Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: I saw the movie recently and really liked it. I surprised myself and cried. This movie is in the same niche genre as "Away from Her" - or even "The Bucket List" but handles the whole aging theme with incredible authenticity. It's really really tough to have the main character as unlikable as Hagar. The director does a masterful job with the challenge. Hagar's hard to understand. Her world has hard edges and she isn't a warm endearing woman at all.

The first scene gets this across without any compromise. Hagar (Ellen Burnstyn) is being taken to a nursing home by her son and daughter-in-law. She figures it out en-route and freaks out. Her edges are really hard. She is mean. She is belittling and selfish. She is a stone. I didn't like her - not even a little bit.

Throughout the course of the movie, we get insight. We find out why she doesn't like petunias, why she favors one son over the other, how her losses have formed her character... I started to see the angel... and I started to like her. I especially liked her when she poured out her secrets to the boy in the shack. Ellen Burnstyn, you are a brilliant actor. Kudos. Kudos. Kudos. What a scene!

This isn't a "feel good" movie, but it is certainly a movie that brings the viewer to empathy. I understand more clearly that hard edges in a person's life are there to protect, they are there for a reason...

Hagar isn't my mother - she isn't even my mother-in-law or neighbor... but parts of her are present in many women (and men) in my life. Those parts somehow make more sense to me now that I've watched The Stone Angel.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: I saw this film at the Chicago Reeling film festival. To pick up on the previous reviewer's remarks, the claustrophobic feel and off colors of the film is I sense quite intentional and conveys the sense of limited space, drab architecture, overall drabness that constitutes the urban environment of most people in Eastern and Central Europe. A bit shabby housing project style is how I'd describe it, and this is how many people live on the outskirts of larger cities. I can't say that I'm familiar with Bucharest, Romania where the action unfolded, but I have visited and lived in Eastern Europe for six months.

When I visited Russia as a student for a semester, my entire group had to drag their luggage seven stories up the staircase of a shabby student dorm building, just as the heroine does when moving in with a woman, because the elevators weren't working. But, I do concur with the reviewer, that the claustrophobia and muted colors, it's overdone, for there are, to be sure, beautiful historic buildings, parks, squares you can find in Bucharest or in any historic city center of Eastern Europe, and Bucharest's didn't get much of any footage in this film. For me watching this film conveys well the claustrophobia that I would feel during my half-year stay there, feeling trapped and limited. (It makes you see why someone would want to immigrate and find a better life, just as people if hope to escape from a United States urban ghetto.)

Also, given the climate of homophobia, say, circa, US in the 1980s, the two young women who fall in love with one another are forced to keep their love a very private matter; hence, the focus on their interaction in the apartment.

It's remarkable and commendable in my view that this queer themed film was even made in Romania, and I find the complaint of the previous reviewer about the poor film quality quite uninformed and patronizing. It's unlikely that the director and producer drummed up much government support and funding for their film, and they did the best they could with their likely limited resources. The actors were fairly good and believable; the dialog was overall well done, and I could identity with these women.

The film offers an added twist to that of forbidden love between two young women, Kiki, an energetic, fun-loving free spirit with a dark, troubling secret (her admiration and love for an abusive, incestuous brother, Sandu) falls in love with Alexandra, a bright, bookish, idealistic young woman who moves to Bucharest to begin her college studies. Opposites attract, and their personalities seem to complement one another, though there is some tension between the ambitious, studious, intellectual Alexandra and Kiki, who seems to be attending college to please her parents. Keeping their love hidden from their parents seems manageable, though we don't get any sense of the tension it requires, nor do we ever see or meet any other students--hard to believe--and the tension keeping their love secret would have entailed. The chief threat to their love is Kiki's brother and her difficulty in trying to severe her relation to him. But Kiki's love for Alexandra seems to give her the strength she needs to finally severe this bond, or does it? That's what the suspense of the film focuses on as the narrative develops, and I won't say how it concludes.

Ironically, Kiki's love "sickness" isn't love for another woman, but her illicit, incestuous love for her brother. Thus, loving a woman offers the potential cure to the sickness of loving a sibling.

Though this feel of this film is stifling and claustrophobic, overly confined to interactions between Kiki and Alexandra, it was still engaging and moving to watch, so I'll give it a 7.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Thank god ABC picked this up instead of Fox. The best description (for those in the know) is really Wonderfalls meets Dead Like Me in the best way possible.

I'm not sure whether an experience with death and destiny early in life makes me a fan of Brian Fuller but I certainly enjoy his productions. I also enjoy checkered floors, pies, talking toys, gravelings and other mischievous items :) While a bit "Burtonesque", I certainly think this enjoys its own niche that doesn't require J Depp or HB Carter to be a wonderfully imaginative playground. Here we can find the joys and sorrows of childhood and adulthood crashing into each and actually making sense and making us want to live life to the fullest!
Problem: OPTIONS:
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- positive positive
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Answer:
The first time I ever saw this movie was back in the 1980s as a wee lad. My dad actually recorded it off the TV. I must have watched is over 20 times, before the relatively recent release on DVD.

I of course bought and watched the DVD and was taken aback by how much the dialogue had changed. In the first version, which I still have on VHS, the mood of the film, thanks to the dialogue, was actually very dark. However the new version, featuring Van Der Beek et al, is more comic.

To put it another way, it's like watching the original US release of Akira with that dub, before watching the remastered version with the literal translation of the Japanese.

I'm in no way complaining, the story and quality of animation are not detracted from, but it does raise the question of whether Miyazaki intended for a lighter or darker narrative and theme in his film.....