Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
DIRECTOR: Michel Gondry
CAST: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood
REVIEW:
Taking its quirky title from a poem by Alexander Pope, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a product of offbeat French music video and movie director Michel Gondry and the twisted mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is stimulating and refreshing proof that a movie’s existence within the “romantic comedy” genre—sort of—does not inherently doom it to cookie-cutter formula. There’s nothing conventional or formulaic about this charmingly eccentric, visually inventive movie, which uses a quirky and original premise to explore themes of love, loss, memory, and the ideas that “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, and that we need all of our memories, both happy and painful, to make us who we are.
Continue readingTitanic (1997)
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart, David Warner, Bill Paxton, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Danny Nucci, Jonathan Hyde, Suzy Amis, Eric Braeden, Jenette Goldstein, Ioan Gruffudd
REVIEW:
With sci-fi thrillers like The Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Abyss, and the action-comedy True Lies under his belt, James Cameron turned his sights in a totally different direction for his next project….a romance set onboard the notorious ill-fated luxury ship the RMS Titanic. Nearly anyone knows the basics of the story of the 1912 disaster, with more than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus passengers, including many rich and famous of the day, perishing at sea when the “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, but none among the many, many films to deal with Titanic had the means to bring the massive ship and its end to the screen with such visual splendor. To draw crowds, Cameron centered his script around a star struck love story, cast with primed-to-explode heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and soon-to-be Oscar nominee Kate Winslet. Titanic clearly struck a chord with audiences, standing for twelve years as the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassed only by Cameron’s next film, 2009’s Avatar. Unfortunately, it’s also overrated, and the story doesn’t equal the spectacular visuals surrounding it. Continue reading
Hamlet (1996)
DIRECTOR: Kenneth Branagh
CAST:
Kenneth Branagh, Sir Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Nicholas Farrell, Michael Maloney, Richard Briers, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Brian Blessed, Jack Lemmon, Rosemary Harris, Rufus Sewell, Timothy Spall, Reece Dinsdale, Gerard Depardieu, Sir John Gielgud, Judi Dench, Sir Richard Attenborough
REVIEW:
WARNING: This review mentions specific details of the plot
In the world of Shakespearean film, few figures loom larger than Kenneth Branagh. William Shakespeare is something of an obsession for Branagh, who directed Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, co-starred in Othello, and here wears three hats as writer, director, and star of this lavish, star-studded adaptation of Hamlet, the only version to include every single line from the play intact and as such running approximately four hours. Continue reading