GUEST REVIEW
An Education
(by Dante Bean)
I had just worked a twelve hour day and gotten in bed when
my friend wanted to drive out to the local art house theater and blindly see
something. I had no motivation, and it's about an hour away. But
they had made puppy chow. Puppy chow is basically Chex, that has been
thrown in a giant bag with chocolate, peanut butter and powdered sugar, shaken
up and then frozen. In other words it's heaven. Like eating
clouds. So I was off.
Collectively we had seen every movie playing there except
for An Education. I didn't know anything about it except it had Peter
Sararasssahgarrrrd and some girl that hadn't been in much before this year
(Carey Mulligan; Public Enemies, Brothers) but Entertainment Weekly keeps
hyping up for an Oscar over this. So we went. And it was pretty
okay.
The flick had a
cool look from word one. I'm not sure it wasn't the print or the theater,
but it looked like it was shot though some kind of filter. Everything had
a softer look to it, like a color film from the 60's or 70s.
A brief oversimplification
of it would be, a very gifted sixteen year old private school girl is on her way
to pursue life at Oxford, as delegated by her overbearing father (an awesome
Alfred Molina) until she has a chance meeting with the suave and
mysterious Sarassghaarrrd (who is in his thirties, creeper) and basically
plays Satan's harp for her to show her a life of high society, jazz, art
and tisk tisk tisk.
I'll avoid any spoilers because it does get relatively
complex, but that doesn't always translate to entertaining. I wasn't ever
really bored, but that doesn't really translate to always entertained
either. The biggest flaw comes from it's emergency brake ending. By
the time we reach the climax we have a pretty spectacular mess on our hands, but
it's somehow all swept under the rug and cleaned up in minutes. Which is a
real catch-22, because while this flick needed another half hour of story, I
didn't want to sit there for it either.
3 Things I Liked About This Movie
-Creepy Sahrrrsgard being
creepier than he has been since Kinsey
-I liked the way
it looked
-Digging the new face
3 Things I Didn't Like About This Movie
-Clean cut boring out of no where wrap up
-Takes too long to tell too little
-Sarzgarzd's confidant is a terrible miscast.
All in all, as far as
acceptable date type flicks go, this is pretty good. It's entertaining
enough, and you won't be humiliated buying tickets the same way that you would
for New Moon or Couples Retreat.