Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Initially I had no interest in watching this movie, but a few months ago my nephew's girlfriend mentioned that she had seen it and liked it. Now that I've seen it I wish I could have been there to cover her eyes and plug her ears! No, it wasn't really that bad, but it's one of those movies I wouldn't be caught dead watching with my parents. I would have had to cover my mom's eyes and plug her ears, that's for sure.

Leave it to Woody Allen to come up with a weird gimmick like an unrelated male narrator throughout the movie, effectively turning this into a faux-documentary on lust among people who can't control themselves because they are just like dogs.

Interesting side note: If Woody Allen had had a part in this movie, he would have played uptight, overanalyzing, neurotic Vicky. In fact Vicky was just a female and attractive Woody Allen in this movie.

Shooter

Recommended to me by my young friend in the National Guard; also my husband's kind of movie. (He says that as long as a movie shows a gun on the poster he's sure to like it). That is not to say that I didn't enjoy the movie. It was entertaining. But it's one of those movies that leaves me without much to say. Except for this funny tidbit my husband offered during the watching (only funny if you have recently watched Into the Wild, as we have): At the beginning of the movie--after the opening scene, but still at the beginning--as the main character is wandering around in the snowy wilderness--Hud says, "...and then he finds a dead guy in a bus."

He also mentioned (several times!) that he thought the love interest (Kate Mara) was hot. Maybe I have mentioned Robert Pattinson to him too many times.

Oh, and one more thing. For some reason I was totally expecting the main character to be Matt Damon. It kind of looks like him in the picture, don't you think? No? My husband didn't think so either.

Into the Wild

Would you be surprised if I said the ending surprised me? I didn't expect Alexander Supertramp to die.

My favorite quote from this movie: "The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences." I especially liked hearing that just after my solo Europe trop. Oh, and a runner up: "That poor girl's about to vault herself onto a fencepost..."

Atonement

I had never heard of this movie (which is surprising, considering one of the main characters is Keira Knightley, a fairly big star) until I bought the book to read on a trip. After I read the book, as often happens with books that have movie adaptations, I was eager to watch the movie and see what they had done with it. I was impressed by how faithful to the book they managed to stay. There were very few things I noticed that had changed between the book and the movie, and none of those were changes that I regretted.

Pan's Labyrinth

It's been two weeks since I watched this movie and regrettably I can't remember much to say about it. It was very good (except for the faun, plagued by poor special effects that detracted from the movie). It is in Spanish, so I had to watch the English subtitles. And the little girl's stepfather was horribly cruel. In fact I think they may have overstated his cruelty. Anyway, I can't get the image of him beating the poor peasant man to death by repeatedly smashing the butt of a bottle into his face and driving his nose into his brain.