theSamo's Cacophony with your feet on the air

• How to lose friends and alienate people: Simon Pegg's major selling out feature is about selling out and not so bad. It would've been good if it escaped Hollywood Romantic Comedy tropes. Thumbs Up!

• Burn After Reading: more like burn after watching. big letdown. Thumbs Down!

• Seven Pounds: really well-made. concept is great. but if you catch on to what's going on early it becomes a real bore. Thumbs Up!

• The Wrestler: this one is slow. but keeps you on your toes. The Ram is one of the more interesting protagonists I've seen this year. Mickey Rourke was too old though albeit perfect. Thumbs Up!

• Vicky Cristina Barcelona: kinda crazy and fun but not much to tell. Thumbs Down! (Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz make out for like a couple of seconds. So you might disagree)

I'll need to elaborate on the next one.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button: When I first saw this movie's trailer... I thought... "well, that's a lame concept." It turned out to be almost the same as I expected it to be. This one is not for busy people at almost a 3 hours length. It also left me perplexed after watching it. "WTF was that?"

Imagine a child born with a deformity... now imagine a tale of love, war, loss, friendship and regrets built around it... a tale 3 hours long. One that uses almost every hollywood trope it can. A tale so generic that its more appropriate of a spoof flick called "Epic Love Tale". But that's not this movie unfortunately. This movie adds the unique non-sense badly thought concept of "growing backwards"... which introduced a whole playing field of cgi and visual effects but adds very little to the story.

The movie is also too disconnected. What's the point of this story really? .... it's pointless. The director does a great job of creating an exciting world. but the camera is only showing us the uninteresting and the unbelievable. The story isn't the only one distracting itself. Both the narrative style and filming styles show great variation. between the 40s scenes, the 70s scenes and the modern day scenes you can feel strong changes almost deep down to the film stock.

Cate Blanchett southern accent was annoying as her "acting". Brad Pitt emerged from the makeup and cgi after 2 hours or so to give us a plain performance. Taraji and Tilda Swinton's parts were good and the actresses pulled them off alright. Come to think of it, these minor performances are much better than the lead roles.

Thumbs Down!

• side note... The award season has an extreme bias towards movies released in Dec. and later. It's also retarded. "In Bruges" is running for a golden globe as a Musical/Comedy. Har Har