I'm not even certain I'll finish this blog today. There are 13 people in the office currently with no signs of the day letting up. I have a feeling come 5:00 I am going to be very tired and have a debilitating headache. Stupid MUSE program.
I'm excited because pending disaster (my new favorite phrase) I will be seeing 500 Days of Summer this Thursday. This will be good both because I've been wanting to see the movie for a long time and because I am getting near-up-to-date with blog posts for the movies I've watched and I want to make sure I always have something to write about on any given day.
Life is pretty dull without play rehearsal. Rather than get home from work and go straight to a purposeful and enjoyable rehearsal, I'm going home and taking a long, ill-timed nap, waking up at 9 p.m., and sitting wide-awake at 2 a.m. to start the cycle all over again. College is over, but the college lifestyle apparently is not.
Today's video is a song on the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack which I serendipitously heard yesterday on a random CD I pulled from my "To be listened to" pile. It was covered (very well, might I add) by the band Ghost Mice, but this original is by The Smiths. The song is There is a Light that Never Goes Out:
Highly anticipated Blu-Ray release of the day? Gigli. Too easy? I'm not feeling creative today...
#17: The Constant Gardener
I could have sworn I heard about this movie a while back during award season. Either I'm mistaken or 2005 was a slow year for movies.
I found this movie at Shoprite when there was a bin of $5 dvds with an additional 50% off. I figured I couldn't possibly go wrong for $2.50 a movie--that's cheaper than renting. Granted, this isn't my type of movie; in fact, it falls into one of the few genres of film that I specifically dislike. It takes a lot for me to enjoy some thriller spy-game type movie and this one is no exception. I love Ralph Fiennes, but even he couldn't make this movie work. It was long, boring, and as unthrilling as a thriller could possibly get.
Two negative reviews in a row...maybe I'm ready for the New Yorker.
To be honest there was so little to this movie that I'm not sure how much I even have to say about it. I like Ralph Fiennes a lot, but coming into this having heard that the story revolved around his character's wife's abduction I expected something like Liam Neeson in Taken--a man on a mission going around busting skulls until he gets what he wants. That isn't to say that needless violence necessarily makes for a good movie, but after Ralph Fiennes' character in this I would almost rather a cannibal.
There is nothing heroic about this protagonist. I know that not every protagonist needs to be heroic, but for the nature of this story it's apparent that they wanted a hero. Fiennes instead comes off as timid and flat. The one memborable confrontation he is involved in in the film is when he gets the snot beaten out of him in a hotel room where, despite obvious signs someone is in the room, he still tiptoes in more petrified than determined. The viewer's primary emotion is not hopeful that he get to the bottom of what happened to his wife but rather shocked that he's even gotten as far as he has given his soft-spoken, weak, and often naive character. The grizzly, manly picture of him on the movie poster is false advertising if I've ever seen it.
I'm also not quite sure where the advertised thrills came in. There were multiple moments where the writers obviously hoped for viewers to have that "Oh my God! It all makes sense now!" moment, but every time a scene like that came up I found myself already aware of the big epiphany that was supposed to occur. I don't mean that in a "I totally guessed that was going to happen" sort of way; I mean that the big revelations supposed to occur typically revealed information that, as far as I know, had already been revealed. There was this bizarre sense of redundancy throughout the movie when by the end I realized I couldn't possibly be captivated by the puzzle the plot solved when I hadn't been aware of any puzzle in the first place.
It isn't really that I can call this movie bad so much as dry. There was simply nothing at all memorable about it. I can't recall a single character's name and besides flashes of personality from Rachel Weisz's character there was little substance to anyone or anything in the film. The relationship between Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz was hardly believable, the plot had little direction, and the hair-raising finale that the back of the DVD promised was non-existent. Besides a mildly interesting eulogy at the end--I'd tell you for whom, but I don't remember--the ending was about as memorable as the middle, which was about as memorable as the beginning. If there was a climax to the movie, I must have blinked and missed it.
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