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VIDEODRONE

By only

Monday August 20, 2007

NEW MOVIE MONDAYS

Live of Others
It’s hard to really know if this was THE best foreign film of the year because there are a lot of movies being made out there, but this is certainly a very good one. Set in East Germany in 1984 towards the unknowable end of the cold war; it was a dangerous time when anything you said could be held against you and used as evidence that you were an enemy of the socialist state, especially if a corrupt government official falls for your girlfriend and wanted you out of the way. But when a famous playwright and his girlfriend are spied on by a fastidious member of the secret police, a strange thing happens. The more the spy spies, the more enraptured he becomes with his suspects lives, finding an intimacy in their lives which he desperately lacks in his own. The more he listens the closer he feels, until he even begins to question his own politics. Cool and removed, the film presents cold war paranoia with a dulled humanity as our spy tries to figure out a way to save the lives of the people he has come to care about.


Dexter
We’d heard a lot about this show. David from Six Feet Under playing a blood splatter forensic specialist working for the Miami police department who is also a serial killer sounded pretty promising. And it wasn’t that bad. We’re happy Michael C. Hall got another gig, and he’s really good at playing a not-gay sociopath who juggles a normal work life and then stalks and kills bad people who had it coming. The premise is pretty original and for the first 6 hours the show held its own, especially when the plot involving another serial killer kicked in to gear. But by the eight hour mark we’d already figured out who it was and for the next four hours it was just a matter finding out why. There’s some good gore and lots of methodical voice over, and you gotta like the idea of serial killer with standards and morals… unless of course you’re a child molester or something. Then you’d probably like the idea of eating cookies shaped like children.


Perfect Stranger
Let’s take a quick poll. How many of you, when you’re chatting online with your friends or writing an email or whatever, say out loud what you are actually typing? None of you? Yeah, exactly. Yet for some insane reason, in every single Hollywood movie EVER, whenever someone is chatting on a computer they are also talking along with the words. This “tactic” is super prevalent in Perfect Stranger (not to be confused with Danielle Steel’s A Perfect Stranger) to the point of ridicule. Well actually the whole movie is a ridiculous abortion, but the typing/talking thing is the real clincher… Actually that’s not quite true. When it turns out Halle Berry is the killer, that’s the clincher. It’s the equivalent of finding out Chazz Palminteri was Keyser Soze, if the Usual Suspects had been directed by the cast of The Hills.