See the love there that's sleeping

Today's about film. After the 3 films i've watched in the last 2 days, i feel compelled to mention them. First up, the early-anticipated Across the Universe, the semi-arthouse, semi-musical Beatles tribute film that relied WAY too much on corny puns and self-indulgent directing. (spoilers warning) The stupid 'she came in through the bathroom window' comment + the totally superfluous existence of the character Prudence (just so they could sing Dear Prudence) and the final image of Lucy literally in the sky with diamonds (with the song really playing in the background) did not do anything for originality. (spoilers over)

And this was a great scene. As you can guess, it was Strawberry Fields Forever- totally trippy, and they layered on the images of the Vietnam war, and if you can get over how contrived/cliched that whole theme is, it was a nice edge of violence they added to the song there.

Click here for the opening scene of the film (which is one of my favourite parts because it goes slightly downhill from here). If anyone's not a hardcore fan of the Beatles, I'd say give this one a skip. The songs aren't their most well-known ones, and the ballads are only thrown in for very halfhearted love scenes that could be edited out without much consequence. Very impressed with Evan Rachel Wood though, who actually sings most of the songs.

Songs to look out for: While My Guitar Gently Weeps- Martin Luther McCoy, Because- whole cast, Girl- Jimmy Sturgess, Blackbird- Evan Rachel Wood, Happiness is a Warm Gun- (the guy who played Max) , A Day in the Life- Jeff Beck, and the best one, Let It Be- Carol Woods and Timothy T. Mitchum.

Speaking of Evan Rachel Wood, I absolutely loved her in Running with Scissors.

A psycho memoir about two psycho families, totally dysfunctional, completely whacky and very sad at the same time. Loved the entire film- i was literally quite riveted for the entire 1.5 hours. Go watch it everyone! Annette Benning is a genius. Everyone has a little madness in them, the world is so strange it's oddly comical yet tragic at the same time, there is no escape for insanity, and homosexuality is made even more twisted. Is it wrong i found Benning's character's delusions of grandeur very endearing.

Here's a scene- Click here.

And last of all... 21 Grams. It's sort of one of those playing-around-with-editing-and-saturation kind of films.. slightly experimental, like Crash meets Memento meets Pulp Fiction (at least in terms of editing) meets all depressing films with themes like racism, fate, mortality and heroism. Not that i didn't like it. Del Torro was great, Naomi Watts was great, Sean Penn is always great, etc etc; the whole thing was just so.. exhausting.

The editing moves between the future, the present and the past, and while all that is very dramatic and atypical of Hollywood (ie, a good thing for the most part), the ending was just so typical. Like (spoilers warning) YES WE GET IT, we lose 21 grams when we die (loss=death), we retain that when we're alive (unless you need a heart in which you lose one and gain one back), we gain weight when we're pregnant (gain=life), life is precious, poor Jack, cocaine is bad, fate and mathematics entwine, tattoos can be removed with a hot butter knife, and even though the title is tantalising, the entire film barely touches upon the potential of this loss/gain theme(spoilers over). Man. That was exhausting.