A wide-ranging film review

I had wanted to do a post a while back about some of the movies my girlfriend and I had seen in Hawaii - our condo had a bunch of VHS movies lying around, so we saw some once we returned at night - but I never got around to it. So I'll do a quick recap of those movies, along with some that I saw this weekend down in Philadelphia.

You've Got Mail: I remember the promotional ads for this when it first came out. I'm not really a big fan of romantic comedies (although I can be a sucker for some, like Blast From The Past), but the Internet-based theme of this film - which is extremely dated in present times - stuck in my head. All in all, it was okay, although it tried a bit too hard to draw parallels between the public and private lives of Tom Hanks' and Meg Ryan's characters. The denouement was a bit too rapid for my liking, and overall, it wasn't as good as it could have been.

There's Something About Mary: Another movie I remember the TV promos for quite well, it occurred to me after watching the film that this was probably the template for a lot of the over-the-top comedies that have become something of an overused genre as of late (think of failures such as Date Movie and Epic Movie). That being said, this film personified the late 1990s, and it was a nice little nostalgia trip.

Pan's Labyrinth: I'm not one who usually watches many movies to begin with, much less those that perform well at awards ceremonies. That being said, I can see why this movie earned its praise - it's an interesting movie that doesn't try too hard to make a pretense about its ultimate message, yet it delivers it in a very artistic manner (unlike, say, No Country For Old Men, which I thought was overdone). By no stretch is it a happy movie, and the main character frequently got on my nerves for her seeming lack of touch with reality (and common sense, at times), but it was well worth the time.

The Fountain: I've wanted to see this movie for a long time, in large part because Darren Arnofsky, the writer-director of said film, also worked on Requiem For A Dream and Pi, both of which are movies that I count amongst my favorites. Fountain was much different, stylistically, from those films, but it was still a movie that deserved a better fate than it got (a mediocre reception from critics and virtually ignored at the box office). The intertwining of stories from the past, the present, and the faraway future focus on death (my girlfriend wasn't such a big fan of watching two fairly depressing movies in successive nights), but it's a movie that, at least for me, has a high re-watchability factor.

Ice Age: The Meltdown: Well, there's really only so much you can say about an animated movie. There's not much to talk about in terms of subject matter - I thought Ray Romano and Queen Latifah as the main voices were somewhat miscast - but animated features have come a long way from my childhood days of The Lion King and Pocahontas.