Double Feature

August 2008 - Where has the summer gone? It seems like just yesterday when gas was $3.99 a gallon. With the ever-increasing price of everything, it may be hard to afford a traditional vacation. So, here are two movies to remind you that, sometimes, staying home might not be such a bad idea.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett find out the hard way in Babel, an R-rated drama from 2006. The film, which won an Oscar for its original score, intertwines the stories of families from Morocco, America, Mexico and Japan. Pitt and Blanchett play an American couple who go to Morocco to try to save their troubled marriage.

Their two children stay at home in San Diego with the Mexican housekeeper. She takes the kids with her to Mexico when she crosses the border to go to her son's wedding. The Japanese family is connected through a high-powered hunting rifle that finds its way into the hands of some Moroccan children.

Overall review: Liked it. The action takes place over the course of a week or so, but the timing of the vignettes is not simultaneous. In other words, we pick up the stories of the different characters at different points in time. That's not a problem. It's also not a problem that there's really no identifiable plot here. And, for the viewer, subtitles take care of the language problem implied in the title. Somehow, all of these different elements come together to make one perfectly understandable movie. But, for a film that invests so much time in making you care about the characters, the resolution of their stories is, ultimately, less than satisfying.

It takes a long time for Tom Hanks to find a satisfying end to his journey in 2004's The Terminal, a PG-13 comedy from director Steven Spielberg. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stanley Tucci co-star.

Hanks plays Victor Navorski, a man from some country near Russia. He arrives at JFK in New York to find that there's been an attempted coup in his home country. Tucci oversees customs or something, and he tries to explain to Victor that the US no longer recognizes his country's government; therefore, Victor's visa is no good. And, therefore, Victor can't enter the US, i.e. leave the international terminal.

So, Victor makes himself at home in the terminal. He makes friends with some of the people who work there, finds a job in the terminal and falls for Amelia, a stewardess played by Zeta-Jones. Eventually we find out why Victor came to the US and why he's willing to wait nine months for his chance to leave the terminal and visit NYC.

Overall review: Ehhh, it was OK. I guess something like this actually happened in France, but I can't imagine it ever happening here. Not in this day and age (and this movie was made well after 9/11). Hanks was OK, and I thought Tucci did well. But, the movie was more than two-hours long and probably could have benefitted from being shorter.