adiezel Reviews

Human Traffic (1999)

84 minute joyride

[9/10 · 31 January 2002]

this film was all smiles for me. i understand why some people don't like it, though - the movie is made by clubbers, for clubbers. As such, for a certain audience, every character, scene and line is something they can relate to...everybody else is left to look on from the side with wonder. I love the subjective camera techniques. the soundtrack kicks ass. all in all, for those who get the joke, this movie is one big smile that makes you wanna get out there and dance.

Amélie (2001)

On-screen poetry

[10/10 · 30 November 2001]

While watching Amelie, I was filled (for the first time since "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) by my immense love of the cinema. This movie filled me with joy, but more importantly, with Amelie. The wonder of this movie is its ability to keep you in the moment. Every emotion of Amelie is felt by the audience. Via his poetic and artistic techniques, Jeunet transports you into the separate realities of his characters, as successfully as Darren Aronofsky did in "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream," but Jeunet's pallete of emotions is far greater. As I exited, a couple of the people I was with were bubbling away, "Oh, everything about that made me happy," "didn't you just love Amelie so much," etc. Do not let people's simplification of this movie detract from it. Yes, people will fixate on some of the surface qualities of this film, but it is, regardless, a triupmh, as well as the best movie you will see this year.

America's Sweethearts (2001)

An insult to my intelligence

[1/10 · 12 August 2001]

America's Sweethearts sells itself on its cast, featuring American sweethearts like Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Billy Crystal and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sounds like a formula for a good movie, right? Take real life movie stars that are loved by America and put them in a movie about hollywood-types and celebrities and call the movie 'America's Sweethearts.' Great idea, sure, until you go see the movie and realize that it is one of the most unoriginal, uninspired, idiotic scripts ever written. The humor is at best predictable and cliche, at worst deliberate and insulting to my intelligence. Even the funniest character, Christopher Walken's strange miser director, is a ball of over-used cliches about artsy film directors. I could swallow predictability and lame jokes if for one second I cared about one single freakin' character in the movie, but that would be too much to ask. Julia Roberts' character used to be fat, but she's already gone through her transformation before the beginning of the movie, so there's no pain with which to sympathize. John Cusack's character is supposed to be connecting to himself and you're supposed to be happy for him, but in flashbacks it seems like he was always pretty OK. There is other stuff that really irritated me in this movie - one example is Catherine Zeta-Jones' "Spaniard" boyfriend, who is the dumbest melting pot of misplaced stereotypes of Puerto Ricans I've seen on screen in awhile and would've offended me if I thought for the one second that the writer (Billy Crystal...wasn't he funny when I was a little kid?) actually cared the slightest bit about his movie and his characters, but I know (pray) that couldn't be true.