Stella's Talk

An Education

A 16-year old Oxford-bound schoolgirl falls in love with a worldly older man. Well-done, believable coming-of-age tale with excellent performances, realistic characterizations, and few surprises.

The Box

i'm a sucker for a movie like this,even if it stars cameron diaz,and have a poor review out there.and a big box office flop,still,i'm curious. and for what its worth,after watching it,i do find it entertaining and intriguing. Richard kelly didn't get lucky with Donnie Darko. he is one hell awesome director.This,like Donnie Darko,is some weird shit to the max.,and i like weird.definitely gonna catch it again one time,to fully understand it

The Bohemian Girl

A very nice, rather unknown feature film of Laurel & Hardy. The duo made three comic operas, merging music with comedy. It works quite well in this feature, although nobody will watch the movie for the music, but for the comic genius of Laurel & Hardy. They play good-hearted but empty-pursed gypsies, which is a great vehicle for their comedy.

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes

Fantastic Mr. Fox

A few things I got out of watching this film:
1. A true Wes Anderson film with the dramatic closeups, unsual camera angles and framing, those wonderful music queues, and odd character behavior in a film about a group coming to grips with what makes them unique.
2. A very clever story based on the work of Roald Dahl.
3. Some of the most incredible stop-animation.

Being a tough-minded film that is absolutely suitable for children, Fantastic Mr Fox is also wise enough to be a bigger hit with grown-up audiences. I wanted to hug this film.

Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon)

at last,a haneke film that i could endure (and what a masterpiece it is,an extraordinary crafted tale).There are two things that makes this film stands out from other haneke's film. The first is the narrative. by telling the story from the first person perspective (in this case,the teacher of the village),the film never loses its grip. the story,flows perfectly. The second is its beautiful black and white cinematography and beautiful landscape.unlike any other haneke film,which is,just so simple and boring (image-wise),but in white ribbon,well,you could capture any image of the film,send it to a photography competition,and you could win from it.it's THAT beautiful. as the story itself.no need to say,this is as good as any other of his story.The difference is,this time he captures it on screen perfectly!

Badlands

1973 "badlands" is an idyllic film about a young couple whose lives have been led astry by fate's mishappenings...strangely, "badlands" is supposed to be a horrific story about morbid trigger-happy young fellows who have caused the deaths of a couple of innocent people due to momentary spur. but it is not, it's a lyrically romantic tale about a naive but hell-bent first love of a guileless young girl, and the killings done during the movie all seem to be forced by the circumstances despite the girl narrates "he's the most trigger-happy person i've ever seen in my whole life"...

now it comes to my routine reciting of the scenario: a plain-jane type of young girl meets a somehow handsome proletariat young man who lives on the wrong side of the track..pleasantly they conversed on the sidewalk, and she knows he's just a petite garbage-man.. but when he requests to see her again, she silently assents...then they see each other more and more in their exclusive retreat..someday the girl's father discover this romance and wanna forbid it, but the boy insists on eloping with the girl so he breaks into the girl's house and starts packing for her...spotted by the girl's father, the boy shoots the father dead after being provoked with criminal charges and the jail sentences. all of a sudden, our anti-hero grabs his girl on the road after setting the house aflame...on the way of their fierce escape, they dwell into a wooden nest by the lake of cottonwoods, dining on raw chickens and fishes like two people in oblivion of civilization until some intrusive bounty-hunter invade into their sanctuary of wilderness..so our anti-hero shoots every single man and keeps on rolling...a spree of killing occur when our protagonist gets anxiety-stricken under the fright of getting caught...at last, the couple set their way within the desolate desert heading the borderline of montana, living in an even more primitively exclusive way like eating grass until one day the girl awakens to realize that this man ain't for her...

as for why it's romantic? i suppose, in a way, both characters have a residue of innocence within them, particularly the childlike detachment sissy spacek holds, her character is like that sort of person you feel comfort in getting along with even you may not notice her that much, she seems like that sort of person who won't pass a judgemental contempt to you no matter what you have done, she just quietly does her own thinking without casting a disturbance on anyone like a misanthropic child who just enjoys galloping in the forest on her own...martin sheen, in that stage of his career, appears fresh-lookingly handsome with an undercurrent rebellious temperament, a freewheeling youthful air infuses a light-headed charisma into him..his character is more like wondrous man who accidentally commits a horrible crime but he continues doing it just to see whether he could make a freeman out of himself again by killing off all the witnesses because he's an adventurist who's willing to take all the risks... he's also a romanticist who would stop the cadillac in the middle of barren desert at dark night to dance with his girlfriend along the melody of nat king cole spontaneously flowing from radio, whose ultimate fear of death is just that he doesn't wish to die alone without a girl to scream his name out, who's poetic by soul to be in awe with the grand sight of tangerine sunset with clouds etwined like a gigantic castle....eventually he surrenders to the police under the pretense of flat tire because he doesn't wish to carry on alone with the girl by his side, and also he voluteers to keep the girl's records clean before he's sentenced into the electric chair..

sissy specek's narratives just feel so self-absorbed like someone's reciting her own precious diaries, and the movie takes the woman's visage to move on, and the tone of her voice sounds apathetically introspective..she doesn't seem to be happy or particularly sad, and far from angst-ridden..she simply exists and encounters a gorgeous boy who looks like james dean, who seems to appreciate her as what she is, for that, she's gratified even he's the murderer of her father and he seems to have a hidden violent streak. but strangely she tends to live along with that fine as if her senses are buried into an autistic universe of naive wonderments for the world until she starts to acknowledge the consequences of things at last, so farewell to girlhood and puberty!

"badlands" is a subdued treat to the eye for baring the poetic inland america, and middle-east states could be quite enchanting with a simplistic allure which is originally american, and as the audience, i feel the grusome aspect of those spree-killings is shielded out of a vacuum of outlandish reveries within the core of the protagonists' hearts which are filled with every bit of purity and candidness in a society which wouldn't take individuality into its frigid consideration as if life's a fast-living dream and at next moment you die in an electric chair after slumbering over a melodic tune of nat kind cole's..after all, the world ain't for dreamers!