Saturday, January 9, 2010

Nne

#4 - An Education

An Education was a real surprise for me. I threw in this movie near the end of the year on a whim. I wanted to get some delicious Cheeseboard, so I figured I might as well go see a movie while I was in Berkeley. This was the only movie I hadn't seen that I had even the mildest interest in watching.

It turned out to be excellent. In the lead role, Carey Mulligan makes the entire movie work. She's a wide eyed young woman getting in a situation that's way over her head, but she's smart. It's not enough to just have the script put words in someone's mouth to show us that they're smart. There has to be something in their eyes.

Any teacher can tell you the same thing. There are some people who you can just tell whether anything is going on inside their heads by looking into their eyes.

I've been watching the TV show Veronica Mars. It stars Kristen Bell from the excellentForgetting Sarah Marshall. She's hot. But I've seen commercials for her over the last week or so for her upcoming movie When in Rome. She is still hot, but doesn't look as hot. I think it's because on Veronica Mars, she's smart. Her character in this new movie looks like your typical cliche romantic comedy role. The type that the extremely untalented Kate Hudson would usually play. That's why Bell is hotter as Mars.

This is the first time that I've seen Carey Mulligan, but we'll see more from her. She handles the character and everything it goes through like a pro. An Education is actually a similar story to Up in the Air. But it presents a totally different way of looking at it. Obviously, I recommend both movies.

3 comments:

Lance Christian Johnson said...

I will disagree that Kate Hudson is untalented. She's great in Almost Famous. Since then, she's done nothing but crap, but we do know that she can be good in a good movie.

Andrew Nolan said...

I was going to write the exact same thing. That's probably because Lance and I exchanged DNA this weekend.

Kaboom32 said...

I have a test question that I use once a year that involves talent. It's a True/False question. The current version reads, "The Jonas Brothers have talent," though the name has changed over the last ten+ years. It turns out that the answer is True, but only because I didn't say "The Jonas Brothers have musical talent."

So Kate Hudson's talent is the talent not to fuck up an already really good movie. I'll concede as much and no more.