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Monday April 28, 2008

NEW MOVIE MONDAYS

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
One of our friends walked in a few minutes into this one and upon discovering what the movie was about said “That would suck, I would want to die.” And well, so did he. But then the 40 year-old editor of Elle, now totally paralyzed except for one eye which he used to communicate through blinking, reconciled with himself and wrote a book, one blink at a time, and called it the “Diving Bell and The Butterfly”. He died 10 days after it was published. What can we say, even our callous hearts were warmed.


Golden Compass
There was a weird amount of bruhaha surrounding this film when it came out, but we couldn’t really see what the big deal was. Doesn’t every fantasy book get the old “it’s against God, it’s promoting magic” treatment? We just figured if you feel like you are being represented by the bad guys here, you are probably reacting out of guilt because the bad guys enslave children and brainwash them and lock them up somewhere in a magical winterland. What those anti-fantasy creationists don’t seem to recognize is that the probability of giant, armour-wearing warrior Polar Bears showing up to put a stop to it all, is pretty unlikely. Not impossible, mind you, but still pretty improbable.


How She Move
We don’t get a lot of inner city dance-off films made in this country. But this one was made in Toronto, and follows all the rules you would expect. A smart girl from the projects (yes, they have them in the T-dot) wants to get out by getting into a good college, but she’s broke. Luckily she’s totally got step and joins a crew in an attempt to win the Step Monster competition in Detroit. $50,000 to the winner. Rivalries abound, then there is a lot of stepping, and popping, and locking and spinning; car windows are smashed and her mom arrives in Detroit to take her home, just in time to see her daughter step, and realizes her daughter has talent. All in an efficient 93 minutes thank you very much.