They're Gonna Put Me in the Movies

#6. The Ugly Duckling and Me! (2006)

I expect everybody knows the basic tale of Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling, so I won't bother going over that aspect of the plot here. It's basically the same storyline but with the additional element of a dubious rat (imaginately called Ratso) who the ugly duckling takes to be his father.



Awful, awful, awful. Do not watch this movie unless your only alternative is setting fire to your house for entertainment.

The animation was poor even for it's time; none of the attention to detail and little touches that Pixar put in, and none of the charm and wit of Dreamworks Animation movies.

The less said about the script the better. Parts of this film made me cringe, and not even in a funny way like The Office did. Little kids might like it I suppose, but that's only because they don't know any better.

#7. Magnolia (1999)

Bit of a difficult film to define this one, but here is my best shot: Set in Los Angeles, this film follows the lives of several people and we watch as these lives intertwine and coincidence brings them together at different points during the course of this epic movie. Some of these meetings are brief and some of a longer duration but all are significant.
A dying man with an estranged son and a much younger wife, a lonely cop, a troubled ex-quiz show kid genius and a trouble current one, a veteran quiz host and fearful daughter are but a few of the characters that are at the core of this story.



I quite liked this film although it was very long and I got a bit restless half way through! I found it a little difficult to follow at first because of the chopping and changing through the individual threads portrayed by this giant cast. I don't think I've ever seen a film with so many protagonists in it! But once I familiarised myself with the faces and names I really started to get into it.
Watching this film again will no doubt show details which I missed in the first watching; links between the characters will become more visible and with hindsight things which I thought were not that significant the first watch will gain deeper meaning.

And also, any film which contains scenes where it is raining frogs has got to be worth a watch, surely? ;)

Labels: 100 films

posted by Hayley on Thursday, January 29, 2009 @ 2:50 PM 

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