monkeysontoast

I finally got a chance to watch a movie last week...it had been over a month! This movie tells the story of two young boys that fall in love, one a post-pubescent student at a boarding school, the other the pre-pubescent son of the school's headmaster.

First, the movie is beautiful. The interaction between the two main characters is touching, and handled with tender care. The two young men (who are the actual ages they are portraying) are excellent and convincing in their roles...as are the other young actors who make up the rest of the students at the school. The interactions between all the characters in the movie are incredibly realistic...not sugar coated, or worse, over dramatized.

There are issues, however, with this movie that make it less than excellent. For one, the script is terribly fragmented. For a while, you forget that there is supposed to be a relationship developing between the two main characters. The main storyline gets lost amongst a jumble of other side stories going on inside and outside of the schools walls. While these side stories don't dull down the movie (on the contrary, they are often humorous and charming), they strip any semblance of order and purpose from the narrative.

The other issue is that all the other characters are either completely oblivious to the affection that Bo and Kim share (which is nearly impossible), or they don't care (which seems equally odd). While I've nothing against a story that is simple, innocent, and charming...you'd think that these two boys would suffer some of the hardships that come along with being young and gay. :giveup Overall, I applaud the movie for approaching it's subject material so openly, in a way that would NEVER be seen in an American film. The characters are engaging and a joy to watch. Too bad the story wasn't more cohesive. Still, worthy of a 7/10.

I caught this movie on Sci-Fi before heading into work. If you've any interest in seeing Dean Cain dive and avoid being enveloped in flames at least a dozen times, this movie is for you. If that doesn't peak your interest, well, I'm afraid you'll wish that YOU were the one about to be enveloped in flames, because this movie is pretty bad. The acting, to begin with, is awful, awful, awful. The characters are all completely obnoxious, and the dialogue is worse than your typical Z-grade, Sci-Fi movie. Towards the end, the movie began to remind me of 'Hollow Man' (complete with escape via elevator shaft), except with a Dragon, not a naked, invisible man. Unlike other similar flicks, however, this one wasn't even awesomely bad...it was just plain bad.

I don't know who the first person was to hail Paul Giamatti and being a talented actor, because he's one of the dullest, expressionless actors I've ever had the misfortune to watch in a movie. That said, it's difficult for me to fathom the appeal of a movie that stars him rambling endlessly on about his wine hobby/love/infatuation, unless of course the person him/herself is a wine connoisseur, and thus, finds discussions about wine interesting. I don't. I thought the writing in the movie would be interesting and witty...it wasn't. I thought the acting would be great...it wasn't. I thought there would be an actual story...there wasn't. In what seems to be a character study film, it fails miserably, because the characters never actually develop past the unlikeable jerkoff's they were to begin with, and because of this, the audience doesn't give a care for them. Apart from a few amusing one-liner's and scenes involving Thomas Haden Church's character, the movie was completely tedious and mind-numbing. It did eventually pick up, starting with an interesting mini-speech on the part of Madsen's character, but an hour and a half too late to matter.