Change Your Image
Vivness
Reviews
Cosa Bella (2006)
Looks great, but is missing about 75 minutes
I felt I had to write this review, simply because everyone who wrote one so far absolutely LOVED the movie. But why? I will say this, Cosa Bella really looks very good. It looks like a big Hollywood movie (and I mean that as a compliment for a change) and it has cool camera work and editing and music (Sia's "Breathe Me" is in there). And yet, the whole story looks like it was cut out of a feature film. It doesn't seem like a short film - it seems like a work in progress. Which is such a shame! If this were a feature film, one that lets you actually get close to the characters, take part in their development, and then still have the same scenes with the same great music and great camera work and dialog, it would probably be excellent. I would love it. I would feel with the characters, laugh with them, cry with them, root for them. But this way, the film is just a sad (albeit good-looking) reminder of what could've been.
Having said that, it certainly seems like Fiona MacKenzie is going to do great things in the future.
Welcome to Sunny Florida (2004)
Nice music, bad camera work
"Welcome To Sunny Florida" is actually really good if you mostly care about the music. The extra material on this DVD is also very good, it has full length interviews with Tori and with her mother, too, and it has a tour yearbook, no complaints there. But what is really surprisingly bad here is the camera work. I'm not a perfectionist and I don't expect every moment captured to be perfectly in focus. But here the picture is out of focus a lot, sometimes there are very strange cuts and at some point it simply starts being annoying. This is why, despite the great music and the interesting extras, I "only" gave this 7 out of 10.
No Such Thing (2001)
Colorless, illogical, boring
Sarah Polley has been in many good movies and she has convinced me both in GO, as well as in MY LIFE WITHOUT ME of the fact that she is a remarkable actress. That's the main reason why I rented NO SUCH THING and expected something good, something unusual, or at least something entertaining.
Well, NO SUCH THING disappointed me very much. The story, I admit, is indeed "something unusual", and so is the style of the movie. It's obviously a satire and it criticizes the media and human behavior. The topic is not uninteresting per se, but somehow the way it's portrayed is very colorless, it's very black and white. Other parts of the movie are simply illogical and yet others seem quite out of place and made me think that maybe they were only put in the movie because Hal Hartley couldn't think of anything else to write about to make his movie longer.
The only vaguely interesting parts of the movie were the two or three philosophical thoughts that were brought up, but all things considered, they're not worth sitting through the other 100 slow, boring minutes.