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RAMAS 
Normally I rate movies based on whether or not I would see them again. This is as exception. I felt like I was transported into white-trash hell for a couple of hours, but I think the film handled a difficult issue very well. Swank plays Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, a real-life person who pretended to be a boy despite physically being a girl because she always felt more like a boy. Brandon winds up travelling around trying to find a place where people will accept him. He finds happiness for a time, but when people find out who he really is, most of them turn against him. (Carly)
Are Christina and I the only ones not suckered by all the hoopla surrounding this movie? Not only was it just plain gross in places, it was boring and trite. Everyone seems to think it's some stunning expose of the American middle class, but I don't really know anyone like these characters. And even if I'm just leading a really sheltered life, the movie's still not original. We've seen all these characters before: middle-aged couple having marriage/job/identity crises, strange and angsty teenagers, the methinks-thou-doth-protest-too-much conservative military vet,
and the slutty cheerleader. I didn't find it funny, either. I saw it listed as a comedy somewhere, which I suppose it could have been if they had pushed it just a little more, but I really don't think it was intended that way, especially given the director's Oscar speech. Every time I hear anything about this movie now, I hear this voice in my head yelling, "Over-rated, over-rated," just like people yell when the Texas basketball team beats a team ranked above them. (Carly)Real-life lesson from the movies: Stay away from Morocco if you want a nice relaxing vacation. Stewart, his wife, and his son visit Morocco on vacation. They are mistaken for another couple at first, and this draws them into some sort of international espionage ring. A dying man tells Stewart a secret, and then their son is kidnapped. They have to balance their interests in world peace and the welfare of their son. It's really very exciting. (Carly) So everybody else seems to like this movie, but I actually like to see movies where most of the characters I meet at the beginning are still alive at the end, something that does not happen in this movie. What does happen is that three brothers off on a ranch in Montana or something have sibling rivalry problems. Pitt is the bad boy, and he looks gross and dirty. The cute one gets killed in WWI in a rather gruesome scene. Julia Ormond is the girl they fight over, and Anthony Hopkins is their father. I can understand the appeal of this film, I guess, but I don't share the sentiment. (Carly) I can say with absolutely no exceptions that the only enjoyable part of this movie was trying to pick out places I know in Austin. This had no plot, a very risky move that did not pay off. Instead of being hip and artsy, it was boring. Essentially you see two people having a meaningless conversation, and then one moves on to a new conversation, and then their partner goes on to another one, and so on. (Carly) Whatever you think about Meryl Streep's strange accent, this is a really good movie. From the very beginning, I kept thinking about how much it reminded me of
The English Patient: a woman in an unhappy marriage finds herself in a new country and meets an enigmatic, handsome single man amidst interesting natives and vast, beautiful scenery, but their love encounters many obstacles. It is a long movie, but I thought the acting was very good. It also gave me a lot to think about--the nature of love, treatment of indigenous people, and a woman's role in a primarily masculine environment. All that aside, the plot was engaging, and the love story is sweet. (Carly)If you ever feel like you want a good cry, watch this movie. As Truvy says in this movie, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion." This movie is the stereotypical chick flick, so don't force your boyfriend to watch. Julia Roberts plays a diabetic who gets married and has a baby despite the fact that her body can't handle the stress. Most of the movie takes place in the beauty parlor with all of the ladies sitting around gossiping. (Christina)
Think of this as the Catcher in the Rye of film: a movie about standing up to conformist society and being yourself and other good ideas about youthful rebellion. This is the only Robin Williams movie I've ever seen where he wasn't being funny, but he was still good. He's a teacher who comes to this boys' prep school and shakes things up. He teaches his students to follow their dreams, some of which conflict with their parents' dreams. It has a sad ending, but you wouldn't want it to end any other way. (Carly)Yeah, this was back when everybody thought Julia Ormond was the next coming of Audrey Hepburn. This movie is essentially the King Arthur legend, a very serious rendition of it. I guess parts of it were good, but on the whole it wasn't anything special. To make a movie of such a well-known story, you really need it to be absolutely beautiful or have a startling twist. This had neither. And, I couldn't understand why Julia Ormond left Sean Connery for Richard Gere. Connery may be old, but he's a whole lot more attractive in this movie. I couldn't sympathize at all with the Guinevere character. One thing I did like was Arthur's cool funeral at the end. What a way to go.(Carly)
OK, so I thought that with those two in the cast, this couldn't be a bad movie, even if it was about horses. I was wrong, but it still made me cry. I HATE crying at mediocre movies. Anyway, Thomas is a rich city woman whose daughter is in a horse accident. The horse is all testy after that, and the girl can't ride it anymore. To help her daughter recover psychologically, she takes her to Montana with the horse to see this horse whisperer she's heard about. Redford, the horse guy, totally doesn't want to deal with these people. But he winds up helping them, of course, and Thomas falls in love with him, even though she's got a perfectly nice husband at home. Yeah, yeah. Touchy-feely. (Carly)Harry Connick is so dreamy. That makes this film good enough, but it's also sweet and funny. Bullock's husband, her high school sweetheart, cheats on her, so she takes her daughter and leaves him. She moves back to her small-town home with her mother, who's a little crazy. She was miss popular in high school, but now she has do deal with being divorced and without any sort of job skills. She and Harry fall in love, of course, and he takes her fishing on their first date. She doesn't want to date him at first because he's not all ambitious and all like her first husband, but then she realizes that she loves him anyway. (Carly) Maybe it's because I had to watch this movie about a million times in elementary and middle school, but I consider this one of the dumbest, sappiest movies I've ever seen. "If you build it, they will come," ranks right up there with "Read my lips: no new taxes," as some of the world's most inane and unnecessarily repeated statements. It pretty much sums up the plot, too. Costner and his wife live on this farm in Iowa. He decides, for various reasons, that he has to build this baseball field. He does, and then his father and all these old White Sox players (Shoeless Joe-period) come out of the corn to play with him. Of course, building the field has been this major struggle in his life, financially and in his relationships. I love baseball, but this is ridiculous. Watch ESPN or something. (Carly) All right all you anglophiles, get ready for some serious Judi Dench (Eleanor Lavish from A Room with a View). This is one of those fascinating, slow-moving historical dramas that not many people enjoy. Don't expect anyone who couldn't make it through "A Room with a View" to come anywhere near finishing this film. If you're interested in British history you should enjoy this film. (Ellen)Lena hates the slimy man (who is oh-so-unfortunately played by Colin Firth). It has beautiful scenery. Lena has nothing else to say about it. The story is about a girl (Minnie Driver) who goes off to college and falls in love with the big man on campus (Chris O'Donnell), and he likes her too, even though she's not some model or something (aww...). Then, she won't sleep with him, and this other girl gets pregnant by this slimy man, and so she seduces the nice boy, and then more stuff happens, and the ending is at least kind of happy. (Carly)Christina's going to disagree with my judgment of this movie. I'll grant that the soundtrack's cool--Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and surf music--but I couldn't sit through the whole film. First, there's that icky John Travolta. What do people see in him? And there's way too much blood and guts. The heroin shooting scene gives me the creeps. I know Quentin Tarantino is supposed to be O-Great-God-of-Directing, but I don't see it. Give me a nice period drama with a little swordfighting and tea drinking any day. (Carly)Carly's right in some ways about this movie. It is gross at times, and there is a lot of violence and bad language. However, the dialogue in this movie is hilarious, and it makes up for all the bad qualities. The writing is superb. Conversations about ordinary, everyday things in this movie become absolutely hysterical. "What do they call a Big Mac in Paris?" "A Royale with cheese." (Christina)
BOR-ING. Sure, Ralph's good to look at and all, but that doesn't save this movie. It drags on and on, until I had to stop watching and do something more exciting, like watch my fingernails grow. Everybody knows the plot already: the smart prof from an old-money family goes on one of those fifties game shows that were fixed, and then he gets caught. This might have been big news in the fifties, but only because everybody thought they were real shows. It's like the whole plot is based around the suspense of what's going to happen, only we ALREADY KNOW. (Carly)Yucky, yucky, yucky. Too much blood and guts. Too much guy getting shredded in a wood chopper. Two Minnesota cops, one pregnant, are looking for a murderer. A few funny parts, but these are overshadowed by the sheer awfulness of the rest of the action. (Carly)
This is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. It's definitely better in a theater; the sweeping desert scenes are far prettier than on TV. Ralph Fiennes plays a Hungarian count who is a member of an English Geographical Society expedition in North Africa right before the beginning of World War II. Thomas is Katherine Clifton, the wife of the wealthy Firth, Geoffrey Clifton. They come to join the expedition, and Thomas and Fiennes fall in love. Their story is told in flashbacks; in the present, Fiennes is the badly-burned patient of Binoche, a Canadian nurse, in an abandoned house in recently-liberated Italy. Binoche leaves her army unit to care for Fiennes until his inevitable death. She falls in love with an British-Indian who gets rid of bombs, Kip. I read the book after I saw the movie, and I thought the movie was better. The book seems jumpy, but the movie's time-shifts come off well. Visually, it is superb. The soundtrack is also beautiful--it has an original score as well as a few big band songs and some Hungarian folk music. Anyway, Ralph Fiennes is absolutely charming, and I so want to be Kristin Scott Thomas. (Carly)
Robin Williams gets a little much at times, but on the whole he's good as a therapist/community college prof. His college classmate, Skarsgaard, is now a prof at MIT. He's discovered the genius Damon working as a janitor there. He wants Damon to pursue his education; Damon wants to drink beer, get laid, and hang out with his blue-collar buddies. He meets Driver, a Harvard student, at a bar. He has to try to figure out what he wants from her and from himself with the help of Williams and his best friend, played by Affleck. This movie is really funny, and the scenes between Driver and Damon are great. I'm still not crazy about Williams, but the rest of the acting's great. (Carly)
(1993 Oscar for Best Picture)