Author: Alex Doenau

Monday night was the Scissor Sisters concert! Now, I’ve not been to a lot of concerts in my time: Tenacious D twice, Joanna Newsom and Smog in a double bill (I found out too late about their performance at the end of last month, though) and, of course, Kylie Minogue.

Scissor Sisters, while being friends of Kylie (is that a new euphemism?) are entirely different on the stage. Jake Shears, Ana Matronic, Paddy Boom, Del Marquis and Babydaddy totally love their audience. Nowhere have I felt more loved and accepted by people who knew absolutely nothing about me.
When you go and see Kylie, she certainly loves you, but the concert is more about focusing your adulation on her. The name of the Scissor Sisters’ concert album is We are Scissor Sisters … and so are you!
I finally understand: Scissor Sisters concerts are giant love-ins.

Warning: This entry contains profanity. There will be a further warning inside.

“You can’t do that … Never let someone tell you that you can’t do something. Not even me.”

If people think that The Pursuit of Happyness is depressing simply because Will Smith suffers several hardships that you would not wish to visit upon anyone on his way to the top … they probably don’t understand depression.
This film, with its infuriatingly misspelled title (infuriating, that is, until its spelling is justified), is not one that you should do any research into. Any digging will reveal that it’s a pack of lies, and a twee, predictable pack of lies at that. There’s a charm to it, and to Will Smith’s performance, but it doesn’t quite ring true.

“We’re your Dreamgirls, and have we got news for you!”

Stories about stratospherically popular musical acts that rose from nothing have a tendency to be the same. Of course, sameness is not a crime when it’s done well. Dreamgirls has many of the popular elements of the superstar genre and, the story essentially being “borrowed” from the Supremes and Motown, so it’s not all original.
What it is is all singing, some dancing, high kicking character action! Ten years of epicness in an industry that can make you or break you!
Dreamgirls: the musical that forgets that it’s a musical, rather than a movie with songs, then suddenly remembers … and consequently takes over your world for the remainder.
From Bill Condon, the man who brought you Chicago, Dreamgirls is a musical that won’t make you feel dirty afterwards. While I don’t care about the “legitimacy” of song in musicals, this movie makes each song seem at least vaguely realistic as a story telling device, if not always good.

You mustn’t eat anything.

To say that Pan’s Labyrinth was “unrelentingly horrible” would not be entirely true. To say that its ending was sad would be entirely subjective. To say that it was “wicked awesome” would be somewhat immature yet also entirely accurate.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie with violence of the variety that sends entire theatres into repulsion; a movie where the right person getting stabbed can elicit cheers from the audience; a movie where the bad isn’t always bad and the good not always good.

Through Pan’s Labyrinth we are forced to remember that childhood can be a dark and terrible place, and that unless dangers are made real then nothing can be learned.

“Relax, brew.”

Having come hot off the heels of The Queen, it was really strange to see Tony Blair turning the suffering of Africans into diamond money. Before that, I had made jokes about this movie being about Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly wresting diamonds from the hands of a not-so-much-evil-as-misunderstood David Bowie. What I saw was a movie that reinforced for me once again that, while the world is beautiful, humans are ugly. I reflected that I have not seen one movie that has made me want to go to Africa.

Blood Diamond is not going to make you want to go to Africa … at least the Sierra Leone of eight years ago. From the director of The Last Samurai, this is a different movie: Leonardo DiCaprio does nothing to save the people of Africa from themselves as Tom Cruise so nobly did for Japan a few years ago. It’s good, if not great, and very, very long.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, despite being one of my favourite films of 2006, has received only two short mentions on this site, one of which was totally … Arbitrary.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut, filmed in glorious and oppressive low rise. The borders of America have beautiful scenery, but not the architecture to match. The atmosphere is stifling; here is a place where the only releases are friendship and sex. This is a movie about lonely, unfulfilled people, yet it is ultimately about decency and the transcendental nature of emotions.

Not from me, no, these are the 2006 Kaedrin Movie Awards! Mark’s awards are particularly notable in that they embrace arbitrariness without being as thoroughly useless as my own criteria, and that he is actually able to focus on the good of Mission: Impossible III without his brain trying to eat itself from reminding the sheer stupidity of Ethan Hunt finding a tennis ball launcher in Hong Kong in the middle of the night in less than half an hour.

Better yet, it looks to be a daily occurrence! That’ll keep you occupied while I spend my time watching movies about Mexico.