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Reviews
Café com Leite (2007)
See it
An excellent short film (18 minutes). It captures the characters, the setting, a major transition in their lives, and will leave you emotionally invested and affected. If you know someone who thinks short films are a waste of time, point them toward this.
Without going into specifics, the film deals with a twenty-something gay couple on the brink of a new phase in their relationship as they try to deal with a number of changes in their lives. Also featuring is the ten-year-old brother of one of them, who comes to play an integral part in the story.
The short film premiered at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival and went on to win the festivals' Crystal Bear prize for Best Short Film.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
Book: Pretty Great. Movie: Awful.
I have read the actual book, "Dreamcatcher", and let me first assure you that the movie didn't have to turn out this way. It might be a hard book to translate to the screen, but if they couldn't do it properly, they should not have tried.
The character of "Curtis" was wrong. Additionally (referring to the Trivia section now), the character name in the book, "Kurtz", was _meant_ to be a reference to Apocalypse Now! Apocalypse Now was a reference back to Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" - and since that's out of copyright, I don't see what the bloody problem would have been with keeping the name, and the association, and for that matter more of the murderous character, in the movie.
The ending was abysmal and not at all accurate to the book's more ambiguous, more interesting conclusion. The accent-change for Mr Grey was stupid - can we have no uncertainty or class at all? Maybe it _shouldn't_ be obvious at once which one he is! Do all aliens manipulate the voice out of its natural accent and into another?
More time inside Jonesy would have been interesting and worthwhile. Better prison-camp scenes would have benefited the movie. Less CGI: stop throwing money at the movie and throw a good script at it instead!
I feel so let down by this attempt at what was originally a story captivating for its, well, alien charm. Avoid the movie and either read the book, or listen to the excellent audio version of it - the narrator can paint a much better picture in a few CDs than this multi-million-dollar large-screen failure.
Lawrence, you did good with your Star Wars efforts. William, you've written some great screenplays - Maverick, Misery, A Bridge Too Far, Marathon Man, All the President's Men...
Stephen, you did great with the book.
Maybe if you'd sold the rights for a little more these talents would have taken some care over making a movie worth anyone's time.
WarGames (1983)
Enthralling AI
I first saw this movie some ten years ago (it being 2003 now). When I rewatched it recently, having found it online, I was excited because I had found the original to be powerful. While the movie is full of stereotypical characters (geeks, would-be geek, army nut, high school girl, brainy soft-spoken Englishman), its beauty lies in the way it explores the relationship between people and computers, emotion and decision, and also pokes into the world of AI, which seems just as far away now as it did in 1983.
I have no idea how much of that technology a kid would have possessed back in '83, but it was all possible in the early days of the Internet, and in its military forebear, ARPANET. Setting relative possibility aside, the interest of this film lies in considering the 'what if?' of human decisions, decisions that may deal out life and death...And what would happen if we let a computer have a shot at working them out. David Clark said, "It is not proper to think of networks as connecting computers. Rather, they connect people using computers to mediate. The great success of the internet is not technical, but in human impact." So imagine what it would be like if we removed the humans altogether?
The reason this film excited me was the way the computer reached its decision. Coupled with three excellent high-tension scenes, and the simple eloquence of Tic Tac Toe (you perhaps have to code an algorithm to try and _win_ Tic Tac Toe to see what I mean...), I was delighted to find that this film kept me as engaged at 19 as it did at 9.