my opinion matters

I took a class in grad school titled “Mental Health and Contemporary Fiction” and we read a book by Alice Sebold. That is how I came upon The Lovely Bones, the book and the film. The book was… well… to be honest I didn’t really enjoy it. At first it was interesting and good, but then it got weird and boring and kind of lame. There was a lot of skimming towards the end of the book, and I am not ashamed to tell you that. But, nonetheless, I wanted to see the film. Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlburg, Susan Sarandon – I can’t pass something like that up even if I wanted to. But I’ll tell you what – they did a good job on making a kind of crappy book into a decent movie, and I believe that is all because of Stanley Tucci. I have always liked him, but he really is different and awesome in this film – totally creepy, but great. I think one of the best parts is that he doesn’t look or act like Stanley Tucci at all, except with his hands and little things like that. He is a great actor. Now, in the b...

First of all, let me be clear. I’m talking about Nine the musical, not 9 the weird animated movie. That movie was seriously weird and not that good. Rob Marshall, the same guy who did Chicago brilliantly, also directs Nine, which is a musical about a famous Italian director (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is trying to film a movie called Italia and at the start of the film there is no real script or creative vision. You realize the whole movie is going to be about him and his relationships between all these women – his wife, his mother, his mistress, his muse. The cast is a little weird, but there are some big names: Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren (who, by the way, needs to lay off the face lifts), Marion Cotillard. Somehow, Fergie comes across a little chubby, which is weird and doesn’t make much sense – maybe she put on some weight for the role or something. Anyway, so the movie starts with a song introducing all the major characters in wordless so...