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There Must Be Some Misunderstanding

I know that movies made in Hollywood are meant to be entertainment. I watched a couple of movies recently that defy that statement.


House of Sand and Fog – I remember seeing the commercials for this movie and wanting to see it when it came out. Boy, would I have been pissed to see this stinker in the theater. Jennifer Connolly played a recently-divorced woman who has deluded herself into thinking everything is okay. She gets a knock on her door one morning telling her she’s just been evicted. At the same time, an Iranian immigrant has been eying the property, waiting for it to come up for sale. The woman is thrown out of the house and the immigrant buys the house. Everything seems like a done deal, right? Wrong. The woman gets entangled with a sheriff's deputy (thereby ruining him and his family) and tries to get the immigrant to give up the house (thereby ruining him and his family). She got a lot of letters telling her what was about to happen. As her lawyer tells her “all you had to do was open your mail”. I don’t get it. Why doesn’t she just get another house? I realize that her father saved for years to get this house but, apparently, he’s moved on – why can’t she? I’d like to say the characters were compelling. They weren’t. I’d like to say the drama was intense. It wasn’t. I’d like to say I enjoyed myself while watching this. I didn’t.


Burn After Reading – I had high hopes for this one. Maybe my expectations were too high. The basic story is about a CIA analyst who gets demoted (then quits) and begins to write his memoirs. His wife is divorcing him so she needs to get his financial records and ends up making a disc of his memoirs. That disc somehow ends up in the hands of some workers at a “work out” place who think it’s raw intelligence. At this point you’re thinking “hilarity ensues”, right? I know I did. I don’t think I laughed once. If handled correctly, I think this could have been a much better film. All the people were cartoon characters of themselves and I ended up not liking any of them. There were all kinds of plot twists and surprise turns with characters doing things you didn’t expect them to do, which would be okay -- if you cared about them. And what was with that chair that George Clooney’s character built? At one point in the movie I could actually hear the water-skis hitting the ramp before it jumped the shark. As with “House of Sand and Fog” I felt like there was a lot of activity for no good reason. I didn’t get the feeling that any of the characters had any motivation for what they were doing and other characters were ruining lives without good cause.


All-in-all, not a good outing for movie-watching.

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