Rio (2011)

“Rio” is an animation film directed by Carlos Saldanha. It is colourful and beautifully made with lots of exotic animals (mainly birds) and music. The story mainly takes place in Rio, and Rio, of course, cannot be depicted without Carnival and Christ the Redeemer. I loved the colours and animation itself, but the story left no impression on me. It was not special or interesting. It was just a story among many stories.

A small, male blue macaw is found and adopted by child Linda Gunderson. 15 years later both Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) and Linda (Leslie Mann) are grown-ups living in Moose Lake, Minnesota. The other birds ridicule Blu, because he is a pet and cannot fly. They are visited by ornithologist, Túlio Monteiro (Rodrigo Santoro) from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who claims that Blu is the last male of his species. He wants to take him to Brazil to mate female macaw.

Though hesitant, Linda agrees and they are flown to Rio. There, Blu meets different birds, and more importantly he meets Jewel (Anne Hathaway), female macaw. But they both get kidnapped by a group of smugglers and this is how their adventure begins.

The story is quite predictable. When it is revealed that Blu cannot fly, it is absolutely clear that in the end at a very crucial moment he suddenly and magically will be able to fly. Or it is predictable from the very start that the story will have a happy ending and macaws will fall in love with each other. So as I said there is nothing special about the story.

“Rio” is a good watch for children, but not for the adults. Still if you are a family person, you might like to watch it with your children, because children will add a colour to the film.

Reviewer’s rating: 6.5 out of 10

The Social Network (2010)

The film is about founding of Facebook and related lawsuits. It was directed by David Fincher. Jesse Eisenberg starred as the world’s youngest billionaire and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. As it is obvious from their surnames, both Zuckerberg and Eisenberg are Jewish and both guys are redheads. In my opinion, Eisenberg is much more handsome than Zuckerberg.

I hesitated to watch “The Social Network” and believed that it will be another boring film about the guy who made loads of money. But film nicely surprised me and I think Eisenberg’s charisma played a huge role in it. Also, writer Aaron Sorkin and director Fincher both have done a marvelous job and made the story more interesting with two timelines connected through back and forth flashbacks.

In the past, in 2003, Mark gets dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) and returns to his Harvard dorm room drunk where he blogs that she is a bitch. He thinks of a new project with his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) in order to get Erica off of his mind. Mark creates a website “Facemash” using pictures of female students hacked from various databases of Harvard, where users rate girls’ attractiveness.

Because of Facemash’s popularity, traffic hits the highest point crashing parts of Harvard’s network. He receives a six-month academic probation. This fame attracts attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, brothers who offer Mark a job of programmer for their future website – Harvard Connection. Mark accepts the offer and we move in time. We return to “present” – to three years later and witness lawsuits against Zuckerberg by brothers for intellectual property theft and by his best friend for ownership of Facebook.

I think Eisenberg is very talented and his performance in this film is great. All actors, including Justin Timberlake play their roles quite well. The film is highly entertaining and enjoyable. It is a great watch in the company of friends.

Reviewer’s rating: 8.0 out of 10