Daisies

1966 Czech feminist film

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Two girls (Marie I and Marie II) decide that the world is bad. As a result, they decide to be bad, finding various ways to misbehave by conning perverse butterfly collectors, playing with the food, playing with their food more, breaking stuff, drowning, and being general nuisances. Honestly, you're going to be frustrated if you like movies that have plots and characters who aren't named the exact same thing.

Yet another Eastern European movie, Czech even. At times, you could accuse this of looking like a film school project that the professor didn't even like very much. It's an artsy-fartsy dadaistic clash of visual trickery and tomfoolery. You've got rapid and maddening color changes, weird sound effects (like creaking door sounds when the gals move their limbs or typewriter noises when there's nary a typewriter), lots of scenes involving the slicing and dicing of phallic symbols, the best scissor fight you're likely to see, and lots of scenes that seem to go on forever. But it does all add up to something, again with sort of an obvious film schoolish theme, and it is visually arresting and completely interesting considering the time and place it was made. It didn't last long, by the way. Czechoslovakia banned, so nobody would get to see the fantastic scene where the Maries take after Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel (a movie that should have been banned in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else; and I'm not even pro-censorship!) and mimic trains while in blackface. There's some Svankmajer-esque animation with the quicky-shots of things like locks, butterflies, word shavings, and colors. This is not exactly a movie that stands the test of time, and the stream-of-conscious delivery and too-lengthy scenes will annoy most people, but I'm nevertheless happy I watched it.

I Love You Phillip Morris

2009 gay romantic comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 16/20)

Plot: Stephen Russell,, an on-the-surface happily married police officer , is involved in a car crash. Immediately afterward, he turns gay, proving once and for all (since this is a true story) that people aren't born gay and that the conservatives have been correct all along. He also turns to a life of white-collar crime, conning his way into very comfortable life style with his boyfriend, Jimmy. Until he's arrested. But life really begins for Stephen in prison when he meets the Phillip Morris in the title, a shy gay man who he eventually gets to bunk with. And yes, "bunk" is a euphemism there. Once they're released, Stephen tries to create a happy life for Phillip and him the only way he knows how--illegally.

I could have used a few different posters for I Love You Phillip Morris, but they were all, for whatever reason, pretty gay. This is a good comedy, and it's great for a romantic comedy, aided by two likable leads. Jim Carrey gets some good material to work, and although that side of him that people have been sick of for ten years occasionally rears its ugly head, his flamboyance never really goes over the top and the tender moments are believable. Ewan McGregor's just as good as Phillip. You really feel his vulnerability, and for whatever reason (probably because he's English), he wears gay pretty well. It's a fabulous performance, and I'm not just using the word fabulous because this is a movie about homosexuals. It's shocking to me that he's in a movie where he engages in gay sex and doesn't show his penis on screen though. I believed the two as a couple for most of this and thought they had good chemistry, and the make-out scenes were hot. This feels like too much, too exaggerated to have actually happened, and I wonder how much they stretched things for Hollywood. Comparisons to Catch Me if You Can are probably obvious, but this one is a lot livelier and has this radiance that feels refreshing. It's not all bright, however, as it approaches subject matter nearly taboo for comedy. There's what I thought was a twist that I saw coming, but it was really well done and led to one of the most touching scenes Jim Carrey will ever be involved in. It's all a hell of a lot funnier than Brokeback Mountain though.

Hard Candy

2005 drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: 14-year-old Juno MacGuff, prior to getting knocked up by that menace-to-society Jesse Eisenberg, chats online with a 32-year-old photographer named Jeff for three weeks before suggesting they meet in a coffeehouse. They go back to his bitchin' pad for some screwdrivers, one which she spikes. Jeff passes out, waking up later to find out that he's been tied to a chair with a bag on his head. It's not what he had in mind. Juno turns out to be neither naive or innocent as she proceeds to torture Jeff mentally and ransack his apartment in an effort to expose him as the pedophile she thinks he is.

This is the second Cory recommendation I've watched this month that has both Patrick Wilson and a pedophile being mistreated. I think this means that Patrick Wilson is Cory's new favorite actor, but I'm not sure.

Probably the less you know about Hard Candy, the better chance you'll end up enjoying it if this sort of psychological thriller is your bag. This will likely have spoilers. I went in knowing nothing, and although I wasn't caught completely off guard when it transforms into a very dark tale of revenge, there were still lots and lots of surprises. When a movie's really got only two performers, their story is only going to work if both of them are good. With Hard Candy, that's the case for the most part, although both are kind of a mixed bag thanks to a sloppy script. Ellen Page plays naive and vulnerable and innocently flirtatious really well, and I was really impressed with the job she did during the first twenty minutes of the movie. When she turns into a complete psychopath, I thought her character was a bit too snarky and sneering. She ended up really annoying. Cory's new favorite actor was excellent in a role that must have been physically and mentally exhausting. He's good as both sneaky predator and victim. The problems I had with the characters wasn't with the acting; it was that I didn't really feel like I could root for either of them. You can't root for a pedophile in a movie no matter how many times he cries out, "I'm not a pedophile." And Page's character was, as I said, a bratty psychopath. The dialogue became less and less realistic as the story went along, and I didn't end up believing either character. A lot of the problem was the script. "C'mon, Jeff...shoot me. C'mon, Jeff...shoot me." Oh, boy. And the "I'm every little girl..." line was really heavyhanded. This is also one of these modern stories that tries to shock and then shock you again with more twists than a story this size can possibly contain. The best example of how these twists do nothing more than mess up the story is when a third character, Sandra Oh as a neighbor, pops up and Ellen Page's character suddenly turns into a complete moron. The tortuous complications in Hard Candy end up seeming more like distractions than anything else. I didn't care much for the style of this movie either. The scene with the characters driving from coffee place to Jeff's home actually made me laugh. There are alternating shots of Jeff and Juno exchanging this glances that lasts for at least fifteen minutes. No exaggeration. And the "stylish" close-up of Juno's lips saying "Juicy" was a little too much. Hard Candy is a movie that definitely took some chances, and the two leads gave some brave, demanding, and mostly-good performances. Unfortunately, any messages writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade might have wanted to deliver seem either conflicting or drowning in the entanglements of the psychological thrills, and I didn't end up liking it very much. I will say this--the lengthy operation scene at the heart of this film was really intense.