Finally after many months I have seen Contagion. My inner virologist was incredibly giddy the whole time.

Next week for my birthday I'm hoping to see Dark Shadows. Can't wait!

Contagion was a great movie!

Resident Evil. It wasn't BAD, but there was room for improvement. I don't know why, but I'm going to bother my time with the sequels, too...

Malibu's Most Wanted

Funniest. Movie. EVER! I was laughing my ass off.

1933's Bed of Roses starring Constance Bennett. I ♥ Constance Bennett; she's always glamorous, very funny, and can hold her own in dramatic roles, even though she's usually cast as the brash-n-sassy type. Ms Bennett and Pert Kelton are Lorry and Minnie, a pair of prostitutes and thieves just released from a Louisianna state women's prison after serving six months. They bat their lashes onto a riverboat and at threat of going back to jail after Lorry steals $60 from one of the legitimate passengers, she jumps overboard during a fog, leading many to assume she'd drowned. She swims to a cotton barge and immediately locks horns with the barge's owner and captain, Dan (Joel McCrea). She spends a few days on the barge with him before taking some money out of his jacket after he leaves his room, then runs off after they dock.

On land, Lorry impersonates a news reporter to interview a politician, Stephen, and after feigning a heart condition to get a nip of alcohol off of him (Prohibition was not overturned until December of 1933, long after the film's production and cinematic debut), somehow eventually gets him drunk and carries him back to his lush home. After he awakens, he discovers her there, and fearing a scandal, he begrudgingly falls for her apparent attempt to con money out of him, and so he sets her up in her own apartment. Now long after, Lorry and Minnie reunite, and Minnie is now married to a rich but undesirable sad sack of a man who doesn't care that she's only taken up with him for the money. Lorry then relocates Dan's barge and repays him the money she stole, thanking him for not being too angry --he admits to her he was at first, but then thought about it and assumed she must have been desperate to steal it rather than ask, and he was doing pretty well for himself, so he figured he'd just let it go-- and the two, now in better spirits, take a liking to each-other; of note, she lies to him about her profession, instead claiming that her job is "a governess, of sorts... for an old Southern family", allowing him to assume a nanny position. Lorry and Stephen are revealed to fight regularly, and she routinely makes empty threats to commit suicide. Stephen doesn't want her having friends over, and has had people in his employ uncover her background --he's also had her followed to the docks and discovered that she's been seeing Dan. After another fight between Lorry and Stephen, she heads off to Dan's barge where he proposes marriage; smitten, she accepts and returns to her apartment to pack some of the clothing she's accumulated, informing her personal main that she's going to be married and wouldn't need anything too fancy because she'll be living on the barge. Stephen returns home and another fight happens, ending with him basically blackmailing Lorry to stay, threatening to reveal her past to Dan. Lorry still leaves, but avoids Dan's barge, and instead rents out a small room in an attic of a house near the docks, soon taking up a job at a clothing store.

Eventually, Stephen begins to miss Lorry, and employs Minnie to find her and arrange for them to be reunited at a local Mardi Gras party. Lorry is suspicious, but goes along anyway. Stephen confesses that though what he feels for her isn't love, it's an honest arrangement where the two of them don't have to pretend to be something they aren't; he reminds her that she still hasn't confessed her past to Dan and presumptively tells her that no decent man will marry a woman with her past. She admits that she has no interest in reuniting with Dan because of that assumption, but she still prefers her current life to being Stephen's concubine. Eventually, Dan finds Lorry, and knocks on the door to her room. Lorry never confesses her full past in so many words (for a Pre-Code film that the cab;e guide describes as "racy", it's pretty tame and the word "prostitute" or any euphemisms for said, like "lady of ill-repute" are never mentioned; her former profession is, though, implied all over the place), but hints that Dan might not approve; Dan insists he doesn't care, love is love and when you know, you know --he confesses that for the last several months, he'd done little more than look for her, his crew now thinks he's nuts, and his business is nearing the red, but finding Lorry, even if just to find out why she stood him up, was all he cared about.

The ending is obvious, but very sweetly played out. Overall, the film is pretty well-written and well-paced. Typical of films of the time, all the accents are more typical of New York or California or the Midwest than the New Orleans area it's set it (save for most of the Black members of the cast playing bit parts, mostly on the barge, who were apparently directed to have barely-intelligible mock-Cajun drawls --this, too, is typical of the era), but what are you going to do? It's more witty than belly-laugh funny, and that's fine, considering the subject material, broad comedy wouldn't work. Some scenes are also subtly dramatic, but softened with cynical humour --in one of the scenes with Lorry and Stephen fighting, during Minnie's visit, Minnie attempts to drown out their shouting but putting a record on the massive and gorgeous Art Deco phonograph in the middle of Lorry's apartment, and while being swamped with a sale at the fabric store, Minnie rather aggressively attempts to get Lorry to consent to come to the party, and so Lorry starts screaming every time Minnie starts to speak, the apparent goal to get Minnie either to stop asking or to leave. Honestly, Constance Bennett is the best actor in the film; Joel McCrea as Dan is decent enough, but his stoic delivery make it clear that he was destined for many Westerns, but he and Bennett play well off each other, and this is one of at least two films they made together. John Halliday as Stephen was adequately pompous for the role, but Pert Kelton as Minnie really lacked personality and often just came off as a bossier version of Lorry once her husband is introduced to the cast --I can only really blame part of that on the writing, but then this was before "method acting" so I tend to be a little forgiving, considering everything else is done well.

Definitely worth seeing.

Just watched Sherlock Holmes 2 and Underworld : Awakening.
Really enjoyed both, fun movies

Dark Shadows. It was alright, but it certainly wasn't Tim Burton's best. :/

Honestly, I've been feeling like that about his films since Big Fish --which I get the impression I liked more than most. Hell, I liked his Charlie & the Chocolate Factory more than most; in many respects, it was truer to the book, and I liked that it made use of Dahl's songs, but it still missed a few marks, and the added back-story on Wonka, in spite of being approved by Dahl's widow (unlike the first film), really seemed completely unnecessary. Part of what made the Willy Wonka character so intriguing in the books was that we knew precious little about him, cos we didn't need it. The story is clearly a very loose Biblical allegory (looser and far less-obvious than, say The Apple, which should be more famous as a camp classic than it is), specifically modelling the temptation of Christ, with Wonka as both a devil and god-figure, which arguably makes it a sort of Gnostic fable rather than mainstream Christian --indeed, in pre- and early Christian texts, especially those of Hebrew origin, the Satan figure is not the adversary of G-d, but the adversary of mankind, suggesting that figure is simply another face of G-d rather than the autonomous figure presented in later texts.

As much as I love Johnny Depp, and I believe he hit this childish aspect of Willy Wonka that Gene Wilder didn't quite get perfectly, it seemed more... like he was going for "bratty" rather than the sort of adolescent manipulative that Wilder was aiming for; Wilder's portrayal of that aspect was more "disconnected", which arguably made the character creepier, but at the same time, Wonka's tantrum, as portrayed by Wilder, seemed a bit too controlled when I think that would have been a perfect time to unleash, even if the character knew it was just for show. Depp simply just missed the mark in that one, and while I didn't hate it as much as most people seemed to, I didn't like it as much as I wanted to.

Hellraiser 3... I don't know why , but i just like this series

I absolutely hate the Resident Evil movies. Sorry, I've been a fan of the video games for many years and the films did not even try to come close to the video game series. Also, it's annoying as shit to see Alice come back to life at the end of every one of those movies. Never ends!!! lol [/rant]

Going to see Dark Shadows tonight. I'm not going in there with any expectations, to be honest. I can see it being great or being a major flop.

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp - heck, Tim Burton and ALL of his stock characters - just need to take a creative break from each other is all.

^^I agree. Tim Burton needs to make something where Johnny Depp is NOT in it. At all. Not even in as a two-second cameo.

As much as I like Johnny Depp and Tim Burton (well, his early stuff at least), I agree that Burton needs give Johnny a break and that he needs to kick back on it.



Last movie I've seen was Grave of the Vampire, not too bad, if you like low budget.

As much as I think maybe they could use a break from each-other, I doubt it's going to happen. Burton once said in interview that "all the great Golden Age directors had that one leading man that seemed to be who they considered a more attractive version of themselves, and I really like to think of Depp as my leading man who's a more attractive version of myself".

So, yeah, I doubt it's going to happen, especially considering what a failure so many people considered Big Fish.

Last night, I watched Anonymous. It was a fantastic film which focused on two main subjects equally; events which took place in the Sixteenth Century, and the works of the much beloved William Shakespeare and where they came from. I loved it!