Tag: Melanie Laurent

Enemies are quite annoying. Everyone probably has a few. I know I have several, including: The Morlocks, Jafar, Tropical Flavored skittles. The list just goes on and on and on.

But what if your enemy was yourself? I have heard that if your enemy is yourself, it is often your worst enemy. That has got to suck. The film Enemy is actually based on that concept!

Actually, it is based on a novel, The Double. It is definitely not based on the movie The Double that came out this year, also dealing with doppelgangers, and it most certainly has nothing to do with the movie The Double from a few years ago.

Huh. Maybe The Double (2014 film) is a twisted doppelganger of The Double (Book) and it prevented Enemy from being a regular doppelganger of The Double (book). The Double (2014 film) stole Enemies identity!

My head hurts. Oooh beards!

Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is your average regular college professor. He teaches about totalitarianism and dictators! A theme that may slightly be relevant to the movie. He lives with his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) and she thinks he is a cheating fool. He has been weird lately and keeping secrets and making secret phone calls.

Why? Because Adam has made a relevation. After watching a movie recommended by a coworker, he noticed a bellhop in the background. And that bellhop looked just like him. Turns out this Anthony Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal) has only been in a few pictures, all side who gives a shit roles, but by golly, he looks just like him. After a lot of sleuthing Adam is able to set up a meeting with Anthony.

Shit. Is. Bananas.

Well, when someone seems to be an exact replica of you with a different personality, who also knows where you live and who you interact with, it is pretty easy to get paranoid. Anthony himself has a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) and is in a committed relationship.

What can either of these gentlemen gain from this doppelmagic and more importantly, what can they lose?

It is hard to stalk someone when you don’t know which one is your husband.

Reading up on an analysis of the film and book after I watched the movie, there was apparently a lot that went over my head. Intellectual smart person stuff that might require reading or degrees in movie theory to get. And don’t worry, i am not letting that fact get affect my view. I just had a recurring “what the fuck, spiders?” thought going through my head throughout the movie. I’d say its a small enough part to get by.

Enemy is incredibly well acted and Jake G is showing off over the last few years a great side to himself. With this, Prisoners, End of Watch, I’d almost be willing to watch most anything with him as a main actor in it. Dude figured it out and it was good.

Enemy is not a quick movie and one that requires you to pay attention. It has a small number of important characters in it and really tries hard to drive the appropriate emotions through silence. However, the film is also really friggan yellow. And that just in general bugs the crap out of me. Over filtering.

I hope another film comes out with a similar plot to make more duplication jokes. Really.

3 out of 4.

The first time I saw the trailer for Now You See Me, I got all sorts of excited. A movie with magic and illusions? Heck yeah! It has been seven years since we really had movies on the subject, when we were blessed with The Prestige and The Illusionist, both of which were quite enjoyable.

Oh. I meant good movies about magicians. Sorry. I tend to forget about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone already (and that was in March!).

Look at this gaggle of fucks right here. Basically every star in this movie! Wait…

To start the film, we are introduced to four different street magicians. Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), the fast talking kind of a dick magician, McKinney (Woody Harrelson), the formerly big mentalist, Henley (Isla Fisher), the former assistant turned pro, and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), the thieving tricky magician. They are all invited to a secret gathering, where they find blue prints to pull off great magical feats. A year later, they are calling themselves The Four Horsemen and headlining in Las Vegas and around the world!

Their new benefactor is Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), a big big millionaire, and they just used a magic trick to rob a bank in Paris. Huh? What?

Yep. But the FBI and lead detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) are in a pickle. Can they arrest them for a magic trick, with no real evidence? Well, no evidence unless they assume magic is real. The answer is no. Even with Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), an ex-magician who has a web-series explaining and spoiling other magician’s secrets, they don’t have enough to actually put them away.

Rhodes and his new partner from Interpol (Melanie Laurent) have to follow the four horsemen across America, as their tricks get more and more daring, and steal from more and more powerful sources. But are they doing these tricks alone, or is there a Fifth Horsemen secretly pulling the strings? Also featuring Michael Kelly as an FBI agent. I feel bad for not including him.

In a previous version of this review, I used famous character names instead of actor names for the plot description (like Mark Zuckerberg, or The Hulk) but Dave Franco kind of ruined that. No one really knows who he is.

Why are you so befuddled Ruffalo? Surprised I decided to leave Eisenberg out of the pictures?The more I think about the ending to Now You See Me, the more I get angry at inconsistencies. That is what I get for thinking about a movie afterwards I guess. But alas, my burden to carry as a reviewer.

In a movie like this, there will be red herrings, because they know you are trying to guess the ending the entire time. After all, clearly the fifth horseman will be someone in the movie, not some random stranger popping up at the end! But when the reveal happens it just doesn’t seem to make much since the harder you look at the film.

The movie spends a decent amount of time focusing on explaining the tricks, thanks to Freeman’s character, but at the same time, there are things done only toby the power of CGI that kind of take the mysticism out of it. We are left wondering if magic is actually real in this movie, or if it is all explainable like the normal real world. Honestly, by the end, I am still not sure.

At the same time, it still was a bit entertaining. I think Woody Harrelson was my favorite player in the movie, by far. Which is great, because I finally saw Rampart recently and didn’t have a good time doing it. As the mentalist, he was pretty funny. Ruffalo was okay as the main cop character, but definitely not the type of role he is used to. After all, aside from The Avengers and this film, every role he has had has basically been in an indie movie.

Now You See Me did a good job of playing with our mind, giving every possible misdirection in the book. But it in no way will stand up to the previous mentioned magic films in a year or two. However, it is still at least a little bit cool.

2 out of 4

The Beginners is supposed to be a pseudo autobiographical flick from the director. But I don’t believe it all that much. Mostly because he looks nothing like Ewan McGregor.

But if Ewan looked identical to the director, this would be a picture of the stars of the movie.

A good thing to know about this movie, for enjoyment purposes, is that it is not told in order. Not at all. Flashbacks, all that stuff. I missed that in the beginning, leading to some unnecessary confusion.

Ewan stars and narrates in the movie, that begins by stating his father (Christopher Plummer) just died. So right away the story breaks up. Four years before his fathers death, his mother died, and he also found out his father was gay.

He didn’t want to be “theoretically gay” either, but experience it, so he opened himself up to a completely new lifestyle and had a younger lover (Goran Visnjic). He dies of some stage four cancer. Half of the movie is telling of Ewan’s past, and the four last years of his dad’s life, and the other half is him coping with the aftermath and falling in love with Melanie Laurent.

Also in this movie? A cute dog! Ewan has to take him in after the death, and he really helps him cope. Or at least gives him someone to talk to. AND ITS A JACK RUSSEL TERRIER.

Actual scene from the movie. Awww.

There are other transitional moments between scenes, where Ewan talks over photos and gives nice breaks between heavier (and also lamer) moments.

It was a decent story. But sometimes the disconnectedness really got to me. The actress, Laurent, I never really liked in the movie. Ewan would have carried the whole movie, but with half of the movie him being kind of morose, it didn’t help the viewer. Plummer and Visnijc (what a last name. Crazyness) were both really good, even though Visnijc didn’t get that much screen time compared to the rest.

2 out of 4.