Beautiful Girls: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - With my own rapidly approaching 30th birthday in a few months’ time, I can’t help but wonder how the hell I got to be this age. I still can’t get over the fact that I’m an adult and I can do things like eat dessert before dinner, or drive down across the border just because I want to. I’m also intimidated by all the notions that are supposed to be “adult” – having a family, keeping a budget, being responsible, owning a car and a house, keeping down a full time job, coordinating family events…now, I’ve got most of those things down (except for the house…damned Vancouver) and it really doesn’t seem like a big deal in my day to day life. But as a concept, when I step back and think about it as opposed to what my life was like before I moved out from home, it’s huge and daunting.

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Revolutionary Road: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty, seems to have a fascination with discontented suburbia. This time he adapts the book Revolutionary Road, a story about a husband and wife with grand ambitions that fall apart from settling down into the average life. It reunites Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in a very unromantic reunion after becoming very successful actors post-Titanic. Perhaps the reason they survived it because of their bold choices as actors, such as this one, to strip down the tragic lost love image that their last movie together provided, instead replacing it with a deteriorating passion. DiCaprio had to shed away his pretty boy image in order to make his career a much more solid one, and now he is far less glamourous. The two of them really are a couple of the finest actors of their generation and they shed their celebrity and become a relatively normal couple.

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Little Women: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - As a young teenage boy, I remember seeing television ads around Christmas for Little Women coming to VHS, and I have a vague recollection of my brothers and I mocking the movie as stupid and girlish, even if we had never seen it. Imagine our dismay when our eldest sister received the VHS as one of her Christmas gifts that year! What was more shocking though was that in the years that followed, I probably ended up watching Little Women more than my eldest sister ever did. Strange. Nevertheless, it has been over ten years since I have seen Little Women, thus it seemed appropriate to review it as one of the films that I used to watch a child in my continuing series of reviews on the films I watched as a child, particularly since Christmas is just around the corner.

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Flight: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - Flight represents the coming together of two giants in the film business, Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis, both possessing legendary film resumes. In preparing for this review through taking another glance at Washington's filmography, I came away a little surprised by how many of his films I've actually seen. Few other actors have carried the same appeal throughout their career like Washington has, and when one considers the projects that Zemeckis has helmed, it is little surprise that this film has been carrying with it a considerable amount of buzz.

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The Unlikely Girl: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - I didn't get to see as many films as I wanted to this year at the Vancouver International Film Festival, but I never do because of finances and personal stuff. But I got to see a few, and I liked the ones I watched so I can't complain too much. The last movie I watched was The Unlikely Girl, a French/American co-production about a young American exchange student who travels to stay with a family in France. Well, let's back up. The films opens with Cécile (Hande Kodja), on a train to a small town in France, apparently separated from her family. She comes to her family's summer house and stumbles into her childhood friend, Luc (Pierre Boulanger), who barely recognizes her. Cécile has been gone for seven years so they take the time to get to know each other again, when Jamie (Shane Lynch) arrives seemingly out of nowhere to take up residence as an exchange student. It was arranged with Cécile's parents beforehand, but she has arrived early and was expecting the house to be empty. Jamie tries to get to know Cécile, but meets some hostility, and there is tension between the two girls because it seems that there is an interest in Luc on both ends.

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