handyfloss

Last night I went to see the movie Chaos (Caos).

It is a decent movie, with some thriller ingredients, following the “misterious” bank robbery theme I also saw in Inside man (Plan oculto). Here the plot is, maybe, more developed, but less perfect. It is not evident why some things happen, and the inclusion of chaos theory into the plot is irrelevant, but it has the makings of a good thriller, in which details fit together as the movie goes on. Not perfectly, but they do fit.

As a little warning, do not expect incredible amounts of action, just because Statham and Snipes are starring. It has some action, but the main dish is the plot itself.

Barring some holes in the script, and the usual unbelievable bits (some explosions, some bad guys escaping miraculously… you know, those things), I’d say it is well worth watching.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Crash, and I have to say that I liked it a lot. The plot is very good, and the events flow naturally.

What I liked most was that the characters were, albeit sketchy (because there are many, and there’s no time for more development), quite more complex than your average black-or-white hero/villain type nowadays. There aren’t really good guys and bad guys. There’s racist idiots, but also people with prejudices learning to overcome them, apparently racist people acting as heroes, ethnic minorities clashing among them, appart from with white people, and “gangsta bros” becoming samaritans.

A great movie, really.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Failure to launch (Novia por contrato).

I went to Antiguo Berri, a cinema that is a 5 minutes walk away from where I live. That’s why I always get out 4 minutes before the movie starts…

Yesterday I got out 6 minutes before, congratulating myself because I had 1 extra minute. All was fun and rejoice until I arrived at the cinema ticket desk… and noticed I had forgotten my wallet at home (and had no time to go back for it). Wait, there’s hope! I had with me my coin wallet, in which I had enough money. The regular ticket is 5 euros, but a card issued to under-30s by my bank entitles me to a discount of one euro. Fine, I had 4.70 eur in my coin wallet! Now, the bad part: the discount card was in my other wallet, at home :^(

Now, I go to that cinema every week, so the clerk knows me. I thougth that she’d accept to make the discount even without the card, you know, my charming smile and all that… Tough luck, yesterday they had a new guy at the desk. My moral sank.

However, I thought “what the hell?”, and told him what the matter was. To my (mild) surprise, he accepted promptly, and issued me a discount ticket, making me pay only 4 eur. Bad part is he didn’t give me a “young discount” ticket, but one of “discount to the elderly” :^)

As for the movie itself, it is a romantic comedy, which says it all. It’s only moderately funny, but I had a good time watching it. It pokes fun at guys living with their parents, which is technically my situation… so I sometimes thought it was a drama, instead of a comedy!

I don’t think I spoil any big surprise if I disclose that the main line of the plot is that the parents of Matthew McConaughey hire Sarah Jessica Parker to make him fall in love with her, so that he quits living with them. Yeah, right, I thought the same thing: them bastards! My self-confidence was already low, I didn’t need the suspicion that next time a girl is “receptive” with me it’s because my parents hired her to make me move out of home, thanks!

I know, I know: it’s a movie. But… did they really think it would work? SJ Parker’s aim was to give MM self confidence, so that he’d shift to the next step in life, living alone. Now, if (or “when”) he did find out about the farce… wouldn’t his self confidence actually sink? Wouldn’t it be even more difficult to make him move away in the future (if it didn’t work out at the first try, as it was evident that it wouldn’t)? What kind of shit were those parents smoking when they came out with the idea, and were can I get some?

Suposedly it is an old story, but I found out about it today (pages one visits when staying too late at work).

The “content makers”, like film studios, singers, writers and so on, are day and night stressing how important it is to respect the copyright holders and not to pirate, in order to have the authors get their fair pay for their hard work…

Now, how freaking hypocritical is this, coming from a company who made this! What the link shows is that the Disney company blatantly copied the story, characters and scenario of a previous (old) Japanese movie called Kimba The White Lion.

The story goes like this: Disney “thinks” they own the rights, and start saying they are going to make a remake. Later on, they find out they don’t own such rights, so they start saying their movie is completely original, and denying that any of them knew anything about that Japanese Kimba thing. Truly outrageous.

Yesterday I went to the cinema and watched Spike Lee’s Inside man (Plan oculto is the Spanish title). I have to say that I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. It’s very well directed (although I don’t like Lee’s other movies all that much), and the photography is superb.

The plot is very nicely written and tied up together. There are, as always are, some weak points and things more or less difficult to believe. However, many real situations that actually happen every day are more difficult to believe, so…

For me that movie is what a movie should be. It tells a story the way the cinema should tell it. A book is a book. A song is a song. A picture is a picture. And a movie should be a movie. Each one has its tools and procedures, and this movie puts the ones of the cinema to good use, IMHO.