Monster's Ball 2001
I finally caught this one on DVD about a year after it came out. Roger Ebert made this movie his pet project last year, touting it as the best movie of the year. But really this is a character study and I don’t see how you can give a character study such high acclaim.
The plot (if there is one) moves very slowly. That pace, I’m sure, turned a lot of people off of the movie. But it’s hard to make a movie about people who are tired of their lives without making it a little boring.
The guy I borrowed the DVD from said he thought the movie was better the second time around and I can definitely see his point. If you don’t have to worry about the deaths in the movie (and just accept them) and you don’t have to worry about how it ends, or get impatient waiting to find out, then you can sit back and enjoy watching how the story unfolds and how the characters develop during the movie.
I can see how Halle Berry won an Oscar for her role. It was a big role with lots of anguish, passion, anger, sadness, etc. It must have been hard for her just going to filming every day. Billy Bob Thornton turns in a very good performance as well, though he doesn’t have to display quite the range. He’s a very interesting actor and it doesn’t seem to matter what movie he’s in, his character is always the one to watch. He just seems so comfortable playing the people he portrays.
So I wouldn’t call it the best movie of the year, but it was still a good film. I’d give it a B+.