Romance

Finally, a Real Love Story!

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Lars and the Real Girl
  • IMDB: link

“The search for true love begins outside the box.”

Hollywood loves contrived love stories with insane stipulations and “humorous” misunderstandings.  Well I’ve got a little love story for you that knocks off the conventions of today’s chick flicks and presents an engaging, sweet, and enduring love story (between a man and his sex doll no less!).

Karin (Emily Mortimer) and Gus (Paul Schneider) are expecting a new baby, but the person Karin is most concerned with is Gus’s shy and awkward younger brother Lars (Ryan Gosling) who keeps everyone at arms length and seems to have trouble with intimacy and with social gatherings.  And who is terribly lonely, whether he admits it or not.

Out of the blue Lars announces he has met a girl on the Internet who has come to visit.  Bianca is a beautiful, smart, and kind paralyzed Danish-Brazilian missionary.  She’s also a Real Doll (a lifelike and anatomically correct sex doll made of silicone) who Lars bought online.  Now, given the state of gross-out humor popular today, you might think you know where the film is going, but you would be wrong.

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I Don’t Know; It’s a Mystery

/ / Home Video, Theme Week
  • Title: Shakespeare in Love
  • IMDB: link

shakespeare-in-love-dvdJohn Madden gives us a new film version of Shakespeare by looking at the struggling playwright who has yet to become the great William Shakespeare.  The movie is centered around the love story between Will and Viola which will be his muse for writing “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter” er… I mean “Romeo and Juliet.”

Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is a struggling playwright banished by his wife and child to London and tired of the constant attention and devotion garnered by renowned playwright Christopher Marlowe (Rupert Everett) which provides one of the films best running jokes.  With a little help from Marlowe and a the sight of his new muse the lady Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow who won the Oscar for Best Actress) Will begins to write what will become his great love story “Romeo and Juliet.”

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Tough Love

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Lust, Caution
  • IMDb: link

lust-caution-poster

Not totally unlike his last work, Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution is a love story lead down the wrong path thanks to forlorn circumstances.  And although Lee’s movie about gay cowboy’s may have worked more thoroughly, there’s still a lot to this Mandarin-language film worth checking out.

Taking place in a World War II China when the Japanese were posing a threat, Lust, Caution focuses on a group of theater students who decide to stop putting on patriotic plays and start killing those Chinese sons a bitches who turned coat to the east, using a young woman (Wei Tang) to infiltrate one such traitor household.  They find out their task is much easier said than done after their target, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), disappears across the country suddenly and without notice.  All the hard work and planning of six young nationalists goes down the drain.

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While You Were Sleeping

/ / Home Video
  • Title: While You Were Sleeping
  • IMDb: link

while-you-were-sleeping-poster

Lucy Eleanor Moderatz (Sandra Bullock) lives alone with her cat, carries an empty passport around in her coat pocket, and works long hours as in a subway booth taking tokens from strangers.  One bright spot in her dreary existence is when Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher) walks by every morning even though they’ve never met. 

On Christmas morning he’s mugged and falls onto the tracks.  Lucy jumps on the tracks and saves his life and through a miscommunication at the hospital is believed to be Peter’s fiancé.  When Peter’s large family arrives to find him in a coma they thank Lucy for saving his life and immediately embrace her into the family.  The whole thing happens so fast Lucy doesn’t get a chance to tell them the truth and, after a few days with the family, doesn’t want to.

Aside from funny misunderstandings and odd coincidences the film is basically about relationships.  Lucy’s only confidant is her boss (Jerry Bernard) who Lucy tells the story to and is both amused and annoyed at her situation. 

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