Reviews by nataliegoes

Anecdotal at best, disorganized and 95% about Catholicism, so the title is a lie. Found it to be annoying and poorly constructed.

Ughh! In the authors own words "Bad book. Bad plot. Bad everything." I can't believe I wasted hours on this horrible piece of crap. Please don't bother.

t may be an extremely well researched book, and the most complete book on her life, but the number of footnotes and excerpts from the Duchess's own letters keep it from flowing - it makes an acceptable textbook, not a biography. Also the constant contradictions and unnecessarily old-fashioned and uncommon vocabulary make it hard to stay interested. The Duchess herself was fascinating, and somehow the author has made this book a slog.

This is a pretty typical Japanese movie. It is a loosely coordinated melee of vignettes surrounding a family that lives in a small village in the countryside. Like many typical Japanese films it is filled with absurdity, long quiet and slow sections, scenery, violence. What isn't in the film is the typical sex and/or naked bodies. If you prefer a movie with a plot, logic and denouement then you will find most Japanese movies unsatisfying. If you like those avant garde European movies, then these films might be a good fit for you. What I found particularly enjoyable in this movie was the scenery and the sweet relationships of the family. If you like this movie I would recommend "All About Lily Chou-Chou," "Linda, Linda, Linda" and "Kamikaze Girls." If you need a little more plot I recommend "Nana," "Hula Girls," or "Ramen Girl."

When the news that a revamp of Star Trek was coming out I was skeptical. But, what a revamp does have going for it was that Star Trek never took itself too seriously. I thought there was plenty to like in this movie. There was enough of the hokey sentiment, and the essence of most characters was retained and the fun of seeing how it all got started. However, having seen it on DVD I am afraid that most of the special effects were lost. As a matter of fact, when most of the battle scenes were occurring I just got bored and would wander away. As much as I like Simon Pegg, I didn't like the character of Scotty, just too slap-stick like; might as well have used Craig Ferguson for that sort of humor. Although I did develop a little crush on Bones, so it has that going for it. The full storyline didn't quite gel for me, and just blowing the bad guy to bits was soooo not Star Trek. All in all, it kept the essence of Star Trek and that is the most important thing and hopefully in any new movies they can correct these mistakes.

This biopic of the life of Edith Piaf is visually delightful, and the music is of course sublime. But the story itself was a shambles. The back and forth of it seems to have been done purposely to keep you off guard, but just ends up making it a muddled mess. Characters come and go, and you could care less. Ms. Piaf seems to have been fairly unlikeable, and I applaud the way they do not shy away from this fact. However, with such a lead and these pop-up and disappearing characters I had trouble keeping my mind on the movie. She begins dying very shortly into the movie, and with all the flashbacks and forths, I became annoyed and was constantly going online to look up biographical facts so I could figure out what was going on. And don't even get me started on how distracting her eyebrows were!

The eel is a strange mix of a movie. It starts off a little violent, moves to a cast of quirky characters, adds serious relationship dilemmas, includes some hallucinogenic visions and ends in a realistic way. Koji Yakusho could read the most inane dialog and make it seem the height of theatrical acting, and performs perfectly. However, the movie is two hours long and I lost interest several times. I don't usually require movies to have a point, but this one seems exceptionally pointless. I mainly recommend it to see Yakusho-san in some earlier work.

I should have liked this book. I am a taphofile (that means I like cemeteries) and the book is written by a woman who becomes the caretaker of a small old cemetery in her town. She knows the stories of the people buried there. She talks about what she learns, and the trials and tribulations of caring for the old cemetery. These are all thinks I'm interested in. However, I found her unlikeable. She seems pretentious, elitist and with no sense of humor. And the way she goes about bragging about her father got old very quickly. Took me forever to finish this book. The library is making a fortune on my overdue fines on this one.

This is a sweet little anti-war movie from the '60s, with pretty people and a lovely location. Sometimes the characters are so odd as to feel Fellini-esque, but in much easier to swallow doses than Fellini. Fellini for people who don't like Fellini. However the plot is so simple as to be trite, and the movie drags in places. Nonetheless it is a sweet, fun little movie.

If you like the movie, read the book! If you didn't like the movie you should read the book. Movies can never replicate a decent length novel, so the best you can hope for is that it will capture the essence. Having read the book before seeing the movie I knew that would be almost impossible to do. In it's way the book takes and unbelievably complicated plot and gives it to you in the simplest way possible. Shortly after the movie started I actually thought they might pull it off, but it only ends up giving you a taste of the complexity of how a couple deals with the fact that one of them is being thrown around time like a ping-pong ball and the other lives life on the usual time-line format. And at times the movie took short cuts to explain how it all works and I found those parts very contrived. And there were pieces I felt were overly melodramatic and took away from the story. All those critiques aside it was a fairly entertaining movie with excellent chemistry between all the characters.