500 Days of Summer was one of the most rewarding movie experiences I’ve ever had. When I first heard about this movie back in the summer of 2009, I thought there would be no way I would ever see it, let alone see it in the theater, let alone see it in the theater and enjoy it. But as word of mouth began to spread and as the movie sustained life in the theater, it became inevitable that I would eventually see it. Nevertheless, I still was convinced that I would not like it. I was wrong. I loved it. Not only was it my favorite movie of 2009, but it most likely has a permanent spot in my all-time top 25.
Category Archives: Romance
The Lunchbox (2014)
“Sometimes, the wrong train will get you to the right station.” These yearning words of wisdom spoken so matter-of-factly by Ila (Nimrat Kaur – One Night With the King), a lonely yet hopeful housewife in Ritesh Batra’s directorial debut, The Lunchbox, quite simply the best movie through the first eight months of 2014. I am uncertain if this movie will be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Academy Award. I hope it will be so that more people will know about it. If it is not, I am not sure I would have ever known about it, let alone see it, if not recommended by my friend David. It further reinforces my appreciation for movie recommendations.
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Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Not only should 2013’s Blue Is The Warmest Color been nominated for a 2013 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but if you are judging by all of the standards on how the Academy usually selects its films, I think that it also should have been one of the nominations for Best Picture that year. Despite some lousy press associated after the release of this film, which I will discuss in this review, this movie might be the honest and most real movie of the year. This is a film that most people have never seen, and most people will never see. You are not alone if you have never heard of this movie. It amassed just $2.2 million domestically, and its NC-17 rating kept it out of most theaters. However, this movie is just as, if not more important, as 2012’s Amor (like Blue Is The Warmest Color, also French), which earned a spot as one of the best nine movies of that less-than-spectacular year.
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The Great Gatsby (2013)
It would be an understatement to say that Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Departed) killed it in 2013. Before his Academy Award-nominating role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio portrayed Jay Gatsby, one of the most legendary characters in literary history, most sincerely and intensely. It was a performance that F Scott Fitzgerald would be proud of and almost make him forget all of the other subpar attempts to recreate his work of fiction that nearly all of us have read in high school.
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Enough Said (2013)
It is unfortunate that director Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money, Lovely and Amazing) Enough Said was the last film that James Gandolfini (television’s The Sopranos, The Last Castle) completed before his untimely death, but what a lasting impression he will leave with the mass public in the most real and honest movie of 2013. Gandolfini has frightened us on the big and small screens for the last 20 years. He has played some of the vilest characters and some of the meanest. Like me, you might go into this movie thinking Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a romantic dramedy. There’s A) No chance it will be good, and B) Even if the critics somehow give it a positive review, there is no way I will give it a chance because it will be so unbelievable. Just like with Gandolfini as some mobster, hard military man, or hitman, we think of Louis-Dreyfus as the queen of goofy television comedies like Seinfeld, Veep, and The New Adventures of Old Christine. There is no way this movie could ever work in the world, right? Well, I will say unequivocally that this assumption is wrong. This movie is not just good. It is great. The chemistry between Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus is not something that just gets by. It is something that works effortlessly.
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