2008-08-29 
 

two very different movies

So I'm going to take another break from writing a great toast for Dude's impending nuptials and hit you with some thoughts on two very different movies.

The Lives of Others
The story takes place during the early 80's and follows an East German Stasi agent who is tasked with spying on a well known playwrite. The Minister of Culture has organized this so that he can steal away the writer's actress girlfriend for himself. Ulrich Mühe is brilliant as the Stasi agent. Having no real life of his own, the Stasi slowly becomes swept up by the events in the lives of those he is spying on. (Hence the title.) Mühe really had me believing that the path he was on and the choices he made were real ones. I really don't want to give too much more away, but I must say that the film had me running through many emotions: disgust, fright, sadness, despair and lastly hope. It's truly a Pandora's box of a film, and one I highly recommend that everyone watch. Especially now, as we Americans slowly give up more and more of our rights in this era of "Homeland Security".


Walk Hard, The Dewey Cox Story
On the opposite side of the coin, a laugh riot. I initially avoided this movie because my search for a good parody movie has been thwarted too often by bad acting, uneven writing or just too many jokes that rely on either flatulence or debasement instead of more complicated humor. Don't get me wrong, there are some outright, in-your-face funny moments in this movie. That said, there's also plenty of clever humor to balance that out. It even dares to poke fun at the genre the movie is parodying instead of just replaying scenes from pre-existing movies for laughs. What a concept! The funniest movie I've seen in a long time.

Labels: dose of mikey, linkage, random review

* posted by me at 10:01 AM

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