Sam’s Place

My Kid Could Paint That (2007)

Sam: ***

• A toddler allegedly made really good abstract art, her father & a photo-realist painter sell her paintings for tens of thousands of dollars. But then it turns out that she probably didn’t paint them after all (my bet is on the abstract art-hating photo-realist). Something about this documentary didn’t really work for me.

Emma: ***

• I felt really bad for the little girl & wish the director had really exposed the parents as child-exploiting fraudsters. The mother played “good cop” but by the end she annoyed me the most with her pretendy compassion. The dad paints, & they’re friends with a gallery owner, & they just happen to have a painting-genius daughter — very fishy.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Sam: ****

• Damn, that nude knife-fight scene was intense! Oh yeah, & the movie…. I liked the motorcycling-through-London scenes, thought Naomi Watts did good job as the caring nurse, & Armin Mueller-Stahl did a good job as the Russian Godfather. I might be giving this an extra star for being much better than David Cronenberg’s previous film, A History of Violence, which irritated me — I thought it was a pretentious & stupid “meditation” on violence (violence is bad when it’s used to hurt innocent people & good when it’s used to stop innocent people from being hurt — how complicated it that?).

Emma: ***

• SPOILER: I was surprised & relieved that the potential love story wasn’t consummated. But otherwise it wasn’t anything we haven’t seen before: a Mafia story.

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

Sam: ***

• I was watching this & had this nagging feeling… What is it? What is it? Then it hit me: this is a “chick flick.” Once you get beyond that & the terrible ending it was OK.

Emma: **

• Predictable plot & ending — just not that interesting. Watch-able, though, if it happens to be on TV & you feel like watching a movie.

Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale (2007)

Sam: ****

• Not as amazing as Gervais & Merchant’s Christmas special series finale for The Office, and fairly depressing, but still pretty good. There were some funny moments in Extras — the David Bowie cameo, for instance — but the serious message here is inherently less interesting than The Office’s satire of white collar life.

Emma: ***

In Bruges (2008) 

Sam: ****

• Funny & violent. Ralph Fiennes is better in comic roles it turns out — here he’s doing his best Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. Usual good job by Brendan Gleeson. And I think there’s some sort of religious theme, with Fiennes representing the Old Testament & Gleeson representing the New.

Emma: ****

• I liked seeing Bruges. Colin Farrell, surprisingly, did a good job acting. More violent than I like but, arguably, not gratuitous.

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The King of Kong (2007)

Sam: ****

• One of those nothing-human-is-alien-to-me type of documentaries, this time the subject is the competition for the title of nation’s greatest Donkey Kong (an antique video game) player. More interesting than it sounds.

Emma: ****

• A well-made documentary. It starts off slowly but by the end you’re really routing for the nice guy to win.

Project Runway: Season 2 (2005)

Sam: ****

• Not quite as interesting as Season 1, or maybe I’m just getting used to the format.

Emma: ***

• I was disappointed in the winner, whose clothes looked like Joan Collins’s in the ’80s.

Becoming Jane (2007)

Sam: **

• Some nice cinematography notwithstanding, a mediocre, dumbed-down, waste of James McAvoy’s talent.

Emma: **

• Disappointing. I don’t understand why American actress Anne Hathaway was selected to portray Jane Austen — poor choice.