thoughts on Spring Breakers

Four college girls (Faith, Candy, Brit, and Cotty, played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine, respectively) really want to go to Florida for spring break, but they don't have enough money (though most of them seem to snort cocaine fairly regularly, which I don't think is cheap, so...yeah).  Candy, Brit, and Cotty hold up a chicken shack to get the money, and the four of them take off on a bus.  At first, the trip (robbery aside, of course) is mostly the standard spring break debauchery you see on MTV and such; however, things take a turn for the worse when the four girls are arrested for drugs and bailed out by a guy who calls himself Alien (James Franco).  Alien has a house full of guns and drugs and claims to have done pretty much every illegal thing there is for money.  Faith, who has been shown attending meetings of a college church group and who has been calling her grandmother regularly on the trip, realizes pretty quickly that this is a bad scene and takes a bus home.  It takes being shot in the arm for Cotty to bail.  There are indications that Candy and Brit plan to leave near the end of the movie, but not before they get in crazy deep.  At one point, there is a truly bizarre sequence that starts with James Franco playing Britney Spears's "Everytime" while Candy, Britt, and Cotty dance around him wearing pink ski masks and holding machine guns.

I wasn't totally sure what to make of all of it, though I know for sure I didn't enjoy it.  Faith seems basically to be a fairly normal college girl who gets mixed up in the wrong crowd.  The other girls are basically sociopaths.  There are some voiceovers about the girls going on the trip to "find themselves," and if that's true at ANY point on the trip, that's really messed up.  I only cared about Faith, and it was impossible to know where the movie was going after a point...yeah.  I didn't like it.

thoughts on Tangled

In this animated Disney film, Mandy Moore stars as Rapunzel, a princess born with magical hair that has the power to make those who touch it stay young, as well as healing powers.  She is kidnapped as a baby by Gothel (Donna Murphy), who keeps her in a tower and raises her as her own.  Every year on her birthday, Rapunzel's real parents release lanterns, hoping that she will see them and return home.  Rapunzel has no memory of her real parents, but loves the lanterns and wants to go see them.  One day when Gothel is out, a thief named Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) seeks refuge in the tower, carrying a stolen crown that other thieves are after.  Rapunzel hides the crown from him, saying that she will give it back if Flynn will take her to see the lanterns.  Thus, the two embark on Rapunzel's first adventure away from the tower.

It's pretty funny and entertaining, though I'm not so much a fan of "someone locks a child in a room for years and years" stories, thanks to that stupid Flowers in the Attic movie that scarred me for life.  Like, I know that Elsa in Frozen's parents made her stay in her room most of the time, but that was an awfully short portion of that movie, plus Elsa then later gets to sing an epic song.  Rapunzel gets no epic songs.  Basically, I hadn't really wanted to see any Disney movies for years before Frozen, and it set the bar pretty darn high; I think every other Disney movie made before it kind of pales in comparison.  Judged on its own terms, though, it was decent. 

thoughts on Her

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombley, a man living in L.A. in what appears to be the near future.  He wears a device in his ear that allows him to access the Internet with his voice.  He plays video games that are projected life-size into his living room.  He works for a company called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com that pays him and others to write letters for people that appear to be handwritten.  Also, high-waisted pants appear to be in style.  One day, Theodore buys a new operating system with a woman's voice; the voice calls herself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).  Theodore and Samantha develop kind of a rapport; before long, he is openly telling people that she is his girlfriend, and being forthright about the fact that she is an operating system.  His ex-wife (Rooney Mara) is appalled, and takes this as evidence that he's not capable of being in a relationship with a real person; however, a number of his friends (including co-worker Paul and neighbor Amy, played by Chris Pratt and Amy Adams, respectively) are accepting of this.  Amy admits that she has become friends with the operating system that her ex-husband (Matt Letscher-- oh, hey, I just remembered he played the creepy guy who murdered Quinn's boyfriend on the first season of Scandal) left behind; Paul and his real, live girlfriend (Tatiana, played by Laura Kai Chen) go on double dates with Theodore carrying Samantha around in his front pocket (the operating system is about the size of a cell phone).  Theodore and Samantha have a number of problems over the course of the movie, but the biggest becomes the fact that as an operating system, she is capable of doing and learning things that he can't understand.

It's sort of interesting.  It's basically asking, to what extent can technology stand in for real, human interaction?  In Theodore's experience, having Samantha in his life is great at first; he has someone that is there when he wants her there, not when he doesn't.  He's still getting over his ex-wife (he's procrastinating signing the divorce papers at the beginning of the film).  Then, like any real relationship, she starts wanting more.  They eventually start growing apart.

I thought it was decent.  One perhaps nitpicky thing that bothered me is that all of the technology in this movie works too well.  In the beginning, when Theodore is checking his e-mail by voice, I thought to myself, "Really? His computer can understand his voice? Voice recognition stuff never works that well for me."  Also: at least once last week I had to do a hard reboot of my work computer.  I'm moderately concerned that the laptop I'm working on right now has a virus.  Yesterday the GPS on my phone crapped out when I was taking a route I never would have chosen on my own.  The point is, unless we can expect major improvements in the future, there should have been more scenes of the operating system glitching up and Theodore flipping out about it.