Big Fish

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Very moving tale about a Father's Lifetime of whimsical stories! , 2008-12-07
QUICK PLOT - A mans father is dying, as the son tries to makes sense of a lifetime of his father's whimsical tales. br / br /This movie demonstrates that we need to appreciate the people in our lives as "Perfectly Imperfect". Ewan McGregor plays the role of a son to a very charismatic father who was known for telling grand and whimsical tales. Although the son loved his father's stories as a child, as an adult he felt that the stories were a barrier to a true and meaningful relationship between them. After some investigation, it turns out that his father's tales were not entirely without merit - and the adult son grows to cherish his father's spirit. br / br /Excellent movie, that invokes many emotions and thought about cherishing the friends and family in our lives, and excepting them for who they are.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Life is nothing but invisible marvellous wonders, 2008-11-09
It turns all around the father and his son and their difficult relation. It was perfect as long as the son believed in the stories the father was telling him all the time, that is to say as long as Father Christmas really was a childhood hero. But older age came and those stories sounded all silly, even sillier and sillier and they led to a complete break between the two, the father and the son, till the father came to the point of departing from this life. The son and his wife came back and he was confronted to the stories again. But one day when he was sorting out some old documents of his father's for his mother he came across a strange deed that showed the existence of an estate under the name of his father. And he went there and discovered that this estate had some tremendous reality and that the witch of the old stories was the young girl from some other old story who had become a piano teacher and had benefited from this estate. She sure was in love with the father but the father was faithful to his wife. The son then discovers that all the stories were just embellished true stories. The Siamese Chinese twin women were in fact true Chinese twins though not Siamese. And an epiphany takes place. When the son was keeping watch over his father at the hospital one night, the father called him and the son understood the father was asking him to tell him a bedside story to put him to sleep, the big sleep. And the son is inspired to tell him his own version of his father's embellished stories and that story enables the father to go to his long sleep with all the characters of his own stories. And when the funeral arrives, the son, his wife and his mother can only see with their own eyes that all the characters of these stories are true people. But in the meantime some miracle had happened. The son on the command from his dying father had taken him away from the hospital to the river where he had put him back into the water, as if the father was only a captured big fish living among the humans and waiting for this last minute to recapture his true nature and swim away down the river where he had come from. That's when the film could have turned grotesque or just funny strange. But Tim Burton is a genius of the paranormal and how to make it look so natural that we are obliged to believe in it and to go back to our infancy, when we believed wonderful stories full of unbelievable wonders that we could only believe in deep in our hearts because they were so beautiful. Tim Burton is a magician that mesmerizes us with surrealistic images. br / br /Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines br /

0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Soooooo slllloooooowwww, 2008-11-06
I give it 2 stars for cinematography and acting. Other then that I can't recommend this film, especially if you aren't fond of slow, long, drawn out movies that really have no point and whose characters are blah. It does remind me of Forrest Gump a little but Ewan McGregor is no Tom Hanks! And his adventures are no where near as interesting or believable as in Forrest Gump. br / br /My husband loves it and wanted me to see it, so I said yes. Most of the time I was sitting there thinking "can we fast forward, because I don't get the point of this scene and it's really boring" And after it was over I was thinking "was that only two hours, because it felt like four" I should have know better. My husband was never a good judge of movies. br / br /I guess I kept expecting something to happen, but it never did. Every scene led up to what I thought would be a big wow factor, but never was. They built up tension in every scene that fizzled out moments later. br /Never trust a film packed full of big time well known actors. It is most likely that they are hoping the actors will carry the film, and they did, but not nearly far enough. br /

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Big Fish, 2008-10-13
Great movie. Reminds you not to take yourself so serious and enjoy life and older peoples stories.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

A Fairy Tale for Adults, 2008-09-28
"Big Fish" may be Tim Burton's best film. At the very least, it's his most underrated. Everyone always talks about his concept work/production on The Nightmare Before Christmas and his older work, but I'd argue that this is a more solid film than those. Instead of comparing, though, I'll just talk about what makes this movie so great. br / br /The basic plot is this: Edward Blood was never the best father, especially through his son's eyes. He'd always tell patently false tales about his life, often hogging the attention with his fantastic stories. Now, as he gets closer and closer to death, he recounts his stories to his son and his new daughter in law, in hopes that his son will finally come to know who he truly is. This sort of story was perfect for Tim Burton, because he gets to finally flex his creative muscle and pull it in multiple ways, since the "telling stories" parts of this movie make this more like an anthology than a straight film. Burton's over-the-top style often seems like it is just TOO much in some of his films, but his direction was perfect for this movie. br / br /It's a whimsical, heart-breaking, fantastic fairy tale for adults. Not in the dark way that people often assume "for adults" means, but what I mean is that the themes in the story are very much about growing up, what it means to be a man, and the pain and joy and terror of getting old. A lot of it is silly, but certainly in a good way. This film is funny, quirky, weird, beautiful, tragic, and hopeful--much like life itself. br / br /9/10