Desert Blue (1998)

Starring Kate Hudson, Christina Ricci, Casey Affleck, Ethan Suplee, and Brendan Sexton III.

Desert Blue is about a girl and her dad who get stuck in a small desert town when someone dies after a soda truck holding a secret ingredient tips over on the highway.

I thought it was nice. Weird, if anything else. Kate Hudson plays the same person she always plays. Christina Ricci played a rebel who liked to blow things up. It was something I'd see again, definitely.

I'd recommend Desert Blue to people who like indie flicks. I'd give it a 5.

Desert Blue currently holds a 37% critic rating and a 45% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Desert Blue trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3HNzMiNpbY

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126261/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/desert_blue/

200 Cigarettes (1999)

Ensemble cast featuring Christina Ricci, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Courtney Love, Paul Rudd, and Kate Hudson.

200 Cigarettes is about a group of people in New York City on New Years Eve, in 1981, who all separately arrive at a party, and their journey to get there.

The film was lame. I couldn't even finish it. Perhaps it would fare better at a later date. Ricci's accent was deplorable.

I would recommend this to my youngest sister. Because she, too, is lame. 2/10.

200 Cigarettes currently holds a 29% critic rating and a 53% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

200 Cigarettes trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwEqiNwBHFA

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137338/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/200_cigarettes/

The Man Who Cried (2000)

Starring Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, and John Turturro.

The Man Who Cried is set in the 1940's, about a Russian Jew (Ricci) who is separated from her father, an opera singer, when he goes to America. She is taken to England after her village is invaded, where she is given a new name, Suzie, and a foster family. She is taught to speak English and she grows up to be a singer in Paris. This is where she makes friends with Blanchett's character, an 'older' Russian woman, a very rich man (Turturro) that her character will chase, and a Romani man (Depp) whom Suzie will fall in love with. Turturro's character discovers that Suzie is a Jew and rats her out to the Nazi's. She flees to America, where she discovers her father assumed his entire family had been killed, change his name, quit singing, moved West, and became a studio head, with a brand new family, and he is currently unwell. The last scene shows Suzie singing him a song he sang to her as a child, in Russian, in tears.

The film was okay. Christina Ricci looked beautiful, which was perhaps my favorite part. I missed a large portion of the middle, but I understood the gist of it. I may be inclined to watch it again.

I would recommend it, perhaps, to my mother and oldest sister and I would rate it a 4.

The Man Who Cried currently holds a 35% critic rating and a 59% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Man Who Cried trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVU9eE-PnBE

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206917/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_who_cried/

Prozac Nation (2001)

Starring Christina Ricci, Michelle Williams, Jason Biggs, and Jessica Lange.

Prozac Nation is about a Harvard freshman named 'Lizzie' (Ricci) dealing with depression.

The film bothered me. Not because of poor acting or way the story is told, because those are both nice things. But because of the way Lizzie deals with things. She's clingy, she's a little crazy, she's detached from reality. I suppose dealing with my own depression caused me to look at the way she dealt with hers and say "that's not right." She throws temper tantrums, she's whiny, she won't leave her boyfriend alone. Depression, to my belief, is ignoring people and forcing them to come to you. Perhaps it's different for everybody, but in my mind, she wasn't crying for help; she was just crying for attention, and it was horrible to watch.

I would recommend this movie to the type of people who drink wine, probably, I'm not sure. I'd rate it a 3.

Prozac Nation currently holds a 29% critic rating and a 58% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Prozac Nation trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QWM_Kni6l0

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236640/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/prozac-nation/

Pumpkin (2002)

Starring Christina Ricci and Hank Harris.

Pumpkin is about a sorority girl (Ricci) falling in love with a challenged teenager (Harris) whom she is working with for a charity her sorority signed up for.

The whole film mocks itself. Everything is a joke in and of itself. Pumpkin is a dark comedy that points out the flaws in other films like this, including a car crash/explosion that someone survived, with no burns at all, to become a paraplegic and be more "caring." Ricci sleeps with the boy, and his mother calls her a pedophile and a rapist, pointing out the fact that it's somehow acceptable in the realm of film for an older woman to sleep with an underage boy but not vice versa. That would be 'creepy' and 'over stepping boundaries.' One of her sorority sisters is abrasive the whole first half of the film. Frizzy, hunched shoulders, pushy, awkwardly rude. At some point in the film, she gets a makeover, after which she confesses to have been given some pills to relax her, and she becomes subtle and girly and agreeable like the rest.

Pumpkin was amusing, if not a little weird. I like it well enough. I'd recommend it to one of my sisters and I'd rate it a 4 or 5.

Pumpkin currently holds a 38% critic rating and a 54% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Pumpkin trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvhzaFRYO2w

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265591/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pumpkin/

Anything Else (2003)

Starring Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, and Woody Allen.

Anything Else is about a struggling actor (Biggs), his cheating, selfish girlfriend (Ricci), and his mentor (Allen).

This film dragged. Ricci plays a selfish girl who is cheating on Biggs' character, and it's painful to watch. Not because of bad acting, but because it's so hard to watch Biggs play yet another idiot pushover. I think Allen, as is mentor, is the older version of Biggs' character. His life stories coincide strangely (maybe it's just me) with the story Biggs tells. He also appears to be his 'conscience.' Allen stammers through all of his lines and after his first few dialogues, I was over it. Danny DeVito plays Biggs' unhelpful, yet well-intentioned, agent. Ricci cheats the whole time with different men, as far as I can tell. Then she leaves him for a doctor who she was shown getting an emergency check up on earlier in the film. I was bored.

I would recommend this to my mother, again. She stated she does, in fact, like Woody Allen films. 3/10.

Anything Else currently holds a 40% critic rating and a 43% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Anything Else trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMJnRli1TaU

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313792/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/anything_else/

Cursed (2005)

Starring Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg.

Cursed is, I think, a horror movie about a brother and sister (Eisenberg and Ricci), the boys crush, her closeted-gay jerk boyfriend, his sister's boyfriend, and the girls he dates. The sisters boyfriend is a werewolf who turned another girl into a werewolf who kills the girls he dates for revenge. The brother and sister are turned into werewolves by the boyfriend, the brothers dog is also turned. The only way to cure themselves is to kill the werewolf that changed them. They kill the vengeful female werewolf, then kill the boyfriend werewolf, with the help of the closeted-gay jerk boy, who admits to having feelings for the brother. At the end, the brother wins over his crush.

The film received mostly negative reviews and was called the worst werewolf movie to date. Poor special effects and a predictable plot 'ruined' the film in the eyes of critics and viewers. As a 2005 monster film in competition with other (gory) 2005 horror films, the mainstream and the special effect geeks would be unimpressed. As a girl who likes campy late 80's/90's/early 2000's spooky films, this movie was spot on. As a horror film, yeah it was a flop. As a film reminiscent of the aforementioned films, it was pure genius. Every film is the same. Same special effects, same blood and guts. People want things that shock them, that they think open doors to new levels of extreme. The 1996 cult film 'Scream' which satirized horror films while being a horror film in and of itself, if it had been released in 2005 or today, in 2013, would have bombed. It would have been a dud. If Cursed had been released 10 years earlier, it would have been a prize winner. Wasn't that Christina Ricci's prime, anyway? Horror movies are lame now, nothing is scary. It's just a shock factor. What's grosser, watching a human beings muscles being pulled out of their arm, or slicing their arms open to fill vats with blood? Who cares. Give me back films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and the first Final Destination. Something frightening that doesn't make me want to vomit. The horror genre thinks it's upping the ante by upping the gore, they're wrong. The mainstream viewer is a robot that likes what they're told to like by people they pretend are important. This evolved into a rant against the mainstream, and maybe that's what Cursed is to me. A movie behind it's time that's better than the ones surrounding it. A flop in the eyes of people who look with them half closed, a declaration to the people who are free to see.

I would recommend this film to the same people I would recommend The Informers and Cosmopolis to. The people who reject the system. The cool ones. You know. I'd give it a 6.

Cursed currently holds a 16% critic rating and a 37% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Cursed trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhLyx8GojoI

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257516/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1142569-cursed/