Episteme

Okay, if I ever have a boyfriend again, can he please be a human version of WALL-E?

I am going to be like everyone else here and admit that I am in love with this robot, a genius creation of animators who know just how to translate the little tiny movements of human body language that communicate to others so much of how we feel. It's funny that they can take those movements, apply them to creatures that don't even look too much like us, except for having vague versions of arms, shoulders, heads and eyes, and create what is really quite a romantic love story. I have to agree with the WSJ reviewer on the first 15-20 minutes, which are without words, being the best of the movie. It gets dicey when humans come in, not just because they are boneless and yucky, but because it takes you out of the entrancing world of Eve and WALL-E. Funny, they sound kind of like rappers.

Anyway, go see this movie with your BF or your BFF and learn how a real man should behave. And I don't mean the part about compacting and cleaning up all humanity's trash, although there is nothing wrong with that -- I mean the part about hooking himself onto the side of a spaceship and traveling to other worlds just to bring his main squeeze back to Earth. Now that's love.

Check out this cute trailer...

Posted by Kim at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I loved this movie and it made me cry. It did! But seriously, I was really impressed with how Ellen Page, the lead actress, interpreted the screenplay to describe a real situation in an engaging way. The movie's reach is remarkable - from talking to people who have seen the film and reading reviews, people of all ages seem to be able to connect with Juno and/or the other characters in the movie to understand and identify with the situation. Many of us at least know someone who has had to make a decision on what do do with an unexpected pregnancy, so the issue of abortion is there. But the movie is far from a moralizing rant on what or whether to choose. Juno chose not to abort, but that doesn't make her stance ideological - it's purely personal, and I'd venture to say that she was glad to have been able to make the choice for herself. I think the film gave this issue in the delicate and multifaceted treatment that it deserved.

Continue reading "Juno" »

Posted by Kim at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's be clear - I wanted to see Shrek 3 in English. I wanted to hear Julia Andrews, Cameron Diaz, Amy Sedaris and the like playing royalty. I wanted to hear Eddie Murphy as the donkey and Mike Myers as Shrek, and I was pretty mad that we actually bought tickets to the Spanish version. (They have both at the movie theater but this one was as the time we wanted.) But I must say that it was great, even if I didn't get all the jokes because of either the language or the cultural references. Poor me. But it's pretty darn amazing how well all this stuff translates - Antonio Banderas played the cat in Spanish too, of course, but they had a very famous Mexican comedian playing the burro, the fairytales are all known here too, and the main plot is pretty universally understandable. Even the high school cliques worked, and they used the equivalent of a snobby kids' accent to show the social pressures of high school which, unfortunately, aren't so different here.

It's similar with The Simpsons, which has people mesmerized here in the same way it does at home. While the show comes across as the story of an American family, with basically the same voices and personalities as it has in English, the story works in a different cultural context because of how universal it is - the father, his job, the naughty son, the doting but frustrated mother and wife, the plump policemen, etc...

So that's my bit on soft power and why it works so well!

Posted by Kim at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been succumbing to a subtle but powerful force, the movies, and I'm torn over whether to resist or give in.

Every time my boyfriend and I want to go out but we don't know where, I say, why not a movie? We ended up at the movies weekly, then twice a week. I almost always have at least three DVDs from Blockbuster sitting by the TV, which I watch in free moments. I went from the normal person who'd seen a couple of the latest titles to a veritable newspaper listing of current attractions, and my friends started making comments. Finally it got so serious that we decided to alternate who chooses what we do when we go out, but Blockbuster continued to empty our bank accounts. Since there is no immanent solution to my addiction, I thought I'd tap into the reservoir of images and impressions that I've been building up. One that I really liked recently is The Good Shepherd with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. You can check it out at http://www.thegoodshepherdmovie.com, and read on for what I thought about it.

Continue reading "A life sacrificed to fiction" »

Posted by Kim at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)