The Secret in Their Eyes...and Alice.

The Secret in Their Eyes is the Argentinean film that won the Academy Award for best foreign film-the one no one had heard of, when everyone expected The White Ribbon to get it.
It is a really good movie-moving back and forth between present day and the early 70's right before everything went REALLY bad in Argentina. There's rape and murder, and Ricardo Darin from Nine Queens is sent to investigate. Does he find the perpetrator? Yes, but the perp has connections and is set free, presumably to commit other crimes on behalf of the regime. All these years later, Ricardo is wondering what happened. Did the rapist/murderer disappear? Get a good job? Killed? And what about the victim's husband, who was destroyed by her death? What happened to him? And amongst this is the unrequited love story of Ricardo and his boss, the lovely and smart Irene-with they or will they not finish their story? I though what happened to the killer was chilling-my friend D thought he got what he deserved but I hate the idea of people taking justice into their own hands. And what happened? Did he tell Irene about it? No, I'm not going to say-go see it for yourself. It's worth it.

I liked Alice in Wonderland-that's all. It didn't move me like Big Fish, or make me love it like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or awe me like Batman and Sleepy Hollow. It was good but that's about it. I did not think much of Mia Wasiskowa (I know I'm misspelling her name) but Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter were very entertaining and I did not recognize Crispin Glover as Stayne (he was really good). I will say this-I wanted every outfit Alice wore excpet for the childish dress at the beginning. Who knew Wonderland had such high fashion? Rhat suit af armor at the end was tres cool, even if it did make her look like Joan of Arc (which I suspect was the point). Eh, watch it on dvd.

Iron Man 2 comes out soon! Now there's a movie I can't WAIT to see.

The Price of the Stars

I read this book because the IO9 website recommended it as a swashbuckler and that's what I wanted. It lived up to it's reputation and more. I loved it, I loved all the books in the series (yes, it turns into space opera), they were all great. You want space pirates? Bad guys? Time travelers? Combat to save the universe with lots of shooting? It's all there and more. Go read them, they're a lot of fun.

Please Don't.

The hot weather here last week brought out so many badly dressed people, it hurt my eyes. Was it the girl with the silver shoes that were so shiny that could have been used to send signals? Or the girl with the shapeless navy t-shirt (bad), ill-fitting khakis (worse) and shiny gold shoes (why??). But the worst was the girl with the plain skirt (not bad), the gray tank top (not awful) but on top of this she put a maroon lace camisole that was truly ugly. It was NOT NECESSARY. And it was ugly.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (the movie. In Swedish)

I thought the Swedes did quite good job of translating one their most famous books into a movie. Here's the plot in a nutshell-Mikael Blomquist is a journalist on his way to jail for libel. He gets hired by an extremely rich financier to find his niece, missing since 1964. Sounds not so complicated, right? But throw in a hacker girl, her evil guardian and a really ugly family secret and you have a great story. The problem is that it's hard to sound menacing in Swedish. This works to great effect when hacker girl's guardian is assaulting her, all the time sounding friendly, while saying and doing awful things-but not so much when the bad is supposed to sound creepy and does not. Is that the language? The actor? Is it me? It's hard to tell. I did like it though, and did a good job of translating a very long book into a very engrossing movie, without leaving much out. The actress playing Salander looked much how she was desribed in the boo-but as for Blomquist? Couldn't they have found someone a little better looking? With a little more charisma? I had a problem with him, I'm sad to say. Overall though, I give a good grade=B+.