It seems I've let my movie reviews fall by the wayside. I'll pick back up with the latest ones I've seen, and maybe go back and hit a few highlights from the past couple of months later.
Samurai Fiction: Episode 1
Samurai Fiction is a Japanese film that garnered fairly high critical acclaim and won a few small film festival awards. My guy at Blockbuster (Charles) said he hadn't seen it, but "heard it was crazy... which is a good thing." Between that and the film award stamps on the case, I was rather excited to see what it was all about. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed. Certainly it wasn't a bad movie, and if pressed I might even say it was a good movie, but what I felt was that it was much more a decent attempt at a very lofty goal, which is to be this generation's Kurosawa film, but it fell short. There was some silly humor in it, which is probably a cultural norm, that I found useless and a bit annoying since it wasn't actually funny. The action scenes were rather quick and choppy, which made them quite short and hard to follow, but it was obvious that the actors did in fact know how to handle their swords. There were a lot of extreme close-ups in the movie, especially following the action sequences, which in a way reminded me of some of Tarantino's work in Kill Bill, though I couldn't say exactly why. The movie is watchable, and I wouldn't discourage anyone from watching it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone except die-hard samurai movie fans.
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
When I first saw previews for this movie, I allowed myself to get excited about it. But then over time I talked myself out of a lot of my early expectations for the movie. I was still interested, but not as excited as before. It turned out to actually exceed my somewhat lowered expectations, which is rare for a movie to do. My biggest fear was that as a psuedo-indie movie designed to feature indie rock, that the music selection would come off as pretentious, like so many hardcore indie rock fanboys and fangirls do. To my surprise, the music was featured during segues, but not thrown in your face as it is in some other movies, like Empire Records. (Not that I dislike Empire Records at all. In fact I'm quite a fan; I'm just making a comparison.) It's more like a theater production that highlights a really cool background while the stagehands set the stage for the next scene.
I can't really think of anyone in the movie whose performance I disliked, but while I moderately enjoyed Michael Cera's work (pretty much like every TV show/movie I've seen him in) and Kat Dennings was stunningly gorgeous, I found myself most impressed with secondary characters' performances, namely Caroline (played by Ari Graynor) and Thom (Aaron Yoo). As a secondary character, Caroline is pretty prominent, but Thom struck me as an almost-hidden gem.
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