My Favorite Movies

My favorite movie of all time! Shyamalan at his best! I never saw the ending coming. Loved the psychological scares throughout the film.

Exellent movie! One of my favorites. Great dialogue and great acting.

Easily the best comedy of the year! Ellen Page gives a terrific performance as Juno, a 16 year old who has to go through an unplanned pregnancy. Ellen Page is turning into one of my favorite actrices. I loved her in Hard Candy, and in this one she really nails it. Her character is so witty and different. I loved the dialogue in this film and the soundtrack. Great music! This film has to be in the top ten list for 2007 and the Oscar nominations were all well deserved. Ellen Page is amazing in this film!

City of God is the best foreign film I have seen and is among my favorite all time movies. Fernando Meirelles does a terrific (and terrifying) job as he puts together this movie with great performances from the actors, great cinematography (it seemed so real), and great storytelling. I loved the style in which this film was presented with smart flashbacks and pauses (the narration was perfect). Overall great film. Life is Beautiful was my favorite foreign film, but I have to admit this film was a bit better. Meirelles makes Ciudad de Dios so real with great characters that intersect with one another at different points of the film. This movie was perfectly made. Fernando takes un into the life of the favelas and we experience it in a very realistic form (raw and violent but true). Great film and a must see.

Director Christopher Nolan had a very difficult task ahead of him once he decided to make a sequel to his hit Batman Begins in which he had created a new Gotham City much different from the previous franchise. With a great performance from Christian Bale we got to see a new and more realistic Batman and a much more interesting Bruce Wayne. The question everyone was asking was whether or not Nolan could match what he did with the first film in this sequel. Nolan had already created a new Gotham City, but could there possibly be anything new he could add in the Dark Knight that we hadnâ??t seen in the first one? Or would this be one of the many franchise films that are ruined by sequels that should never had been made? These questions are answered right away for us viewers from the opening scene when a bank robbery is taking place and we are introduced to the new character, the Joker. We had seen how great Bale was as Batman and we also had seen the performances from Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman who all gave a new dimension to their characters (and continue to be great). But what sets The Dark Knight apart from Batman Begins and gives it a new and fresh look is the introduction of the villain, the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger. Ledger gives an inspiring and Oscar worthy performance in his role as the immoral, evil, and violent Joker. One cannot explain or understand crime and violence and that is what Ledger represents as the Joker, an individual who does things for reasons that we cannot comprehend. It is hard to rationalize what is going on in his mind and why he commits all the atrocious crimes in the same way we could never understand the true criminals in our days. Another new character in this film is the highly moral and loyal Harvey Dent played by Aaron Eckhart. He symbolizes everything the Joker does not. He is all about good and fighting crime, he is the voice of reason over emotion. This is where Nolan goes right and gives the franchise a fresh look, focusing on the new characters and giving them greater dimensions than the previous ones we were already introduced too in Batman Begins. This movie franchise is much more than special effects and action, it is about creating interesting and complex characters and underlying a message of the struggle between good and evil in our society. I have to admit that along with Iron Man these two are the best superhero movies ever made. The sequel is not only as good as Batman Begins but in my opinion superior thanks in most part to Heath Ledger who added an entire new dimension to a well known character as the Joker. This film is not about Batman, itâ??s about the Joker and the struggle between finding the evil in everyone or finding the good. Heath Ledger is this movie as much as Robert Downey Jr. was the movie in Iron Man. My favorite film of the year which in my opinion is much more than entertaining, it is complete.

This is the best movie of 2008 after The Dark Knight. Danny Boyle is easily becoming one of the best modern day directors and a director I will look forward too in later works no matter the plot or the actors. The cast is entirely unknown but they do a great job, the characters are very interesting and the romantic story mixes very well with the violence and the comedy. The film has several similarities with the Brazilian movie City of God and is just up to par with that movie. This is one of the favorite movies to win the Oscars this year and will probably give Danny Boyle one as well for directing. The way the story is told with flashbacks, through the very well known game Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, in which every question asked leads us through the difficult life Jamal had growing up in the slums of India just makes this movie even better and more entertaining. This is a must see movie for all. You wont be disapointed. Excellent final credits as well, great soundtrack, the movie has it all.

I have never been a fan of Star Trek but this film truely suprised me. J.J. Abrams did an excellent job at reviving this dead franchise and making this the best movie of 2009 so far. I think that fans and non fans will be equally entertained with this version of Star Trek which goes back to the beginning and shows us how James Kirk and Spock come to work in the Enterprise together. What Abrams does with this franchise is very similar to what Nolan did with Batman, which also went back to the origens. In this film we have great vissual effects, an excellent cast, and a very entertaining story. We kicked off the summer with Wolverine which I enjoyed, but this film makes that one look mediocre. Star Trek has set the standard for the rest of the summer movies to come, and I doubt that they will be able to top this one. This film has it all, it is not just vissual effects. Abrams has intelligently renewed the franchise with these talented young actors and I can now say I want to be a Trekky and will look forward to more movies from this franchise. My favorite movie of the year by a long shot so far. There are few movies I can watch over again, but this is defintely one I could see several more times and not get bored. Even if you are not a Star Trek fan like I wasnt, you should go see this film because you will not want to miss out of the best movie of the year so far.

I had been wanting to watch this movie for a long time, but I had never got around to it. I finally got the chance to see it last night and I was blown away. The movie really did live up to all the hype thanks to great performances from the cast, especially Kevin Spacey. He is terrific in this movie. I also enjoyed Benicio del Toro although his character dies way to soon. The background music is your typical 90s suspense theme, but seeing this movie 15 years after its making you can say it is timeless nonetheles. This thriller is one of my favorites along with Seven, Pulp Fiction, and Reservoir Dogs. After I finished watching this film I felt the same way as I did with all those cult classic movies. I was expecting the plot twist because that is what everyone talks about all the time, but I still loved that twist it was great. I love movies that slowly build up to a great ending. That boat shootout scene was just excellent. The movie had me hooked from the opening scene, Kevin Spacey is just great when he narrates a film. Excellent film, one of my favorites from the 90s and has a good twist at the end almost as good as The Sixth Sense. Very well constructed movie and great job by Bryan Singer as a director. This movie opened several doors for him as a director as it did for some of the actors as well.

¨You see in this world there`s two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.¨

I wonder what would`ve been of Clint Eastwood`s career if it weren`t for the ¨Dollars¨ trilogy. Before working with Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone, he had a career as a television actor in Rawhide, a western based TV series, but he couldn`t get a decent job in Hollywood so he began to look for work abroad. He reached international success thanks to Leone`s reinvented spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), known as the ¨Dollars¨ trilogy. He proved producers wrong because they thought that people wouldn`t pay to see movies of actors they could see for free on television, but audiences were more than willing to see him in the big screen. His pairing with Leone couldn`t have worked out better for him since the director`s trademark was combining long wide shots with extreme close-ups. These wide shots couldn´t have been enjoyed as much on the small television sets at home. Eastwood`s rough features and manly charisma also contributed to Leone`s success, and both seemed destined to work with each other. There is no need to see the previous ¨Dollars¨ movies as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly stands out on its own and is actually a prequel since the movie takes place during the Civil War in the early 1860`s before the other plots take place and they are all separate stories that only have Clint Eastwood`s character in common. When I see Eastwood`s latest films as a director I can`t help but think how much he was influenced by the great Sergio Leone. He must have learned a great deal working with the Italian director in this masterpiece. It is just shot beautifully and to perfection by Leone, the cinematography and scenery are amazing and feel real, and the score is perfect. Eastwood may be a different director than Leone was, but he pays close detail to his craft and also knows how to shoot beautifully.

The plot is pretty simple for a movie that is about three hours long, but Leone`s use of the camera and extended shots makes the film longer. He also adds several side stories that work really well in the narrative. The film begins by introducing each character (although in the opposite order: The Ugly, The Bad, and The Good). The film begins with an extreme close up on a bounty hunter (Al Mulock) and then when we see the wide shot there are three of them who are quietly entering a bar. Once the men enter we hear three shots and out comes Tuco, also known as The Ugly (Eli Wallach), who escapes. In the next scene we are introduced to The Bad, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), who is tracking down a peasant farmer. The scene is truly a classic as no words are spoken for about ten minutes, but the tension can be felt. Angel Eyes is actually looking for information on the location of a treasure of coins lost during the Civil War and he is told a soldier named Bill Carson has it. Finally, we are introduced to Blondie, The Good (Clint Eastwood), who saves Tuco from a group of men who want to turn him in because there is a reward on his head. Blondie saves him only to collect the reward himself, but once Tuco is about to be hanged he shoots the rope and sets him free as part of a scam in which they divide the money. They later turn against each other only to discover the location of the treasure that has been buried and the race begins to see who can get to the treasure first as the three men have different information regarding its whereabouts.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is my all-time favorite Western. Any other film in the genre will always be measured by its standards. The opening scene in which we are introduced to Angel Eyes (The Bad) is just so beautifully shot that no dialogue was needed and we were already hooked (Ennio Morricone´s amazing score can also take some credit for that). The first ten minutes have no dialogue whatsoever but it sets up the general tone of the movie: several wide shots where we can see the great landscape and deserts combining them with extreme close ups of the characters facial expressions, the tension and suspense is built with long and slow scenes and suddenly the violence happens so quickly that we are caught off guard. The film doesn`t celebrate violence, it portrays it truthfully. The main character is the quiet Blondie (The Good), but without a doubt Tuco (The Ugly) is the one who has the most lines and brings some unbalance and goofiness to an otherwise serious picture. One of the funniest scenes is when he is in the tub and one of the bounty hunter shows up to kill him but before shooting he begins the classic speech villains tend to give and Tuco pulls out his gun and fires at him saying, ¨When you have to shoot, shoot, don`t talk.¨ Tuco plays a key role and his character is kind of the gray in an otherwise black (Angel Eyes) and white (Blondie), good guy and bad guy western movie. He breaks the conventionality in the genre. The final Mexican standoff scene is also truly memorable and one of the best shot sequences. This is a truly unique film that has stood the test of time; it catapulted Eastwood into a movie star, and has influenced him on his way to becoming a great director. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is one of my all time favorite movies and is a must see film.

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