After two months of movie theater withdrawal, CP's return to the partially sane, pseudo-Western world allowed for moviegoing and these subsequent reviews.
Franklyn: Good ideas squandered all over the place. This movie boasted Hollywood's second most underrated 30ish actor, an interesting conceit, and a fantasy world that's part colonialism, part masquerade. Unfortunately, the script was bad. Parallels between the fantasy world and the real world weren't effective because the happenings in the real world were sometimes more preposterous than those in Franklyn world. Screenwriters should swear off the Iraq war along with the rest of humanity, as nothing redeeming will ever come out of that cesspool except waves of delicious oil for THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. In the right hands Franklyn could have been the Naughties' Dark City, instead its this silly shamey thing. Ryan Reynolds is underrated. 
Surveillance: A pleasant surprise! Since this was directed by David Lynch's daughter, Carmen expected a derivative, demented weirdfest chocked full of vagaries and violence and structureless abstraction, but, bizarrely, he was wrong! The movie presented a pretty straightforward narrative, with great acting and the little weird flourishes that shock and surprise and make smiles. The best thing about the movie is that the "twist" ending is incredibly obvious from very early in, and still the director manages to keep the audience interested and to present the events in a very idiosyncratic light. Yayyyyyy.
The Reader: Why was this movie made? Outside of Kate Winslet stealing Anne Hathaway's Oscar, The Reader presents absolutely nothing audiences haven't seen before, and this is only made exponentially worse by the movie relating itself through the most manipulative of historical vehicles: The Holocaust. Why are they speaking English? CP felt not anger towards the film but the kind of dull indifference that he experiences when looking at brown shirts without designs on them or interacting with really, really boring people. Maybe a better analogy would be to say that watching The Reader is like watching home movies of your own childhood where someone else plays the part of you; it registers as something familiar and maybe evocative but ends up just being remote and lifeless and a mere imitation of something "real". :(.
The Reader: Why was this movie made? Outside of Kate Winslet stealing Anne Hathaway's Oscar, The Reader presents absolutely nothing audiences haven't seen before, and this is only made exponentially worse by the movie relating itself through the most manipulative of historical vehicles: The Holocaust. Why are they speaking English? CP felt not anger towards the film but the kind of dull indifference that he experiences when looking at brown shirts without designs on them or interacting with really, really boring people. Maybe a better analogy would be to say that watching The Reader is like watching home movies of your own childhood where someone else plays the part of you; it registers as something familiar and maybe evocative but ends up just being remote and lifeless and a mere imitation of something "real". :(.
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