Movies
A pretty tepid and soulless political thriller. Take a couple of big Hollywood names, throw in some political intrigues, a looming assassination and a director known for delivering sluggish Hollywood bombast, and you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from The Interpreter. Kidman is an interpreter with a somewhat sketchy past working for the UN. When one night she inadvertently overhears a conversation not meant for her ears, she has to report it, knowing fully well that by doing so she might jeopardize her own future. With only three days to thwart an assassination attempt and with Kidman unable to disclose everything she knows in order to protect the people she loves, the police have their work cut out for them. Kidman's performance is somewhat impassionate, Penn is a total miscast. The plot is predictable and by the numbers, the cinematography feels dull and with a runtime crossing the 120-minute mark the film has trouble keeping the tension going. This was a poorly executed film, I'd expected a bit more going in.Read all
A bland thriller that tries to up the ante during the last hour, but fails completely as a semi-action flick. The film is overly long, Pollack's direction is uninspired and the acting is very mediocre. The middle part is okay I guess, but after 150+ minutes that's not at all enough to leave me with a contented feeling.
Cross-dressing comedies really aren't my favorite niche. It's not the cross-dressing itself that bugs me, rather the tired and predictable comedy that comes with it. Mix it with a basic romance and apparently you have one of the greatest films of all time. Not sure how and where Tootsie found its critical acclaim, but it's time for a revision. Dustin Hoffman plays a talented but overly demanding actor who can't get a decent part anymore. Desperate as he is, he dresses up as a woman and lands a job in no time. He falls in love with the character he created, but when he starts making friends the situation becomes quite complicated. There's some (rather obvious) subtext on how women are often treated as second rate citizens (both on the job and privately), but in the end Tootsie is little more than a basic romantic comedy. The film looks pretty bland, performances are unremarkable and the plot is very predictable, no idea why some people got so excited over this film.Read all
Expectations were pretty low going in, even then I came out incredibly disappointed. The performances are weak (Streep's accent is atrocious), the romance is wooden, the drama uneventful and the whole is just incredibly sappy. Sitting through nearly three hours of that, without any care for any of the characters, was hell.