Movies

I haven't reviewed movies in a while, so it's time to catch up!!
I think the easiest thing is to ignore the bad movies and just talk about the good ones! The toughest thing would be to remember back to January, but I have kept a record of my life in this gorgeous little Hello Kitty diary that Véronique sent me, so I just need to flick back through colourful pages strewn with little birds, bees, flowers and Hello Kitties!

OK - Let's go:

• War of the Worlds - I watched it. The cinematography was good, but I won't be watching it again. Tom Cruise is just not tall enough!
• Syriana - I reviewed this back in January, I think. One of the best movies I've seen. Hard to follow what's going on and who is who, but it makes you think about what makes the world go round (and it's not Love!).
• 300 - really bad. Don't waste your time watching this movie. Life is too short.
• Good Night and Good Luck - another George Clooney movie. Again, excellent. Wonderful to see men fighting for what's right and moral.
• No country for old men - this is the latest Cohen Brothers movie. A lot of blood, a lot of gruesome deaths, but very entertaining all the same. Darker than previous Cohen Brothers movies.
• Atonement - saw this one on the plane to Australia, so maybe not the best circumstances. While it was quite faithful to the book and it played out the different interpretations of the key scenes really cleverly, it didn't really work for me. I didn't like Keira Knightley in it - I felt she was holding herself too stiff throughout, with her elbows pulled back all the time. But the sound was really bad, so maybe I'm being unkind.
• A few really bad ones: Martian Child and Eye of the Dolphin, both seen on flights where there was no choice of movie channel, so we watched them, but it was painful!
• The next three, we saw on the flight back from Sydney to Heathrow - they were great movies that made the journey shorter:
• Juno - gorgeous, funny movie about teenage pregnancy.
• Michael Clayton - George Clooney at his best, and Tilda Swinton too. I've loved Tilda Swinton as an actress since Orlando (I can't believe that movie was made in 1992!). Plenty of intrigue, double dealing, and in the end, again, a very moral character at the centre of it all.
• Le scaphandre et le papillon - a French movie about the editor of Elle magazine, who suffers a major stroke and can only communicate by opening and closing his eyelid. I did cry at the end of this one. It's very beautiful and very sad, but shows the strength of the human spirit.
• A Fish Called Wanda - it was showing on the telly again, and I laughed as much this time as the last (in 1988). John Cleese, Michael Palin, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline are hilarious.

This brings us to the 13th of March. I've got as many movies to tell you about again, but that will be for another day.