Reviews

BRING IT ON is easily the funniest movie I've seen this summer. I could not stop laughing watching it. It is infinitely funnier than the horrible and horrible overrated Scary Movie.

The dialogue in this movie is something . . . else. A great amount of it is terribly cliche and stupid - but therein lies the comedy. Me and my friend could not stop laughing at the lines we heard. And some of them truly were quite funny.

Seeing the previews you might think this is going to be an extremely stupid, pointless movie full of stupid teenager jokes. That's not how I saw it. It seemed to me to be satirizing teenagers as people and showing how stupid some of them could be a lot of the time, which I found delightful -and I AM a teenager. The director was involved with the GREAT show Upright Citizens Brigade prior to this and Trotter from UCB has a part as the dance instructor. He is easily the funniest in the movie.

In short, if you have a good, fairly cynical sense of humor I think you'll find this movie pleasantly surprising, and very funny.

And High Fidelity shows that this is more true for Rob Gordon (John Cusack) than most people. Rob owns Championship Vinyl, a record store where he and his two employees, Dick (Todd Louiso) and Barry (Jack Black), argue about music and insult customers. This is the background for a fantastic movie early in the year and one of the funniest movies I've seen in a while.

The movie's main plot is Rob recounting his past breakups via his favorite organizing device, the Top 5 List. He purposely excludes his most recent girlfriend, Laura, from it. He is trying to deal with her leaving him for a strange, world music-listening, martial arts-doing freak named Ian (Tim Robbins). Then he decides to look up all his old girlfriends, and in the process finds out a lot about himself.

The best scenes, however, are those in the record store - Todd Louiso and especially the utterly hilarious Jack Black steal every scene they're in. They argue over music incessantly, and anyone who knows a good deal about music will be laughing hysterically during these scenes. Dick is a quiet music geek in the classic sense of the word, while Barry is a cruel, ridiculous elitist.

In the end, High Fidelity is a wonderful, terribly funny movie with a lot of great stuff in it. See it.

Brazil is an incredibly unique film. One of the greatest triumphs of art direction ever, Brazil draws you into a dark, mysterious world where one man, Sam Lowry, is a slave to the dark future that surrounds him. Sam seems to want to ignore the collapse of the world around him. He spends most of his time in a fantasy world of his own creation which is as vivid as the real world he exists in. In the fantasy world Sam is a winged superhero who tries to win the affection of a beautiful woman and has to fight off a massive samurai. Soon he meets a woman who appears to be the one from his dreams. He tries to win her affections only to discover she's associated with the terrorist Tuttle (Robert De Niro). Soon he finds himself trying to escape the stormtrooper-esque police. He finally finds salvation . . . the truth shall make you free.

Fight Club is a truly great film, in my opinion the best of the year (1999). This movie shows us something we haven't seen before. Based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Fight Club is the depiction of how one man's search for meaning in his life develops into a sort of fascist paranoia.

While the movie looks rather simple (a bunch of guys fighting each other is what the previews depict - they are VERY misleading), Fight Club is anything but simple. Mostly it is a vicious satire of consumerist society. We see our narrator, who identifies himself as Jack (played to perfection by Edward Norton), trapped in a pointless existence revolving around buying furniture and going to support groups. Then he meets Tyler Durden, who shows him how to break free and give his life meaning. This meeting will change his life forever.

Where Fight Club goes from here is something that cannot be explained. A must-see.