Dirty Dancing

Year:1987

Genre: Romantic

Director: Emile Ardonlino

Cast: Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey

Rating: Very Good

The main plot of the movie is the romance between the lead characters, Baby and Johnny. Baby and her family arrive at a resort for their vacation. There she gets acquainted with the staff and gets an opportunity to watch 'dirty dancing'. She is a thrilled by the moves and the dances. Johnny is the lead dancer in the entertainment group at the resort. When his dance partner is not able to participate in an Annual Dance show where they dance every year, Baby becomes his dance partner.

Johnny trains Baby, from a person who can make moves to a good dancer. They practice the Mambo and the portrayal of how Baby learns the moves are quite nice. Though they even practice the 'lifts', they don't do it at the show as Baby gets nervous. Later they fall in love and the rest of the movie shows how her father does not like the relation and how he finally agrees to it. The last dance sequence in the movie was awesome and so was the 'lift' scene.

A sweet little story that keeps lingering on even after you watch movie.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Swedish)

Year: 2009 (Swedish)

Genre: Crime and Thriller

Direction: Niels Arden Oplev

Cast: Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace

Rating: Very Good

A carefully scripted movie with a good plot. It revolves around the investigation of a 40 year old missing case of a girl, Harriet. A journalist, a professional hacker, and an old powerful family, to which Harriet belonged, are the central characters. The main plot is how the lead cast resolves the mystery and identifies the person guilty of many murders which led to the disappearance of the girl.

There is a sub plot to the movie - the life of the hacker, Lisbeth. There are a lot of incidents in the movie, which portray the crimes against women, be it 40 years back or even now. Though some scenes may be mentally disturbing, the script seems to have handled it well by making it look authentic than exaggeration.

The colour tones are also neutral. A majority of the scenes are in shades of black, white, and grey, and suits the mood of the film. The movie does show many helpless girls becoming victims to crimes but Lisbeth is shown as an example of one who is a victim to a crime and yet is able to handle the situation wisely. And she even takes her revenge on him. Though Mikael does the investigation from the beginning, Lisbeth seems to crack the clues, do the background research, and is portrayed as the bolder character.

Premonition

Year: 2007

Genre: Drama, Suspense

Director: Mennan Yapo

Cast: Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon

Rating: Okay

The plot opens with Linda (Sandra) waking up a morning and doing her daily chores like sending kids to school, jogging, cleaning, and so on while her husband, Jim, is away on a business trip. Suddenly a police officer arrives and informs her that her husband died in a car accident on the Highway. Devastated, she calls her friend and mom. Her mom arrives to stay with her and the day ends when her mom goes off to sleep in the guest room and Linda fall asleep on the couch, holding her wedding photo to her chest.

Next morning when she wakes up, she is in her bedroom and in different clothes. Her mom is not there in the guest room and Jim is alive and in the kitchen, watching television. Here starts the confusion. Though Linda tries to believe that what she saw was a dream, she knows that there is something more to it. Things start becoming worse when she again wakes up the next day. Her house is full of mourning friends and family and the funeral of Jim is set to take place. Now she knows that something is really wrong and she tries to find out what is happening.

Her days are not going in the order it should be and are jumbled up. She gets to know of her husband's death even before he is dead, and many more events. The first two days make it seem a bit confusing. But later you get the flow and understand the plot as she tries to relate and understand the events in her life.

The movie has a Prologue and Epilogue. It ends on a positive and hopeful note.

The Town

Year: 2010

Genre: Crime

Direction: Ben Affleck

Cast: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner.

Rating: Okay

The Town is a crime movie and the plot is based on a novel Prince of Thieves.

The movie opens with a bank robbery operated by Ben, Jeremy, and two more friends. Rebecca, who is the Bank Manager, is taken hostage and later freed. The story moves on to show the lives of these gangsters and the crimes they get involved in. Ben and Rebecca start a relationship and Rebecca is not aware of Ben's background. Rest is a cliche story - cops are involved, Rebecca comes to know of Ben's activities and breaks off the relationship with him, like all good gangsters there is bad crime lord governing them, and so on. Finally in one of the police operations, three of the gang members are killed. Ben escapes and kills the crime lord. He buries the looted money at a place where Rebecca is sure to find it and leaves her a note. The note is a hopeful one that they meet. She donates the money to the local ice hockey rink in Ben's mother's memory. The final shot shows Ben somewhere in Florida, looking over the waters from a small house.

Nothing seemed great about the movie and the story seemed to be a usual one. It seemed very much predictable. Just seemed like the old wine still in an old bottle itself.

Dragonfly

Year: 2002

Genre: Drama

Direction: Tom Shadyac

Cast : Kevin Costner, Susanna Thompson, and Kathy Bates

Rating: Good

The movie is about a doctor, who loses his wife, who was seven months pregnant - also a doctor, to a tragic accident, and is grieving the loss. He later sees signs of his wife trying to contact him through her patients who experience near-death situations. All the patients, draw wiggly crosses and ask him to go to the end of the rainbow. He initially has no clue of where is it that they are asking him to go. He tries to focus on other things but these signs follow him even at home like his pet parrot behaving oddly, he seeing a glimpse of his wife out of the window, and a dragonfly paperweight falling by itself onto the floor.

The story moves on while he finally seems to understand where he is supposed to go. He goes to the village where his wife was serving before the accident took place and is finally led by the villagers to a hut. A woman leads him into the hut saying that though they were not able to save her body, they saved her soul. In the hut, he finds, in a basket, a beautiful baby girl, his daughter, which was what his wife was trying to inform him about. His wife had given birth to the premature kid before her death. Similar to his wife's birthmark, the baby also has a dragonfly mark close to her ankle.

The movie, though not that great, has some beautiful shots, and some emotional scenes. The background score also seemed a little different and interesting.

Halfway through, I realized that this was the film based on which the Hindi movie Saaya was made.