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christopheschelfaut
Reviews
The Fountain (2006)
this year's eternal sunshine...
Every year there are being released a few art house movies that have a very big potential: a story with several dimensions and every time you watch it you see the movie from a different perspective. Often they have a poetic beauty and are visually stunning. Eternal sunshine was one of those and this year's there another one...
I was fortunate to see "the fountain" at the gent international film festival (belgium) in the presence of director Darren Aronofsky. In his speech he told he wanted to make a new kind of science fiction movie. No laser guns and stuff like that, but beautiful, poetic images of space...
The movie tells the story of a couple: Isabelle(Izzy) & tom. Izzy has a tumor and Tom is a scientist who's trying to find an antidote against dead. This is one of the three stories. The second one is the story Izzy's writing: the fountain (which explains the title) and the third one shows us tom as a space explorer in the 26th century. They're all connected to each other and deal with questions about life & dead, the reason of existence...
It's no ordinary science fiction movie, but a poetic tribute about love, dead & existence. Sometimes it's surrealistic and then it reminded me a bit of eternal sunshine.
Conclusion: The fountain is a wonderful movie that leaves you more questions than it answers. Every time you'll watch it, you'll get another dimension of it. There'll definitely be loads of people who'll hate this movie, to those people: stay away! But if you're in for a poetic, visually stunning and intelligent film then this is your movie!
Into the Blue (2005)
the potential for a good movie was there, but they didn't see it...
Yesterday, I had the the chance to see the preview of "into the blue". I didn't expect a lot from it. I thought it would be another summer flick about youngster getting in trouble by finding drugs. Fortunately, the story is more than that, perhaps a bit too much. The director,john stockwell, obviously doesn't know which way to go with the story. The movie starts promising, but after about half an hour, he loses his grip on the actual story and starts focusing on the characters. There was a lot of potential in this movie, but he didn't use it. This movie COULD have been a sort of "national treasure" under water... But don't let this remark spoil the fun, the movie is still really enjoyable. Paul Walker & Scott Caan are a dynamic duo and the appearance of jessica alba,... Conclusion: if you want to chill an evening this is your movie, but if you expect to have a good story and an intriguing plot, chose another one!
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
fantastic!
Yesterday evening I saw "Hotel Rwanda" in theater. I had already heard great things about it, and after a while I was already expecting a bit too much of it, but when I saw it, it fulfilled all my expectations. I'm not the emotional type, but during this movie, I got tears in my eyes several times. Don Cheadle stars as Paul Rusesabanginan, it's his best performance in years! This was the role he was born for. I've also seen Ray and The Aviator and I have to admit, Ray was great, but when you compare Jamie Foxx with Don Cheadle's performance I don't understand why Cheadle missed the Oscar for best leading actor! Members of the Academy, shame on you!