Much Ado About Nothing

http://www.smalltowncritic.com

I wanted help understanding this play. I couldn’t quite get it from reading it, and the only production I’ve seen of it, a forty-five minute version, while very helpful and fun, wasn’t quite the real thing, nor was it put on by high-powered, professional players. The first time I saw it (before seeing that forty-five minute production) I stopped watching it after a bit. Then a trusted friend told me it was a good movie/production, so I tried again.

High artistic values throughout, and I now agree with my friend. I still find myself not as in love with the play and its heroine as I am with Twelfth Night and Viola. Beatrice seems narrower and less vulnerable than Viola is. And our sympathy is split between Beatrice and Hero, who has the most powerful, play-climaxing reconciliation scene. However, the intensity of relationships, the plot tension, the humor, and the language (the lines unfolding like flowers, one after another, forever and forever) are all there.

Mad Men, Season One

http://www.czerniec.com/

Continual positive references in the press.

I found the first season irresistible. The entire show has the queasiness of a certain kind of dream. It’s realistic but also subtly yet powerfully stylized. The main character, Don Draper, is as dark, mysterious, and compelling a Byronic character as I have ever personally encountered. The other characters, despite a certain cartoonish-ness, all seem to contain an irreducible mystery. The sense of design and the cinematography are unlike anything I’ve encountered, and seem much better than that of other television series I’ve seen. The season’s dramatic arc builds more powerfully and coherently than that in the two other series I know that have season-long narrative arcs (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Gilmore Girls). The dialogue is chiselled to fine, smart point. There’s a strong element of subtle pornography of various kinds: sex (though there’s nothing that actually goes beyond PG-13, the uncensoredness of the general approach, the willingness to say how things really are, makes the show seem more explicit than movies that go farther), alcohol-drinking pornography, and cigarette-smoking-pornography. And it's perhaps the most nostalgia-producing show or movie I've ever experienced. The presentation of sexism is relentless, incisive, and unable to be turned away from, the way a car-wreck at the side of the road is. I haven’t rented the next season, maybe because it all feels like too guilty a pleasure.

Heathers

http://movies.tvguide.com/heathers/127716

I am drawn to high school movies, up to a point, and this one tended to get mentioned as more notable than others in discussions of movies I’ve seen.

I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia: looked at as a plot summary, this movie is even more dire and, well, sick, than it seems in the watching. Partly the humor saves it, although it wasn’t, for me, all that funny. It’s fearlessly sailing into such dark material gives the movie life, and the material did seem fascinating. It feels like a revenge fantasy against bullies (one of whom, the male lead J.D., turns out to be one of the bullies) that takes on seriously the complexity of those getting the revenge. And revenge fantasies can be compelling in a sick way. Ryder’s charisma in the lead role kept me watching.

Belle Epoque

www.movieposter.com

A colleague and friend recommended this to me, perhaps because I told him I had enjoyed Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The movie to compare it too, I thought, was Y Ti Mama Tambien. Both are in the soft porn/erotic mode, but Belle Epoque knows what genre it's in—the traditional fabliaux—and executes it well. We believe in the characters’ innocence; the Penelope Cruz character is a real ingénue who we care for. We care for everyone. All the characters are attractive, to the point of corniness, and I didn’t mind whatever corniness was there.

Barry Lyndon

http://media.photobucket.com

A Stanley Kubrick movie treatment of a novel by a novelist I in theory want to know more about (Thackeray).

The lack of urgency may have been the result of a desire on the auteur’s part to say something about anomie. The erotic current in the movie is strong (in a perhaps too-easy way). The visuals are admirable, as always with Kubrick. I stopped watching at the end of part one, already a lot of movie-watching.

The Visitor

http://douggeivett.files.wordpress.com

A good review in the New York Times.

The professor seems a little too woebegone, and I’m afraid the other characters, despite their charged presence and beauty, also seem a little cartoon-y to me. A.O. Scott wrote that the movie avoids “triteness and phony uplift,” but I’m not sure it does. It’s made with some care and has heart.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

http://www.zimbio.com

A good review, and the presence of Penelope Cruz.

The performances of Bardem and Cruz electrify, and Barcelona itself looks beautiful. There seemed to be some structural untidiness and casualness, but I felt engaged throughout. And yet my daughter and some reviewers found it flat.

Bullets Over Broadway

seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com

My friend E also recommended this movie as an example of a successful Allen movie.

A little more cold-hearted that Crimes and Misdemeanors, and just a bit lacking in the depth department, but entertaining and engaging.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

www.thereeler.com/features/le_woody_cest_moi.php

Cf. Match-Point. When I complained to my friend E about Match-Point’s seeming soullessness, he suggested this movie.

And indeed it played out as the same movie, only this time with a heart to it; and the second plot, involving the Woody Allen character, and much comedy. Because of the second plot, it had a sense of being multi-dimensional, where Match-Point seemed disturbingly flat. Having Professor Levy as an important character helps make the movie a search for truth, however compromised. Woody Allen is both funny and deep while being a good story-teller, in a way that I’ve never seen him be before. Before I had only seen him be two out of three of these things.

Gentleman Prefer Blondes

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gentlemen_Prefer_Blondes_Movie_Trailer_Screenshot_(34).jpg

I saw this movie referenced a lot, and I was also interested in seeing Marilyn Monroe in an actual movie. I had seen her (a long time ago) in Some Like It Hot and had either not understood her performance or not understood the movie.

This seemed so dumb. Women who are played to be a caricature of how sexism would like them to be—without irony. I could only watch a half hour or so.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

http://www.jjmurphyfilm.com

I was interested in the director, Stephen Soderberg, because of Traffic, and the idea that the same director would make both conventional movies, like Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven, and less conventional ones, like Traffic and this one.

The Graham character (the troubled, lonely videotaper) and the Ann character (the neglected wife) both seemed to me brave conceptions, very-real-seeming, and unusually vulnerable. Ann’s adulterous sister and husband seemed less so but they had a lot of intensity. The intensity level is high from beginning to end. While some might say that the movie celebrates perversity, the humane-ness of the most nominally perverted character and of the director-writer’s visionmakes this accusation untrue. The adulterous husband seems vastly more evil than the videographer. If there’s a flaw it might be a lurking sentimentality, but the emotional intensity and the tautness of the narrative keep the sentimentality under control.

The Searchers

http://aspectratio.files.wordpress.com

A classic I hadn’t seen.

Thought-provoking and ambitious, and a powerful experience. In retrospect, however, its main character seems a little too much like a one-dimensional bully-sadist, even if he does experience some understanding and redemption at the end. And the young man who’s part Indian seems a little too much like a contemporary sensitive-kind-of-guy. It’s about racism, but not in a very complex or nuanced way. It reads to me more as a kind of Moby-Dick, with the John Wayne character as Ahab. Racism is a thought-provoking strain, but its all about mania for revenge. And Ethan, Wayne’s character, doesn’t have the mystery and philosophical depth of Ahab. However, I read that it’s a candidate in the minds of some for best movie of all time. I’m not saying it’s not a good and important movie. The haunting, stark visuals involving landscapes were my favorite part.

Bringing Up Baby

www.battleshippretension.com/57.php

A classic I hadn’t seen.

My unreasonable anti-Katherine Hepburn phase continues. Her role is to drive Cary Grant crazy, but instead drives me crazy, and not in a good way. The Cary Grant character doesn’t seem to to be enjoying himself much either. All of which puts me in the sad position of not being in on the joke. And I loved her in Holiday and Morning Glory, back in college or not long after.

The Iron Giant

www.anchoragefilmfestival.org

Some people who are animators told me this was a good movie, and I’m always interested in an animated movie that gets a good review.

A movie that believes in itself, carefully crafted, and having a soul. And yet—it doesn’t seem to care about the deeper issues it raises, or it sees those issues in a an unaware, popular-art, folk-art way, so that it seems to be in mono, not stereo; to put it another way, it seems to be a movie for children, or for the child in an adult (not that there’s anything so wrong with that), not for adults. Compare Persepolis.

Cat Ballou

www.tvworthwatching.com

It made the list of classic comedies in The Enlightened Bracketologist.

It's possible that every one is trying just a little too hard to be goofy and to yuck-it-up, as if this movie doesn't take its own comedic soul quite seriously enough. Or maybe I just wanted it to be more taut. It almost feels home-made, as if the parts only loosely go together. But it was watchable and energetic and loose in an unusual way.

Bananas

http://www.fancast.com

I felt remiss early on for not seeing some early Woody Allen comedies, as he was so much a part of movie conversations I was interested in when I was in college and graduate schools. When I finally saw Sleeper I found it extremely funny. However the one joke after another approach, and the too-slow-pacing plus too-much silliness formula of Banans did me in, and I soon stopped watching.

No Country for Old Men

http://www.moviewallpapers.net

Good reviews, and it was a way into the work of novelist Cormac McCarthy, whom it seemed I should read but whom I hadn’t.

Powerful from the first moment and throughout. Bardem’s performance in particular seemed very powerful. The minimal dialogue and minimal use of musical soundtrack combined with the sun-blasted cinematography gave the movie a particularly powerful feel. The screenplay, apparently closely adapted from the novel, was intricate, yet never overly so. I watched it on a friend’s big screen with an excellent sound system so I may have been more dominated by the film than I am when watching on my laptop, my usual mode. What charged movie-making. Score another for the Coen brothers, big time.

Cast Away

http://images.starpulse.com

Some authoritative sounding people (at a party? at work?) said it was a good movie.

Understated, with a strong sense of the physical reality the main character encounters. Tom Hanks, as usual, is intense and understated at the same time. The ending is a little contrived, but coming up with a resolution that didn’t seem completely hokey must have been difficult.

Be Kind Rewind

http://killjill.files.wordpress.com

Still under the sway of School of Rock and Hal, and seeing a positive review, I ordered it.

A little slow and a little too obviously a feel-good movie, and the jolts of insane energy felt more like little puffs of insane energy, but the sweetness that seems to characterize Jack Black’s movies was there.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

archive.sensesofcinema.com

See Christmas in July, below:

"Because I so enjoyed The Lady Eve when I was in college, and because people write admiring things of its director, Preston Sturges, I put this movie, plus The Great McGinty, and Miracle at Morgan Creek on my Netflix queue.

Maybe my problem is that if there isn’t romance, in the sense that if a movie doesn’t have a relationship with a loving/sexual/emotional charge it’s hard for me to be interested. Maybe these notes have made that obvious. This movie doesn’t have one. And the humor has a bit of that crowbar to the ribs quality. The narrative pace—despite the narrative high jinks and verbal gusto—also seems a little slow. It’s still full of interest and well told."

The Great McGinty

http://videodetective.com

See Christmas in July, below

"Because I so enjoyed The Lady Eve when I was in college, and because people write admiring things of its director, Preston Sturges, I put this movie, plus The Great McGinty, and Miracle at Morgan Creek on my Netflix queue.

Maybe my problem is that if there isn’t romance, in the sense that if a movie doesn’t have a relationship with a loving/sexual/emotional charge it’s hard for me to be interested. Maybe these notes have made that obvious. This movie doesn’t have one. And the humor has a bit of that crowbar to the ribs quality. The narrative pace—despite the narrative high jinks and verbal gusto—also seems a little slow. It’s still full of interest and well told."