Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The Social Red Riding Inception Network   

By Gwen Schultz

This weekend as I chilled hard at the National Sports Academy I had the pleasure to view three movies. Whether or not this was good for my concussed brain is another matter. The three movies were The Social Network, Red Riding Hood, and Inception. Being a pretty laid-back, uncritical person who sees no discernible difference between Titanic and a Disney Channel original movie, I was able to see that these three movies all brought something different to the movie viewing experience.

Justin Timberlake plays the founder of Napster

Let's start with The Social Network. Directed by David Fincher, this movie exposes the humble ...or malicious?...beginnings of Facebook and how this social networking site—now better known as FB, crackbook, facey, fbook, stalkbook, etc.--came to define our lives. What makes this movie so enthralling for so many people, perhaps, is that there are over 500 million users of Facebook, and you'd think that at least some of them would be wondering how Facebook got to be the way it is (and why it keeps changing?!?). Coincidentally, I deleted my Facebook account about a week prior to viewing this film, and the movie made me feel as though I was being antisocial (which I'm not). The pivotal role in this movie was Mark Zuckerberg who was played by Jesse Eisenberg. I'm no acting critic but I do think that Eisenberg gave a killer performance. He was perfectly nerdy, heartbreakingly insecure, and superbly witty. In fact, I thought that all the Harvard students and other characters were well casted. Furthermore, it is never a bad idea to put Justin Timberlake in a movie. In terms of being a movie about a website, it had a tolerable amount of computer nerds sitting around computers pretending to type code really fast. The ending scene was also perfect: Zuckerberg sitting at a computer refreshing it over and over to see if his ex-girlfriend has accepted his friend request yet. Ah, the joys of Facebook...

There's a 30% chance that it's already raining.  

On Saturday night, I went to the Palace Theater to view Red Riding Hood. I'm not exactly sure what my expectations for this one were; to be honest I was just hoping that the flashing lights wouldn't fry my brain. Catherine Hardwicke's film tells the story of a remote village that is terrorized by “the wolf.” It is believed that it lives up in the mountains, but during the movie it is revealed that it is one of the village people that is the wolf. I was definitely a little skeptical of the main character, Valerie, who was played by Amanda Seyfried, the actress that played that girl in Mean Girls...yes. That girl. I thought that Hardwicke did a great job with the scenery and the village didn't look too made-up. Ok, the wolves looked so fake I thought it was on purpose, but that's the only thing that was bad about the visual stuff. The story of the movie didn't really have anything to do with “Little Red Riding Hood” other than the girl with a red cloak, a wolf, and a grandma. If anything, that just made the movie more fun because every time the girl goes into her grandmother's house you're certain she's going to get eaten. On the whole, the film was advertised as a thriller but turned out to be more of a comedy. Maybe it was the brutal moments when the acting was seriously questionable or the brutal-er moments where the extras just ruined the scene for me (they literally did some ridiculous stuff...was anyone paying attention to them?). I don't know, but it was quite entertaining in that sense. Despite any disappointment with the storyline that anybody might have, the film did tie together nicely at the end. It succeeded in being one of those mysteries in which no matter how hard you try to figure out who the secret killer is, you don't really know until the end. I would be impressed if someone figured out with confidence who the wolf is—that is, if they don't mind sitting through the romance/ thriller?/ comedy that is Red Riding Hood.

Is this review real???

Inception was the third movie I viewed this weekend, and I saw it in the comfort of my own room on a TV that is painted to look like Spongebob Squarepants. After some mishaps with the TV remote (which seems to think it controls the DVD player) and a possibly skipping DVD, I finally got the movie going. I had been hearing that it is mindblowing and “really epic” so I had high expectations. Director Christopher Nolan's vision of a world where people can extract information from people's subconscious through their dreams shows the adventure of Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he tries to be the first man to perform “inception”: inserting an idea into someone's mind. My only problem with this movie was the wife—I really disliked the wife. I just hate it when sci-fi action thriller movies turn into relationship therapy sessions. In the end, however, I think the concept behind the story was awesome and I can't complain about the way it was done. I suppose that if anyone was totally lost about what was going on, they would still be entertained by the action scenes. One thing that I think was done particularly well was how they showed the “stretching” of time from one layer of dreaming to another. For the last half hour or so of the movie, they show a van in the process of falling off a bridge in slow motion while cutting back to other action scenes, showing that the time situation is getting a little crazy. This could have been extremely confusing, but Nolan pulled it off extremely well. Otherwise, the acting was flawless, the music was cool, the mindblowing-ness optional, and it was complete with a “decide for yourself” ending (I'm going with reality, by the way).

So, was this a productive movie weekend? I would say so. After seeing Shutter last weekend, I think pretty much any movie would have suited my tastes. Ok, all kidding aside, these three movies were very different from each other, but I think they made a good group. Online representations of ourselves, hidden identities within a community, and getting confused about what is reality and what is not: whats not to love?