Good - great, even - but not till the last drop. The last 5 minutes contains a totally unnecessary bit of business that insults the intelligence of everyone watching. Oh well.

Beautiful, subtle soundtrack (must get!) and incredibly lush visuals, saturated colors, etc. Now I want to live in Germany.

I liked how unrelentingly slow and measured the pace was, even though it made me kind of antsy at times.

I could watch John Cusack eat the phone book for two hours and be entertained, but this movie really doesn’t work very well. It’s not badly made, exactly—it just doesn’t have a tone. It’s not realistic, so it’s not gritty and sad; it’s not over-the-top enough, so it’s not dark and satirical. It’s just weird.

Or, as Ross and I like to say, it’s just crzazy. Like Martin Scorsese.

Nice one, Tim. I didn’t think I could like Sarah Jessica Parker, but somehow you managed to make me. :-) About halfway through the movie I realized I’d actually seen Plan 9 From Outer Space, at a film festival in Singapore when I was 17. Heh. Man, Johnny Depp is beautifully weird.

Pretty good - chewy and quite palatable, but I’m not going to remember it in a couple of months. Good on Ned Vizzini for becoming a pro writer so young, though - looking forward to seeing how he matures.

What is with people? ;-)

I’ll try to find it in me to talk about this on the Rumpus tomorrow.

I thought I could handle reading a biography of a Christian apologist, but it turns out the author’s laudatory tone when discussing all Lewis’s arguments about the subject really puts me off. In addition, he attempts to defend Lewis’s misogynistic views as “not that bad, considering, and really not as bad as they seem”—and appears to believe that non-Christians who criticize the Narnia books do so primarily because they resent Lewis for his “elitist” belief in Heaven.

Sigh.

Ross told me this was the saddest book ever, and that every bad thing that could possibly happen in it does.

That’s totally not true, but it is a sort of melancholy book in an “O The Tragedy of Ordinary Life” way. I liked it a lot. Go Brandeis! :-)

I forgot to record that we watched this several weeks ago and both thought it was extremely beautiful but not very emotionally compelling or well-plotted. Definitely lovely eye-candy though.

Finally saw this! Liked it a lot, but am not sure if it’s kosher to like it for being campy and funny as opposed to moody and brilliant. :-)

Ok, so here’s the thing.

I really, really liked this movie. A lot. And that’s pretty rare, for me. I tend to see flaws, I expect a lot, I’m easily detached and not easily manipulated. But The Prestige really worked for me in a lot of ways.

And yet - oh, why must there be an “and yet”? - I can’t really say I LOVED it, because it bothers me quite a bit that the “magic” of the plot (pardon the pun) depends on the audience accepting a totally fabricated “scientific fact” within the otherwise realistic world of the story. It’s not fantasy - this isn’t a fantastic world. It’s just a (wonderful, weird, and admittedly very satisfying) TOTALLY MADE-UP THING. And, shades of Erica, I think that’s cheating. Because the movie doesn’t follow any of the other conventions of fantasy - it doesn’t create its own world within which we might be persuaded to accept the veracity of this fantastical element. It just fabricates a thing that can’t, and doesn’t, exist in our world in order to create a surprising reveal at the end. And that just doesn’t work for me, intellectually or artistically.

It kind of works for me aesthetically, which is why I still really enjoyed the movie. :-)