The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005)

This movie was advertised as a comedy, which it certainly wasn't. It was much more of a lighthearted drama. That small issue taken care of, I very much liked this movie. Mosly because it didn't AT ALL give it the standard Hollywood treatment of "large kid" movies. You want to know what life in a large family is like? Don't ever, ever watch Cheaper By the Dozen 2, or Yours Mine and Ours. Watch this. The mom was carefully attentive to all their children, and nobody started screaming when someone threw up on the floor or started throwing paint around. Actually, come to think of it, NO ONE threw up on the floor or started throwing paint around. Shocking as it may be, that doesn't happen regularly in a large family's home.

With that soapbox out of the way, I really did like this movie. This woman was an incredible mother and a faithful wife, even in a situation where most heroines of today's movies would have taken the children and left. The scene where she talks with her sixteen-year-old daughter is fascinating, as it flies in the face of many of today's ideas - that a woman's life is wasted if she stays at home taking care of children.

I'm not sure who else would enjoy this, though. I'm trying to think who I could recommend it to and can't actually think of anyone. It's fairly slow and laidback and casual in the way it presents its material. I thoroughly enjoyed it but I'm not sure anyone else would. 4 stars.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Let me start off this review by saying I'm a huge-ish fan of Tim Burton's. His lighter movies have a fantastic touch to them ("fantastic" is clearly not used here to mean "very cool") and his darker movies have a wonderful dark beauty to them. His movies also handles morbid humor really well... straddling the line perfectly between "Oh, gosh, that was hilarious" and "Oh, gosh, that was disgusting." I also loved Corpse Bride, which, of course, this was compared to the most. But on to my actual evaluation of this particular movie.

Corpse Bride had a lovelier story and seemed fuller in its telling of it. This was an amusing story, but there wasn't enough of it to fill a seventy-minute movie. So they just inserted lots of exposition in singing. Let me make this clear - if you're one of those people who is bugged by characters randomly bursting into song... you will NOT like this movie. I think there was more singing than there was dialogue. Didn't other me all that much, except that I kept expecting something to happen and then it never did. Maybe if I hadn't been expecting something plot-heavy I would have had a completely different take on it. There were a few laugh-out-loud moments (I laughed hardest when the child opened up his Christmas present to find a shrunken head inside) that definitely made it worth watching, but I think I would have been more interested if they had just cut all the songs and presented it as a 15-20 minute short. 3.5 stars.

*batteries not included (1987)

I was somewhere in the middle on this film, I think leaning more toward a 2.5 than a 3. While it had some moments that made me smile, they were all "guilty pleasure" smiles. Like, "I know this is ridiculous and silly but I can't help being slightly charmed by this." However, the movie as a whole felt disjointed. There were too many stories going on without any actual complete resolutions on any of them. The street thug who turned out to be not so bad, for example. His story ends very abruptly, and this movie was too overtly sentimental to get away with NOT finishing his story. Was it a more serious drama, it could have left him hanging, but not in this movie. So I was amused in moments but largely unimpressed by this film, although I would imagine younger audiences might like it. They're not likely to think, "Oh, this is disjointed." The youngest one I watched it with was thirteen, and she seemed to enjoy it. 2.5 stars.

High Fidelity (2000)

I'm a big fan of Nick Hornby's writing, and had already read the High Fidelity book. I was unsure as to how the movie would be - would it keep the same rambling, blog-like conversations about music? Would it transfer as a story from Britan to America? Would it try to Hollywoodize the whole thing instead of keeping it the charming meandering story it was? The answers, by the way, are yes, yes, and no. This was the PERFECT movie adaptation - a great adaptation of a great book. What struck me is that almost every single character was instantly the way I'd imagined them. Those actors just NAILED their character. (The one exception for me was Ian.) This is not your typical romantic comedy. It's slow, it's laidback, it's meandering, it's philosophical, and it's completely charming. There aren't many more good things I can say about this movie. I can't figure out ways to put them all into words. Great stuff. 4.5 stars.

Crash (2004)

What a fascinating movie. This movie took all these different stories about racism and told them in a fresh way, avoiding most of the cliches. That's pretty impressive. I'm not sure I'd call it the best picture of 2005, but it was certainly well done. My main argument with it, though, was that many of the stories felt incomplete. The Sandra Bullock story, for example, left me wanting more of it to be told, as did the story of the Asian couple. When compared to my favorite movie, Love Actually, which also consisted of several intertwining stories, that one did a much better job of telling the stories satisfactorily. Although many of the stories in Crash were satisfactory, there were too many that left me going, "Wait- what? What about them?" 4 stars.

Beyond the Sea (2004)

This wasn't hugely high on my list of "movies to see," but within about ten minutes of putting it on I realized it was going to be a movie I really, really enjoyed. It's difficult to find a word that accurately describes the feel of this movie, but I think the closest is "fanciful." Even when looking at the difficulties in this man's life - his rocky marriage, his disillusionment, his unusual family relationships - there's still something magical and free that jumped out at me every time he took the stage. The sequence early on in the movie where Bobby decides to go to New York to try and make it big is one of the loveliest moments I've seen in a movie in a long time. Something about it just struck home for me... I definitely got chills.

I must also say Kevin Spacey was absolutely superb in this role. Sometimes when actors take on roles as singers they don't come across as at all natural. That was not the case here.

This is definitely an artist's movie, or a movie for people who like biographies. 4 stars.

Doogal (2006)

The trailers had me thinking this was a worthless movie. However, a friend recommended it, and I dutifully went out to rent it. After the first fifteen minutes I left the room, instructing my family to let me know if it got better. Apparently it didn't. I tried to finish it again later, but still couldn't find anything to recommend it to me. I love animated movies and I love spoofs, so obviously this can't be all me "not getting it". There appears to be no humor and very little actual story. The dialogue is amazingly stilted, not to mention cliched ("Don't worry, Florence. I'll get you out of there. I promise." "I believe in you, Doogal. You're my best friend." That's the kind of nonsense we get in here). 1 star.