for love of the game

i dont much care for sports movies, but i am a total sucker for kevin costner sports movies! in this movie he plays a baseball pitcher who is at the end of his professional career. the film follows his last game as he goes to the mound to pitch one last time. as the game goes on he keeps striking out everyone that comes to the plate. as he gets nearer and nearer to maybe doing the impossible: pitching a perfect game, we go into his head and flash back to everything that brought him to the point he is at. we go back and see him earlier in his career as he makes important decisions about his life and its importance over baseball. mostly the flashbacks come in the form of a girl, kelly preston, and his relationship through the years with her. what starts out as a fling becomes more and more important to him and he must make a decision between the game and the girl. all this is played out as he keeps going back to the mound on his attempt at a perfect game. the film is well constructed, flipping between flashbacks and on the field. as this game takes shape and becomes so important, we see his relationship with preston doing the same. as he throws his last game we see him come to terms with having to leave the sport he loves and the thing that made him who he is. its a good movie, and a great chick flick told from the point of view of the guy. i guess chick flicks for guys usually are sports movies, huh? well, they found the perfect match in this great movie!

my super ex-girlfriend

what a train wreck. just about everything in this movie is a disaster, from start to finish. the movie follows the life of office worker luke wilson as he tries to find love. we know the whole time that he actually likes the girl that he works with, and she likes him, but instead of making that work, we get this whole thing with uma thurman. she plays an art dealer who is also a superhero. the two of them meet and start dating, but uma thurman's character is completely insane and wilson wants out. she flips and begins stalking him. all the while there is some sort of random story going on about an evil bad guy who is after our heroine. the movie might have worked if thurman's character wasnt so absolutely insane. he isnt just a needy girlfriend, she is a desperate stalker for no good reason. oh, and one more thing, why the hell is luke wilson the lead in this movie?!? i dont think it is physically possible to find someone with less of a leading man personality! this guy is a vacuum of emotions, they would have been better off with a cardboard cutout of anyone else! i've never noticed how bad he is until this movie, but to be honest, it could just be that the whole movie sucks and its just making it more apparent.

max

a provocative film that speculates on the life of one of history's biggest villians: adolf hitler. the movie looks at his younger life as he attempts to become a professional artist. max, played by john cusack, is the art dealer who takes a shining to the marginally talented adolf and tries to get him to develop into a better artist with something to say. finding that his skill as an artist is limited, adolf rebels against the art scene and instead begins to push the envelope in his political views instead of his artistic views. the concept is interesting indeed, but we dont really get much of an inside look at adolf himself, instead we only get the perspective of an art dealer who befriends him who is just as confused about the aimless boy as everyone else is. noah taylor does a great job with the unenviable task of trying to make hitler likable, but the story itself doesnt quite allow us to like him. its as if the film makers are trying to make him human, but are just not willing to make him relatable. an interesting film, but misses the mark.