Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Rantastic… (Film #002)



     Okay.  First off, I want to defend my case by saying that the only reason why I watched Letters to Juliet was for Amanda Seyfried.  Not only because I think she's ridiculously gorgeous, which she is, but I think she's an amazing actress.  Many might know her from Mean Girls, but she caught my eye in Jennifer's Body (which was a piece of shit movie too, I only watched it because I got a free screening for it).  Anyways, every want-to-be director has their list of top 3, 5, and/or 10 actors/actresses that they would love to work with one day, and Amanda is in my top 5 list of actresses whom I would love to work with.  She has potential to become one of the greats for sure.  I'll list some reasons on why I think she's great later in this rant - but first let's talk about the movie.

     Where do I start?  oh, I know.  Let's start off by saying that this movie sucks balls.  One of the most cliche romance films of the century.  Sticks to the romance genre formula down to the tee, and it still felt like it was done wrong - It gives love a bad name.  Bon Jovi, anyone?  There were a lot of things that could have been executed better… like the opening scene.  Was it necessary to open with various photo renditions of "Romeo and Juliet"?  I mean, really?  and the text..... being old english.  There's a reason why some people get paid good money to just choose the stinkin' text!  USE THEM.  And of course, when someone says that a romance movie was cliche, they are most likely referring to the dialogue, and yes, the script was elementary.  This was the epitome of a no-brainer movie.  If any girl says that they loved this movie, they better have a god damn amazing, out-of-this-world, oh-my-god-an-alien-popped-out-of-that-man's-stomach-at-a-diner, reason(s) or I'm going to want to punch her left boob while I let out a barbaric yawp.

     Okay.  With that frustrating rant out of the way, here are some good things I saw. Even in the midst of cheesiness, Vanessa Redgrave's performance was simply stunning.  I don't think Vanessa had an amazing performance because everyone else sucked.  I think it's easier to sink with the ship than to rise above it; therefore, her performance was even more elegant because she was able to deliver such depth in a character with the crappy script that was given to her.  Another person who surprised me was Gael.  The way he played the over-ambitious type of character was really well done.  I would have to say that Chris Egan was the bane of the group, but the blame is more on the director and writers because there was no room for him to dig deeper into the character.  Technically speaking, his character didn't need much depth, but it would have been nice to see more.

     Now moving onto Amanda Seyfried.  I think Amanda is an amazing actress who needs to stop being casted into these one dimensional characters.  She has a very charismatic aura in all of her performances, and those eyes of hers - goodness gracious great balls of fire.  At times it looks like she could look straight into your soul.  Not to mention that million dollar smile (I'm a sucker for beautiful smiles).  One of the biggest reasons why I like watching her performance is because you can see her efforts on screen.  She really makes the best of what she's been given and tries her best to push a one dimensional character into a three-dimensional world.  One of these days she's going to shock everyone with her talents and my only wish is that I would be the one to reveal that to the world.

     The most irksome aspect of all of this is realizing that a film like this will and has influenced the culture we live in.  It’s no Shakespeare, but it does have a cause and effect.  The film had a budget of $30 million, and it grossed $80 million worldwide and $53 million domestically…  That’s not even counting the DVD sales.  I’m not worried that this movie is going to change (or brainwash) society’s perception of what love is, but if movies like this continues to strive in theaters and becomes a fad within Hollywood stories, it definitely has the potential to cause a dent (i.e. the Titanic craze in ’97).

     Overall, this movie was horrible and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.  The only good things about this movie was Vanessa's performance, and how awesomely cute/hot Amanda Seyfried comes out in it.

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