Showing posts with label Amy Adams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amy Adams. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2014

Her, English Hollywood Film movie Review, Johnson Thomas, Rating: * * * 1/2

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Her(English) Rating: *  * * ½ Her is a simple film that offers a view of love that could become the relationship of the future. It is absurd yet emotionally touching!

English film Review
Johnson Thomas
Film: Her
Director: Spike Jonze

Rating: *  *  * ½
     
Theodore is a lonely man in the final stages of his divorce from Catherine(Rooney Mara). When he's not working as a letter writer in Beautiful handwritten Letters Corp., his down time is spent playing video games and occasionally hanging out with friends. He decides to purchase the new OS1, which is not just an operating system, it's a consciousness, as the ad states. The lonely, regretful, forlorn Theodore quickly finds himself drawn to Samantha(Scarlett Johansson), the voice behind his OS1. They grow closer and closer and eventually find themselves in love. Theodore finds himself dealing with feelings of both great joy and doubt.  And therein lies the crux of Spike Jonze absurdist dilemma.
    
Her is absurd because it may not be fathomable to most but for those addicted and dependent on technology, it plays out like a cautionary tale. Her is a simple film that offers a view of love that may well be a possibility 20 years from today.  And it’s a scary proposition because it shows us how we are steadily distancing ourselves from our fellow man and taking succor in the inanimate  and mechanical and indeed may end up destroying our very souls. It also shows us how pure emotional love and bonding can be when stripped of all physicality and form. Humans need to be loved and it’s only when we can build healthy relationships, that we can grow emotionally and spiritually and find contentment.
   
The lessons are many and complex but the narrative is simple and punctuated.  Jonze has always been unconventional and with this film he takes his unconventional brilliance to new heights. Every intricate detail is set-up brilliantly in a series of events to convince us of the relationship that is the core of the film. The construct is of a real man living in a world where technology has taken precedence over human bonding.

   

Amy Adams as Theodore’s friend is dependable, mildly neurotic and equally driven to loneliness. Rooney Mara as Theodore’s pretty wife does her bit with great traction despite a small role given to photo-flashbacks. And Scarlett Johansson does the most difficult, luring Theodore into the security of her tender, caring voice. We never see her but we hear her and that is so sensational that it’s enough. Just as it is so for Theodore. Joaquim Phoenix does the sensitive, forlorn, affection seeking Theodore with so much heart that you have to be impressed. Hopefully the Academy will too!
This is definitely one of the most unusual films of 2013-14.  And You dare not miss it!


Friday, January 17, 2014

American Hustle, Hollywood English Film movie reviews, Johnson Thomas, Rating: * * * 1/2

English Film review
Johnson Thomas
Typically American com-undrum!

 
Film: American Hustle(English)

Cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Pena
Director: David O Russell
Rating: *  *  * ½
This is typical American cinema- a talk heavy con within a con spoofy drama with sharply etched performances.
Director David O. Russell's fictional period crime drama is about a reckless FBI agent who recruits a con man and his alluring British partner into a scheme to gain the upper hand over other talented swindlers. Loud fashions and outsized shades abound from the first scene, in which paunchy, middle-aged Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) fusses with an elaborate hairpiece. It’s an intro that is quite telling. 
The screenwriters may have changed their characters’ names but most knowing viewers will recognize Irving as a stand-in for Mel Weinberg, a Long Island scam artist who joined forces with the FBI to avoid prison time. Out of that unlikely partnership emerged Abscam, an audacious sting operation that pushed federal undercover work to controversial new levels of manipulation and entrapment, resulting in the bribery convictions for seven congressmen and various other government officials in 1981.
 
Irving, is shown as a smooth-talking relatively honorable small-time hustler: He owns a legit dry-cleaning business but moonlights as an art forger and loan shark, bilking desperate applicants out of a few thousand dollars at a time. But things change when he falls hard for smart, beautiful redhead Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), an unlikely kindred spirit who, with the worldly alias of a British businesswoman named Lady Edith, swiftly moves Irving’s scam into the big leagues.
 
When renegade FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) thrusts the deceptive duo into the treacherous world of New Jersey power players and underworld heavies, the thrill of the grift grows too strong to resist. Meanwhile, New Jersey politician Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) gets caught in the middle, and Rosenfeld's capricious wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) holds more power than anyone could imagine.
It’s not a smooth enough con to pull-off. But it’s certainly ambitious and fitfully entertaining.  As directed by that master of modern farce,David O. Russell, this fictionalized account is less a dramatic FBI procedural than a human comedy writ largely on themes of duplicity and paranoia against a dazzling ’70s backdrop. The performances are all keeping with the mood and setting momentum for the narrative that tries hard to pull off a bigger con- By skimming over it’s indulgent length, and lack of emotional payoff!
Russell  and co-screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (“The International”) chart a shaggy, meandering journey across a sweeping and colorful true-crime canvas. Production designer Judy Becker, costume designer Michael Wilkinson, composer Danny Elfman and above all music supervisor Susan Jacobs — have managed to imbue the experience with  a palpable delight in the garish excesses of the era-mid-’70s New Jersey milieu.   The Director goes for style over substance in a major way and the result is an intermittently involving production !