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I took a little too long to get around to writing this review! So I’ll try to remember my first impressions…
I am a Jane Austen fan – despite reading all of zero of her books. But I do own the complete book series, which I might get around to reading one day… Continue reading
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A classic 1990s rom-com! Featuring the mum and dad of 90s rom-coms – Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
It’s from the writer/director Nora Ephron – the brain behind When Harry Met Sally, the similar 90s story of Sleepless in Seattle, and Julie & Julia. (She must have really loved Meg Ryan – I wonder if Nora considered her for Julie & Julia because she has a striking resemblance to Amy Adams.)
You’ve Got Mail is the ultimate feel-good film… Continue reading
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This is our Christmas film because it’s set at Christmas time in snowy New York – so magical!
It’s a fantasy romance film about fate, and whether you should act on impulse or allow life to take the wheel. When Sara (Kate Beckinsale) and Jonathan (John Cusack) meet on Christmas Eve by chance, Jonathan falls in love with her straight away, but Sara believes they must leave it to fate… Continue reading
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I’ve been thinking about this movie for days.
A gripping tale in post-war Germany, about a woman name Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) who has a summer affair with a teenage boy named Michael Berg (David Kross). A few years later, Berg is a law student and is sitting in on a Nazi war crime trial in court where he is stunned to see Schmitz again… Continue reading
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A heart-breaking story about, not the person who leaves, but the person who’s perpetually left behind.
I like this unusual perspective, particularly since time-travel is such an attractive, but foreign, concept. Yet, the story is focused on the more human and deeply relatable themes.
I’ve heard the book is fantastic – I’m going to read it this summer. But, the movie is exquisite. If you haven’t seen or read The Time Traveler’s Wife, the low-down is that a man is a time traveller and his wife is not. The time traveller, named Henry (Eric Bana) can’t control his travelling, so his impromptu disappearances and reappearances become a way of life for his wife Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams)… Continue reading
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(Prepare to see a lot of screen grabs with quotes from this film around. The script is so poetic.)
Her is a sci-fi romance, drama hybrid that premiered at the 2013 New York Film Festival.
It’s set in the near future where rather than keeping one’s head down – staring at a phone screen – people now have an ear piece that respond to voice commands.
The operational system – or OS – that performs the requests now have personalities, and for all intense and purposes, are a personal assistant with feelings and emotions equal in complexity to humans.
This new update is something that the main character, melancholy and lonely Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), becomes immediately interested in… Continue reading
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This film is up there with Bridget Jones’ Diary, I reckon.
I got this DVD because there was a ‘buy two, get one free’ deal on. Since the choice was limited, I thought I’d give this a whirl.
I was concerned because I had no interest in any of Jane Austen’s romance novels and had little knowledge of the stories and characters. So I wondered if a film about people discussing these books would be confusing…
Not the case, surprisingly!
The first time I watched it, I was just like ‘meh’, better than a chick flick… But kind of average. So it gathered dust on my shelf until one day, boredom and exhaustion from watching my DVD collection five times over resulted in me indulging in The Jane Austen Book Club once again.
I have to say, I really love this film now. The six main characters are empowering and strong, they all… Continue reading
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I bought this DVD as a bit of a whim. After stumbling across the trailer on YouTube I thought that the look of the whole film resembled the circus scenes in Big Fish.
It is the story of the dark side of the circus during the early 1930s, with a forbidden love story between Jacob (Robert Pattinson) and Marlena (Reece Witherspoon) intertwined. Jacob runs away with the circus and poses as a certified vet to continue travelling with them, but discovers that there’s much more to performing that the magic the audience sees.
On the way, he experiences the control and under handed acts that go on in order to keep the circus from failing during the depression. Staff would go missing in the night if the boss and husband of Marlena, August (Christoph Waltz), was unable to pay… Continue reading
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If you haven’t watched this movie, it is basically about a wealthy girl, Allison (McAdams), who fell in love with a poor country boy, Noah (Gosling), whom her parents did not approve of. She was taken away and after a few years was engaged to marry a more ‘appropriate’ man of wealth and status… That is until Noah comes back into the picture which forces Allison to choose between a respectable, kind young wealthy man or a free spirited, kind young poor man.
As I have mentioned many times in previous posts, romance is not my cup of tea. I don’t enjoy the predictability of them, the smooching, the overly-perfect and much-too-good-looking characters, as well as the either typically happily ever after or tragic endings. Or the mamsy-pamsy emotional blubbering characters who through the fog of their infatuation… Continue reading
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“Truth, beauty, freedom and love.”
I have never been a fan of sappy romance, and I still am not. Because Moulin Rouge! is not at all sappy or unbelievable, nor does the music break the suspension of disbelief. I think that it is because the acting is not over the top or overly theatrical at all.
Ewan McGregor plays the protagonist, Christian, who is a writer who wants to write about love, but with one problem being that he has never been in love. That is until he meets Nicole Kidman’s character, Satine, a courtesan at the Moulin Rouge. Satine is forbidden to fall in love, so they must keep their relationship a secret. Continue reading
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This is a rather delayed review of the first film of the Twilight Saga. But it has won the poll with an impressive 221 votes! So here is my take on it:
The first thing that I can comment truthfully on is the music… if anything, the emotion comes from the music in this film. Emotion, however, is not something that would be seen throughout the protagonists. Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire boyfriend, Edward, (Robert Pattinson) are predominately absent of extreme feelings or overall facial movement…
But the 25 year old-looking high schoolers who glittered in daylight and are transformed into a sexualised and attractive killers… Well. It just doesn’t go down well for me. I think that vampire + sparkles = evil fairy… Not a pin-up highschool boy, like Hollywood has portrayed Edward Cullen to be… Continue reading
NZ Film Freak 