Weekend movie recap

Ahh the weekend - the time to get out, hit the town, and blow off the stress of the working week. Or stay at home and watch DVDs, like I did this weekend.

First up I saw "Little Miss Sunshine", with Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Chloe from 24, and Phil the Writer from the Larry Sanders Show. I had heard pretty good reviews about this, and really enjoyed it. It's about a dysfunctional family who travel cross country to enter their daughter in a junior beauty pageant. The tension between the family members is great, the opening scenes in particular sucked me in. It slowed a little towards the end but was still good. I especially enjoyed the work of Steve Carrell in this, better known as Brick Tamland from "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burghundy"



and Michael Scott from the (unfairly I believe) often criticised US verion of The Office.



This was a bit of a different turn for him. It's still a comedy, but he plays a gay professor who has just attempted suicide because one of his grad students declined his romantic advances, so his character isn't really all that zany. He carried it off well though, and there was a lot of humour and humanity in his understated performance.

Sunday night I saw "The Interpreter". I'd seen it a while ago but Michella hadn't so I watched it again. As I'd seen it, she asked a range of questions during the movie (eg "Who is that guy?", "Is that the same guy as before?", "Is he a bad guy?" etc) and often I couldn't answer. Remember this is a movie I have seen before, and thought I understood. It made me wonder if I ever really understand movies, and take everything in, or if I'm content to just figure out the general gist of what's going on and then enjoy the car chases and explosions.

Michella pointed out that for one of the world's most famous actresses Nicole Kidman doesn't really make that many good/successful movies, which I'd never really thought about before, but it's probably true. Anyway if you haven't seen this before and want to know whether it's any good . . . it's OK. You probably won't be blown away, but you won't get bored. Although you might not understand it all if you're anything like me.