’t he think that he might be next? Well, that was absurd but not as it was absurd that, after having decided to kill Conrad, two of them watch without making a move while Conrad and the long-haired guy fight. Again, not as absurd as the fact that the big criminal who spent his days either killing and stealing or in prison is not able to kill the doctor who spent his days talking to people, sit on a comfortable chair..
What about the other criminal who gets killed by the doctor’s wife who has even a broken leg? 
Let’s not talk about the cop who is so determined to solve her cases that she works on Thanksgiving without pause: movie characters are always like that and that’s why people like movie characters more than real people. In movies people always care so much..
Let’s not even think too much about the fact that Conrad never tries unorthodox methods to get Elisabeth to tell him the numbers. He’s desperate, but he’s a good man and a doctor, so he tries to solve Elisabeth’s problem in order to get her to tell him what he needs to know. 
Movie characters are like that: cops and doctors who care so much about their jobs, and now even a psychiatrist who can diagnose a girl he met only once simply by reading her file, although she’s been in and out of mental hospitals for ten years and nobody got it. He’s the best psychiatrist and that’s it. 
Also, the story is that in 1991 these criminals entered a bank interested only in a gem that was kept in a specific box. They knew which one and were interested in nothing else, after all the gem is worth several millions so the money in the bank is merely petty cash in comparison. It’s not our business to know how he could know where the gem was kept.
One of the thieves double crossed the others and kept the gem for himself, hiding it in his daughter’s doll. They went after him right away, found him and killed him in front of his little daughter. It was a crowded subway, and although nobody tried to help the man (come on, anyone attempting anything would have been killed, who’d do that? they were clearly not joking), after he died hit by a train the three criminals were immediately arrested by cops. They spent ten years in prison and just got out. 
Very quickly they manage to find the dead man’s daughter, and they also kidnap Sachs’ girlfriend and Conrad’s daughter to ensure their help. For some reason they kill the girlfriend right away, she was clearly not one of the protagonists. They know everything about the Conrads and they kill the old woman who lives next to the Conrads in order to set there their headquarters.
They work fast, don’t they? Wow, you’d think such a plan would require some time...
Conrad suspects nothing when he gets home after seeing Elisabeth for the first time: he puts his daughter Jessie to bed and plays sponge-bath with his wife to show us that the perfect American couple is still at it like teenagers even having an eight-year-old daughter. 
They sleep and the next morning the child is gone. The chain at the door has been cut. They didn’t hear a thing. 
The criminals set rather sophisticated surveillance equipment everywhere in the house so they can control everything from their screens: when did they do that? Not during the night since they overheard them and even saw them the night before (Patrick mentions the sponge-bath, so we can imagine that he saw the doctor using a sponge on her leg). When did they set their equipment? They were released only recently, and she’s stuck in bed because she broke her leg skiing..
The child is a very smart eight-year-old who looks out the window and understands she’s right next her parents apartment, and who sees what I think is the ventilation grid and leaves it uncovered, all while her capturer is out of the room to make a couple of sandwiches. She then starts to sing to let her parents know where she is without raising suspicions... wow what a kid!
Patrick still understands, but only because he can hear what happens in Mrs Conrad’s room and he hears the child’s voice. What does he do next? The immobilized and surveilled woman found out where they are! So he takes the child and two men and goes away! Why?? What could the woman do? Not call the police or anyone else because they were controlling her. Not even calling her husband to tell him, for the same reason. Surely not sneak out to get her, because of her bad leg and because of the same reason why she couldn’t call. They were controlling her, so why the rush to run away?? That’s stupid. 
They leave the fourth man behind, who has no trouble with the plan apparently. He seems to be quite at ease with the idea that the other three run away while he’s left behind to kill the woman!
During the time it takes him to reach her room (how slowly does he walk?) she has managed to free herself from the thing that blocks her leg and also to hide somewhere so he can’t find her, until she hears him enter the room where she is (is he very noisy or is her hearing so good?) and she hits him with her crutch. She hits him once more and then reaches the room where they kept the monitors.   
She notices that he’s no more on the floor where she left him right when he has reached her: they fight and the rich woman with the broken leg is able not only to stop the ruthless criminal from strangling her, but is also able to stab him with the thing she kept in the plaster cast to scratch her leg.
Conrad takes the girl to Potter’s field, because Elisabeth’s father was buried a John Doe even if his daughter was found and she seems to have a name and a surname..
The fact that Elisabeth remembered the six numbers on her father’s grave doesn’t trouble me because after all the mind works in mysterious ways. She never had any of the mental illnesses that were attributed to her. Conrad says that she suffers from post-traumatic stress after seeing her father die in front of her, and in the last ten years she’s been afraid that they’d go after her next (maybe not remembering or not realizing that they had been arrested), and has faked it to be safely imprisoned in mental institutions. 
Basically as a little girl she followed her father when he escaped, looking at the men chasing them. She stayed where dad had told her, but moved to see what was happening. She saw some men demanding something from him, and pushing him on the railway track, keeping him there to get him to talk until he was hit by a train. She saw the men getting arrested, and then disappeared, she was not found there. She reappeared later, hidden in the boat that was carrying her father’s coffin to Potter’s Field (how she found it is again supposed to be none of our business I suppose), and the men charged with burying the coffin probably took pity on her and granted her her wish, and buried her doll with her dad.. she had touched the coffin with her fingers where the numbers were engraved and that’s how she knows the numbers.. although how could Patrick know this is another mystery.
Patrick finds his precious gem, shoots his partner as I said before, the cop arrives to shoot the other partner (alone against two of them, did she really think they were going to surrender?) but he manages to wound her before dying. Conrad fights Patrick but doesn’t kill him because he’s not a murderer, still luck helps him once more and Patrick is buried alive. 
The cop had of course asked for reinforcements before setting foot on the island, but it doesn’t seem like anyone tried to find Patrick. Who cares, I guess. 
At the end, someone drove Mrs Conrad there so we can see the family reunited. Conrad thanks the cop and then takes Elisabeth to his family, I guess to live with them. That was the right thing to do of course, had he forgotten about her this movie would have been worth zero stars, but when the wife saw her she merely smiled at her, without a single question. How could she know about her part in the whole thing? Who told her? 
It ends with Elisabeth and Jessie holding hands, which was nice, and yet not enough. I would have liked something more. 
Dr Conrad-Michael Douglas
Mrs Conrad-Famke Janssen
Thief leader Patrick-Sean Bean
Unstable girl=Elisabeth Burrows- Brittany Murphy
Cop-Jennifer Esposito

Dr Luis Sachs-Oliver Platt

Eagle eye - 2008

The chases-scenes are not bad, and it has one good scene, during a chase at the airport, when our protagonists are thrown here and there as luggage; all the rest is rather disappointing and boring. 
The story is not bad, although nothing really new it’s still interesting. Two people who never met each other, Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) are contacted by the same mysterious female voice on the phone. They receive orders that they must obey, for Jerry’s own safety and for Rachel’s son’s life. They are controlled everywhere, the voice knows everything they say or do, and gives them orders as they go. It is soon clear that they are not the only one blackmailed into obeying the orders, and is pretty clear that there is no way to escape, since whoever it is can control everything. Half-way through the movie it reveals itself as a big, intelligent, independent-thinking machine called ARIIA, actually created by the government, who following the constitution thinks that the actual government is a threat to the People and must therefore be eliminated. 
The problem though is that the characters are so stereotypical they are not interesting at all. Rachel specially, is a young single mom who threw out her husband when her child was still a baby, we don’t know why, but we know she thinks that he was the biggest mistake of her life, that he doesn’t pay alimony and that he always forgets his son’s birthday... a divorced young woman and a single man as the lead characters, I wonder how the movie will end... :-/ no surprises there of course. In movies it always seems that surviving together is the best start of any romantic relationships :-/
Jerry and Rachel try various times to say no to the voice, but they are forced to go on - although it’s pretty annoying to hear Rachel say ‘no no’ so many times, as if it wasn’t her son’s life at stake here. Well, actually it wasn’t because we see at the end that Rachel and her son were key to Ariia’s plan, so none of them was supposed to die too soon, but she didn’t know that. 
They are led into Ariia’s main chamber, where Jerry’s twin brother worked: Ethan had understood that Ariia was going rogue and had tried to stop her by putting a vocal-activated-block, so Ariia needs Jerry to get rid of it (‘cause you know, same face, same voice..)
Ariia also used other people to create her weapon. She had someone cut a very powerful explosive in crystal-form into a pretty stone that is mounted into a necklace. Someone else steals Rachel’s son’s musical instrument and puts inside it the device that will trigger the explosive. Ariia’s plan is that the child and his band will play at the Pentagon where all her targets will be reunited, and Rachel will be there wearing the necklace. 
Meanwhile, an FBI agent (Billy Bob Thornton) is chasing after them, and special agent for the Air Force Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson) is learning about Ariia and trying to find a way to stop it. 
The FBI agent understands at some point that they are controlled by someone and tells Jerry about the explosive, before sacrificing himself to give him way to escape. Jerry understands that Rachel and her son will unknowingly activate it and rushes to stop it. When he finally enters the room where all those important people are reunited, where the children are already playing their music, and he sees Rachel running towards her son, he understands he could never make it in time so tries to stop it in the only quick way he can think of. He had the Fbi agent’s gun and was wearing a guard’s uniform (after he was of course able to win a fight against a trained guard... and apparently stopped to wear his uniform even though he was in hurry...) so now he shoots in the air. Everybody stops what they are doing, and three armed men shoot Jerry down. It was a real hero scene, I liked the scene when he fired his weapon knowing what would happen to him because it was the only way, and I was sorry that he had to die, but honestly it would have made more sense if he had died, but at the end we see him receiving a medal ( so his father will finally be proud of him :-/ ) and he’s well, up and about, with only an arm in a sling. Three men shot him and he’ s fine... :-/ 
Perez and a major had managed to ‘kill’ Ariia by removing her memory pieces and hit it in the big-circular-eye-thing-head ... which was rather disappointing. Couldn’t they think of it sooner? How to stop a machine: take away the power, dismantle it, break it into pieces.. 
The ending scene was even annoying: it was supposed to be the happy ending :-/ 
Jerry shows up at Rachel’s home for her son’s birthday with a gift for him - because he remembered, what a good man - and they look at each other in ‘that’ way to let us know that a romance is beginning... how stupid. They know nothing of each other, and men had done stranger things than remembering a date in order to impress a girl.. 

Earth girls are easy - 1988

I know this movie is silly and dated, but 1988 Jeff Goldblum in this movie was really hot. The story is absurd, both men and women seem to think only of parties and sex, I never cared for the slapstick part of the movie even when I was a young girl, I never thought it was funny only messy and loud and annoying, but the Valerie character is nice, the aliens are cute and as I said Jeff was really hot, I mean Really. This is a movie for girls too, because there are scenes kind of reversed, a little bit. There are of course the two guys looking at hot girls, but in here there are scenes that show how hot the guys are, instead of the girls :-p
When I was a girl I liked this movie because I liked their story, I liked the romance, I liked Valerie, I liked Mac, and I liked the ending, I thought it was very romantic. 
Seeing it now I think more or less the same: I like the two leading characters, I find the other two aliens rather cute, and I like the romance. The musical numbers, three or four I think, are not bad, they’re actually nice, but I don’t care much about them, this particular aspects depends on the mood I guess (the I’m-a-blonde song may be funny, but it has nothing to do with the movie!). The rest isn’t interesting in the least, but that only means that I can go to the kitchen or to the bathroom without having to pause the movie :-p
I never liked the title much because it’s a love story, not a porn movie.
The actors were nice. Goldblum of course, then Jim Carrey who displayed his rubber-face already, and Geena Davis, who here is very nice, simple, endearing.
The story is simple :-p Valerie (Geena Davis) is a manicurist (they were already into the crazy-nails mania in America in 1988 apparently), engaged to doctor Ted (Charles Rocket). He doesn’t seem to be interested in her sexually anymore, and when she finds him home with another woman she throws him out. She’s heartbroken, but then something strange happens. Two aliens (the red and yellow ones :-p ) were looking at girls and lost control of their spaceship and crashed in her pool - yep, because a girl doing manicure and nails can afford her own house with private pool, wow huh? In my world, that’s even stranger than meeting aliens..
She finds herself with three very strange, very furry aliens in the house. She calls a man to drain the pool, so that they might repair their ship and go back home, but it’ll take a whole day, and Ted is about to come home to talk about what happened, and she doesn’t know what to tell him. The aliens watched a bit of tv, and they suggest telling him they’re from Finland, and everybody knows that “Finland is the capital of Norway” or at least Valerie thinks so. She’s worried because Ted is a real trained doctor, and “one look at you, he’s gonna know you’re not local”  :lol: They learn the language and the culture through tv, and we see that Mac has a love-touch that can make her fierce cat all docile and purring. Funny thing is, that seems to be the only magic trick they know, or he knows, because the others never use it, only Mac. 
So Valerie takes them to her friend’s salon where they are conveniently shaved and dressed, and they turn out to be
red alien: really cute and blonde Wiploc (Jim Carrey),
yellow alien: black handsome Zeebo (Damon Wayans) and last
blue alien: really hot, with magnetic eyes, Mac (Jeff Goldblum)
Valerie’s friend Candy, after seeing the result, suggests going out all together, and they hit the disco, where Zeebo wins a dance-battle and Wiploc shows to have a snake-like tongue. Valerie is still so upset she doesn’t even realize that when Mac asks if he should dance too, she was supposed to dance with him and not go out alone :-p Mac follows her out and shows how good he is at the piano to cheer Valerie up and they almost kiss. They go home to find Ted has come back and called the police, but when they arrive she tells them that it’s not Ted’s home and the three guys are her guests, and when they take Ted out she thinks it’s really over and she’s kind of low. Mac goes to her room and tells her that “Mac can make Valerie feel very very good”, maybe meaning with his magic-power, but of course she understands sex and at first thinks this might not be a good idea, what with him being an alien; she says that sex is out of the question, he asks “what is sex?” and I don’t know if it’s only me but I find his voice here very sexy. She says “you know, making love? a man and a woman like each other and they take their clothes off...” and Mac says “okay” *_* and after seeing him naked she changes her mind :-p They have sex, then she has a strange nightmare, then they hug in bed in the morning, when it is revealed that he has two hearts (well, all three of them have two hearts of course, it’s their species, maybe they come from Gallifrey who knows :-D ).
Wiploc and Zeebo go with the pool guy for a ride to the beach, but when they stop at a gas station the two of them scare the guy working there with a toy gun, then sort of steal the van, and drive around the wrong way making a big mess; when she learns about it, Valerie runs to try and help, but seeing that that’s out of the question she makes them arrest her too with Mac. Wiploc and Zeebo have been taken to Ted’s hospital, and Valerie and Mac hurry to get them out of there, after getting themselves out of the police car. 
They go back home with a confused Ted. An equally confused Valerie kisses him and agrees to leave for Las Vegas and get married right away. The aliens repaired their ship and prepare to leave. Valerie says goodbye to them, but when Ted sees it and understands he freaks out, even yells that she’s been contaminated. Mac uses his love-touch on them (it works at a distance too apparently) and they start kissing, but Valerie breaks free and while they’re already flying off she yells to Mac that it didn’t work, that she loves him and wants to go with him; Mac asks “I am Mr Right?” - “yes” and he takes her with them, while Candy watches them go and finds nothing else to say other than “good luck” and “call me”... 
It ends here, without a word on what will happen next. This is an 80s movie for girls, nothing makes sense and the ending least of all (how will she live there? wearing a fur-coat? opening her own salon to shave everyone?) but it's nice nonetheless, it never pretends to be more than what it is.

ITA le ragazze della terra sono facili

Bunraku - 2010

Somehow I find it difficult to give this movie a straight yes or no. It has some things going for it and yet didn’t really hit me. It was interesting visually, but lacked in heart, and the ending was wrong and stupid (so I guess I’m leaning more towards a no). I liked the comic-book style, the drawings, the characters with no name, the colours, the video-game sounds, but there are also things against it: the Alexandra character, the only one to die, for example; she’s a mystery, why they put in such a character, called in a famous actress, and not only give her very little space but made her die in such a way, and without a word spent for her. There’s also the fact that the movie is ‘designed’ to be cool, and maybe here and there they tried too hard. I’m not convinced that they chose all the right actors for the roles, but I liked the presence of a narrator. The fight scenes are stylish and well danced, but specially the fist-fights are visibly fake. I know they always are, but they’re supposed to ‘look’ real. 
The number of enemies made me think “oh the hundred fools” but it wasn’t a scene as cool as in Kill Bill. Here and there there were scenes that had videogames-sounds and even looked like videogames. 
Throughout the movie the narrator explains, more or less, always in a sort of cryptic way, who you're going to meet or what is going to happen. The characters were very stereotyped.
It starts describing how men invented more and more ways of killing each other until they arrived on the verge of destruction, so all firearms were banned, but “the gun gave way to the sword” again and men kept killing each other. This town is run by a murderer and his gang. The boss is called Nicola the woodcutter (Ron Perlman) and his men wear red suits. One day a train brings to town not one but two silent strangers: the Drifter (Josh Hartnett) and Yoshi, a Japanese man who wants to find a medallion that was stolen from his family. Now Nicola wears it. At first they fight each other and then they become allies. The Bartender (Woody Harrelson) helps them, but he doesn’t fight anymore. He did once and was almost killed: he says that Nicola took pity on him, but it seems to me that he was spared because Nicola liked his woman Alexandra who became Nicola’s favourite. 
Together they will take down all the red suits and Nicola’s nine warrior before defeating him too, and after that they will both go their separate ways, while the bartender will stay in town with Yoshi’s cousin Momoko, to open a bar/restaurant together. 
The best character was Killer n.2 (Kevin McKidd), very stylish and cool for real, who really seemed part of that world. I specially liked his first scene, when he defeats the gang who wants to dethrone Nicola and his men, and gives their leader a chance telling him that if he comes back to work for Nicola “all will be forgotten, even the buffoon part” with a nice little bow, rather cool, because the guy had called him a buffoon earlier. That was my favourite part. 
For the final battle Nicola shaves his face and finally we can see him more clearly, although I didn’t really like that sort of Obelix-look. Still, his scene was good. 
Hartnett seemed a bit out of place, trying too hard to be what he’s not. 
The final battles were more annoying than cool, because Killer n. 2 seems to overpower Yoshi while Nicola hits the drifter with an axe to the chest. They both seems defeated and yet they get up and kill them with a single move. I know they’re the heroes and blah blah blah, but you know, fantasy has rules too, comedy is a serious business, stories should have sense and meaning, and all that kind of things. Every story should make sense, even the most fantastic of them. 
The drifter seemed even unable to get up on his feet while Nicola was perfectly healthy without a single scratch, and yet at the end the drifter kills him and walks out... once again another movie with undefeatable enemies that at the end are defeated in the wrong way. They always do that, it’s really annoying: impossible obstacles overcome by sheer luck, or impossible enemies defeated in absurd ways simply because the heroes must win. 
Basically, the man with the limp manages to live, Momoko is saved, Yoshi and the drifter are again as healthy as ever although they were almost dead, and Alexandra died in the fire they caused when she came back to save Momoko and stopped where she was when she saw the bartender she loved and the burning roof fell on her, and she died while the bartender took Momoko out to safety and didn’t spend a single word for her. 

So yes, I like some things about it, the visual, the colours, the idea, the style, but there was no soul.  Watched it once, and that’s enough. 

The lady says no - 1951

My goodness, this was a boring load of stupid and crappy nonsense. Never watching that again, it had nothing going for it, really nothing. Every scene brings it lower and lower, until the stupid obvious ending. 
It’s about a girl, Dorinda Hatch (Joan Caulfield), who grew up with her aunt Alice, seeing her sad and tormented because of her husband Matt who came and went as he pleased, even for months or for years apparently. With her head full of that she now writes a book called The lady says no, where she states that women are better off without men. It’s not a feminist book, and it’s definitely not a feminist movie. She writes that no man is worth any pain or torment, never talking about love, as if it didn’t really existed. Of course as she meets photographer William Shelby (David Niven) she falls for him immediately, although she has a hard time coming to terms with what she feels - still she runs after him in an embarrassing way, I’d even say she makes a fool of herself running after a man that she barely knows.
How the movie goes about it? He comes in all conceited, making her angry by stating that the ideas in the book can’t be hers. She refuses to pose for his story about her, making a ridiculous face for his camera. At a lecture, she’s asked by a woman what did she mean when she wrote that no woman should let a man get away with whistling at her, and what could said woman do about it, and Dorinda’s reply is that she would make him so angry at her that he’d regret having whistled at her... really? you walk on the streets, a stranger whistles at you and you make him furious at you? And she thought that would be a good thing?? She was looking for trouble, that’s not good advice for girls.
On his part, smug Shelby says that “women love to be whistled at”, which is very annoying! 
Next thing, he wants to publish her ridiculous picture on the cover of a national magazine, so she goes to him asking for it to be destroyed. He blackmails her into kissing him in exchange for the picture! She’s forced to accept, and then he treats her badly. :-/ She asks him to try again and then she slugs him! Both are things not to do. 
She goes home to sleep, ‘reads’ his book (mostly pictures) and dreams of him being surrounded by slave girls while she captures him and dances around him in a tiny costume. She wakes up and forces her uncle to take her to where she knows he’ll be; the uncle leaves her there, she has a strong drink, quarrels with Midge for Shelby’s attention, hits on Goldie’s husband Potsie to prove to herself she can be a femme-fatal, then tries to pay Midge to leave Shelby to her, convincing her with an exchange of dresses. She dances with him and then she intentionally causes a big fight that involves most men in there :-/ 
He drives her home and they talk: she says she has no feelings for him, he makes a boring speech of what should be 1952-passionate-talking, although I’ve heard much better speeches in other 50s or 40s movies. He leaves again, she enters the house but after a few seconds she runs out to her car and chases him, only to find that he’s gone. She finds Midge to ask about Sbelby, and when she learns that with her words and her book she caused a break-up between Goldie and Potsie she makes it her mission to bring them together again. To do so she causes a lot of trouble but then she has them face to face, she tells Goldie to ignore her “stupid book”, “full of lies and silly nonsense”, and they get back together. 
She disappears without another word and goes home to pack her bags, angry at her uncle and aunt, saying she’s tired of being their punching balls, that she want to go away to be alone. 
What happens now? The uncle says ‘it’s all my fault’ and the aunt says “no, don’t worry about me” !!!
and they say I love you and hug!!
I mean, what??? :-//
Dorinda goes away to find herself; on the road she meets Shelby who stops her car. She throws away her book, they kiss and she says she’ll write a new book called “27 ways to say yes” ... 
My goodness I feel sick. This movie gets worse with every scene! I'll even say that Niven in this movie is about as charming as a fancy ashtray. 

ITA innamorati dispettosi

Creed - 2015

I liked it, it was well done, well written, a good movie. It was moving more than once, I love that they didn’t forget the story of the previous film, that the character is really the same; he’s an older Rocky, but it’s still him, and remembers all that happened, all the people he knew. There are a lot of moving scenes, but it’s also funny sometimes, like the scene when Donny is doing push-ups and Rocky tells him that “we used to do it one hand, I don’t wanna say anything but..” and Donny starts doing it one-hand. The scene when Donny’s ma watched his match at home supporting him was both touching and funny, and the relationship between Rocky and Donny grew very nicely, and they were really fighting together. Only thing is, when they climb the famous steps in Philadelphia and Rocky is tired, I understand what they meant but I also thought that Donny was pushing him too much.  
It starts with a boy in 1998; he’s in a reformatory when a woman (Mrs Creed-Phylicia Rashad) comes telling him that his father was her husband, and that she’d like him to go live with her. In 2015 he still lives with her, has a good job in Los Angeles but secretly goes to Mexico to fight. He works in a ‘financial group’ and gets promoted, but he quits instead. He watches the Apollo vs Rocky match on youtube. He lives in a very beautiful house, and his mother (she took him in and is now his mother, although she wasn’t his birth mother but was born when Apollo cheated on his wife) tells him that she doesn’t want him to fight. She doesn’t want to go through all that again.
Creed goes to Apollo’s old gym but they refused to take him in. He moves to Philadelphia looking for Rocky (Sylvester Stallone). 
Rocky fills remorse for Apollo’s death, thinks that if he had stopped the match Apollo would still be alive. He refuses to train Adonis at first but the guy is insistent so Rocky starts giving him advice. Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) keeps showing up, follows his advices, trains by himself at the gym and finally Rocky accepts and starts training him. The people there are surprised, he never accepted training anyone before. 
Rocky has Adonis doing all the exercises his way, like jumping the rope (of course, understandable), and running a lot and trying to catch chickens.. 
Adonis meets a girl, Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and they start a relationship. 
Adonis calls Rocky his uncle and goes to live with him. Rocky makes regular visits to the cemetery to talk to Paulie and Adriana. He has a son called Robert who lives in Vancouver. He takes Adonis to another gym because he’s about to fight against Leo of the other gym, Pete’s son. Rocky can’t train him all alone, so he needs more trainers to help him. 
Pete finds out that Adonis is Creed’s son after making phone calls to LA, and Rocky asks him to keep the secret as a personal favour. The match Donny vs Leo is won by Donny. 
Bianca is upset when she reads on the internet that Adonis is Creed’s son and he never told her. It’s all over the news, that he’s the result of Creed’s adultery, and poor Mrs Creed has to stand all that. 
English manager of boxer Ricky Conlan wants a match between Ricky and Donny, and Donny accepts because Rocky is on his side, but then while they are training together Rocky falls down, throws up, and is taken to a hospital. They tell Rocky that he has cancer and has to undergo chemotherapy, and has to start immediately. Rocky says that his wife did the chemotherapy but she died anyway and refuses the therapy. He doesn’t want Donny to know about it but he finds it out and is very angry when he learns that he doesn’t want the therapy. Donny goes to the club where Bianca is scheduled to perform and he starts a fight.. when Rocky goes to him Donny yells at him to go away, that he had his father killed... then Donny apologizes to Bianca who doesn’t accept the apology of course because someone can’t just go around starting fights, risking her career, and then make it right with a simple apology;  Donny explains to her the Rocky thing, that he had just discovered that he has cancer.. she’s very sorry, but she doesn’t let him in. He yells things like ‘I’m sorry, I trusted you, I need you, don’t push me away’ ...  then Donny is able to convince Rocky to accept the treatment, and they sort of do it together: Donny goes with him to the hospital and trains there while Rocky watches him. Rocky keeps training him and Donny takes care of him. 
Donny has serious anger issues. This was what I didn't like about him, but that's at a personal level: as a character I guess it was reasonable enough that he was like that, I suppose. Anyway the heart of the movie was not the relationship with Bianca, that only helped understand the character outside the boxing world, no the real heart of the movie is the growing relationship between Adonis and Rocky. Adonis has finally found the father figure that he was missing, and they love each other, and they help each other, and it's all very touching and nice.
Before the match, Rocky calls Bianca and she comes for Donny. His ma sends him new pants, like Creed’s pants but with both the names Creed and Johnson written on.
It’s time, the match with Conlan. Everybody’s watching, Donny is almost k.o., there’s a big speech from Rocky, things like you have to win because you’re a Creed and I love you, and Donny keeps going, with the Rocky music ... it’s not a k.o. after all, and Conlan wins at the points, but Creed surprised everyone, and it’s a sort of win for him too. For both Rocky and Donny. A good movie.

ITA Creed-nato per combattere

Where the heart is - 1990

I liked it so much when I was a young girl. Watching it again now I can recall those feelings, but I also see all the absurdity with adult eyes. How it was magical back then! when I didn’t ask myself how could they manage all that without money, when I didn’t think it was odd that they only met good people, when every stroke of luck was simply nice and not absurd... back then I concentrated on the beautiful paintings, on the lovely and warm atmosphere, on how nice it was that they all loved each other...
The story: Stewart McBain (Dabney Coleman) is a rich man with a beautiful wife and three children who have no intention of leaving their comfortable home. He makes a living blowing up old buildings in order to build new ones. The movie starts with him at work, being stopped by some protesters who win a petition to save a place called The Dutch House. If the house stands, Stewart can’t move on with the project and is in a crisis. Tired and worried, he doesn’t approve of his youngest daughter Daphne (Uma Thurman) keeping the music loud all day, of his son Jimmy (David Hewlett) spending his time playing with his toys (actually computers, but Stewart doesn’t approve of those either), or of his other daughter Chloe’s (Suzy Amis) art which consists in painting her own body and her sister’s in bodypaint, so one night instead of driving home he leaves them at the Dutch House telling them that they’ll have to manage on their own. Still he gives them 750$ each to start. Daphne is angry, yells at her parents “you can’t just spoil us and stop spoiling us when it suits you!”. She even goes back to her parents’ house to make a big scene, jumping on the car and yelling... but Stewart forbids his wife Jean (Joanna Cassidy) from helping them, because they must make it on their own.
They try to rent the rooms but of course nobody wants to pay to stay in that place. Chloe accepts an offer from an insurance company to make a calendar (reluctantly though because she didn’t want to sell her art, which is sooo arrogant and stupid), so she uses the money to buy some paint. They all find a friend who they can convince to take a room in the Dutch house, but Chloe’s friend Lionel (Crispin Glover) won’t have the money until he completes his fashion collection, and Daphne brings home a homeless guy (Christopher Plummer) in exchange for magic lessons. Jimmy’s friend Tom (Dylan Walsh) is the only one who can pay his rent. 
Luckily Sheryl comes along (Sheila Kelley), a girl who can pay and is willing to do so because she believes in the spirit world and thinks there’s good energy in that house...
Stewart tries to keep his company afloat putting all he has into it, but when the market goes down he loses everything. Jean goes to her children crying in shock, they lost all the money and both their houses. They start looking for Stewart and finally it’s Sheila who finds him in the company of a homeless man and brings him home. Chloe continues her paintings, and Jimmy shows his dad the videogame on demolition that he created , but not all is yet well. They are evicted from the Dutch House and can’t find a job (well, they go in once asking for one, they’re told no and they go away... ) , but when they seem to be at their lowest, without money and without a home - and yet still with a Porsche to drive around - a big storm gives Jimmy an idea: the house is not safe, what if the storm where to bring it down?? So they help things along, Stewart blows it down so well it appears as if the storm did it, so now they’re ok again; without that house his problems are finished, and they all get back what they lost, even Jean’s house in the country. At the end the family is all together, Chloe finishes her calendar, Lionel has a big success with his fashion show and tells Chloe that he’s crazy about her, that he only pretended to be gay to be taken seriously in the fashion world, Tom is finally in love with the right sister: Daphne, and now all’s well that ends well...
Watching it now I can’t help thinking how old all that computer-talking sounds. The paint that Chloe bought would never last for all that: we know for sure that she painted seven walls - I don’t know if the one with the purple window was ever made into a month-picture or not, but still it has been painted, plus all the body paint and all the accessories needed, some wings and a bow and arrow may be little things but they don’t come out of thin air, they must have been bought somewhere...
They don’t start penniless: they have 2250$ and a roof over their heads, which honestly is more than many people have nowadays, but they were simply too spoiled to seriously consider finding a job - I mean, Jimmy finds one once, but as soon as someone steals his bike he quits....
When they all go looking for jobs later in the movie, Stewart wants to blow up buildings, Daphne wants to be a magician’s assistant... I mean, do they want a job or not??? Come on!
A silly scene that I didn’t like even then: the first morning in the house they see their father outside and decide to act all happy, and the two sisters start dancing around while Jimmy acts like a monkey.... this scene was always too silly, no matter how young I was I never thought that the answer to ‘what would you do to make someone think that you’re enjoying yourself’ was to act like a monkey..
Having said all that: I still think that the calendar was beautiful, the body-paintings were wonderful, and I like the idea of this house where the walls were works of art, and the country house was beautiful, and I love the scenes when the characters speak or walk still wearing their body paint on; I like the young Uma Thurman more than I liked her spoiled character, but Daphne redeemed herself at the end; I liked a lot Crispin Glover, and I think that Glover and Daleman are the only ones in this movie who actually show a range of emotions on their faces. Glover here reminds me, in their own very different ways, of Tony Perkins.

Misery - 1990

It is still a great movie. The ending is not really a happy ending for me because my favourite character died; I loved the sheriff and it was the saddest moment for me when she killed him :’(
The story:
Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a very famous writer, he wrote a series of books based on the character of Misery, but is fed up with her and intends to kill her in his next book. He tells his publisher (Lauren Bacall) that he stopped being a writer when he started writing Misery... which is rather annoying considering that Misery gave him money and fame. There is nothing shameful in writing romantic novels, and besides nothing stopped him from writing something else between one Misery book and the next one! 
He already wrote Misery’s death, and the book is about to come out soon. Now he wants to write more ‘serious’ books, and as always he goes to his secluded place in Colorado (always the same hotel). 
Finished the new book, he starts driving back, apparently undisturbed by all the snow around and in front of him! No surprise he goes off the road in what might be a fatal accident, but a car behind him stops. Annie (Kathy Bates) is a strong nurse; she takes him out of the car and drives him to her house. She reveals to him that she’s his number one fan, and she was following him knowing his routine very well. Paul’s editor calls the sheriff (Richard Farnsworth), worried because she didn’t hear from him, but there’s so much snow around that Paul’s car is totally hidden, and he has no way of finding him.
Annie takes care of Paul, tells him how much she loves Misery, and as always is the first to buy his new book as soon as it’s available in stores. As a thank you for helping him, he also lets her read his new book, still in his bag. 
Annie gets very, very upset when she reads that Misery dies giving birth and is buried; she becomes furious with him, but then calms down, reaching the decision that he simply has to bring Misery back. She burns the new manuscripts in front of him, even has him light the fire, because she says it’s too filthy, and then she buys a typewriter and some paper so he can write a new book. She’s a good reader too, she won’t accept anything done the wrong way, Misery was dead and buried in the last book so he must move on from there. Right! :-p
He’s been badly hurt in the accident, but Annie finds excuses to keep him in the house instead of bringing him to a hospital. After reading the new book though she comes clean and tells him that nobody knows where he is, and locks him into the room with the bed and the typewriter. Time passes, he finds a way that Annie agrees with, and she reads the story as he writes it. 
I don’t know if Annie was more scary when she was furious or when she was all sweet, saying how much she loves the new Misery book, how well he writes, how big a fan she is...
The snow is slowly melting, and the sheriff finds Paul’s car and realizes that someone helped him out of the car. 
Realizing that she’s dangerous, he secretly saves up his painkillers, and then he puts them in her wine when they’re supposed to celebrate.. I think that he completed his book, but I’m not sure. Anyway, she spills the wine and his plan fails. Paul looks around the house when she’s out shopping, using the wheelchair where she sits him every morning so he can write at the table, and finds a scrapbook, discovering that she was once involved in the deaths of at least two babies in the hospital where she worked, but there were no proof against her. 
Annie understands that he’s been moving around the house and gets angry; she drugs him, ties him up to the bed, and then she breaks both his legs!  Aaaargh. 
The sheriff doesn’t forget about it; he finds out that Annie used words from the Misery books at her trial, that she always bought Paul’s books, and that lately she also bought a lot of paper, so he goes to her house to take a look. Of course she lies to him, she always has a good answer for everything, and the sheriff is about to go away because he has no reasons to stay in her house any longer, when he hears Paul shouting. The sheriff finds him in the basement, but then Annie shoots him in the back with a rifle! Noo :’(
She tells Paul that the next two bullets are for the two of them, and he tries to buy some more time agreeing with her. He tells her that she’s right, that he loves her too, but that they need to finish the book first in order to give Misery back to the world. Back in his room, he finishes the book and then asks her for a cigarette and a glass of champagne, and since she knows that to be his usual ritual she agrees, she’s even touched when he says they’ll need two glasses this time.
When she comes back with the matches, he sets the book on fire, with some fuel that he had hidden in his pants, and Annie throws herself on the book to save it and Paul hits her with the typewriter. 
She’s of course not dead yet: they fight furiously for a while, until finally he manages to kill her. 
We don’t know exactly what happens next, how he comes back to the world, but of course we can imagine that someone would at least come looking for the sheriff, and he had been asking around about Annie, so... he makes it somehow. We see him with his publisher: he wrote a new book about his dreadful experience with Annie, and still sees her face around sometimes..
ITA Misery non deve morire