Let's make happy
Watched Things
August 09 Movies
Aug 31st
August turned out to be a big movie-watching month for me. Here are the movies I saw and what I thought upon seeing.
In the theater
The rave reviews that this “quirky” film from Denmark received seemed too good to be true, and it was indeed pretty unpleasant! I will never enjoy the tuba again. And the vignettes! No more “vignette” movies for a while.
Meryl Streep as Julia was delightful and amazing. As much as I love Amy Adams, though (and I do), Julie could have choked on a duck bone for all I cared about her story. But then the movie would never have been made, I guess. It was a pretty good movie.
On DVD
This is the 2007 French animated movie about a girl growing up in Iran. The animation was great, the Iran stuff was interesting, the main character (and her English voice acting) was just-OK/bordering-on-annoying. I recommend it.
The perfect economic downturn movie! Everyone should see this before the year is up and the recovery is official. It opens with showgirls decked out in “sexy” costumes made of coins and singing “We’re in the Money.” Classic Busby Berkley, with musical numbers that are both brilliant and very odd. The plot is stupid, of course.
This is Peter Jackson’s movie about two girls who murdered one of their mothers in New Zealand in the 1950s, starring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey (pictured). The fantasy sequences reminded me of the kinds of movies that I watched over and over again as a kid, like Labyrinth and The Princess Bride. The film’s commitment to getting into the girls’ lively imaginations made the murder all the more disturbing, and I probably liked Kate Winslet in this more than in anything else I’ve seen her in.
On TV
Nothing needs to be said about this classic, only that the OETA Movie Club is awesome.
July 09 Movies
Aug 11th
When I wasn’t knitting tiny things in July, I watched a few movies. Here are the movies that I saw and what I thought of them.
In the theater
I had heard from a trusted source (who will go unnamed) that this was a funny movie. Eh, it started out pretty funny, then it got progressively less so. Also, the plot didn’t really work for me, even as a silly comedy plot. I give it a C+. (The plus is for Ed Helms. I met him once!)
A funny and very smart political satire, with not one lagging moment. The best movie I’ve seen in a theater in a really long time. John overheard a woman saying that she “didn’t laugh once” as we were exiting the theater, which was almost as funny as the movie. I suppose she didn’t like the bad language.
I kind of liked this small movie. The acting was done in a natural style and the whole thing was very sensitive. There was one scene that employed horrible tinkly indie music, but since it was just one scene, I could forgive it for that.
On DVD
Everybody seems to know about Stanley Kubric’s Lolita, but no one seems to have actually seen it, as far as I can tell. So I decided to see it, and I liked it. By far my favorite thing about it was Peter Sellers as Quilty (Humbert Humbert’s rival). He is so great! The girl who played Lolita, Sue Lyon, was also very good. Unfortunately she doesn’t appear to have had much of a successful acting career after this.
On TV
I can explain this one. See, John and I have been watching the reruns of Frasier on Lifetime lately, and because they come on several times a day, our DVR is often set to that channel already when I turn the TV on. So when I feel like watching television at other times and there’s nothing on but a Meg Ryan movie WITH commercials that I can fast forward through… so it just happened.
I totally have memories of my own AOL days, so that aspect of the movie (and the way that the Internet spurs some heated debate in some scenes) is sort of interesting. The rest? Not so much, and really dated, and so what if I teared up a little at the end.
June 09 Movies
Jun 29th
I like movies, so why not write a few quick reviews of what I’ve seen lately? I might start summing up all the movies I see at the end of every month, just for fun.
In the theater:
I bet a lot of you have seen Up. Up was very good! I liked the character development (and yay for a cute old guy as the hero) and the way that the house served as a metaphor throughout the entire movie. This May New York Times feature on the way Pixar worked on the character designs made me want to see the movie, and it was also a little inspirational. Animation seems like fun (hard work, though).
Not great! I hadn’t heard much about Departures, but since it won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars this year, I figured it was worth seeing. It was like a just-OK made for TV movie: the characters were good, the story was not bad, but it was so sappy and cliche that I was kind of embarrassed to be watching it in public. For me, a redeeming quality was that the Japanese language was simple and so it was fun to follow along. But surely there were other movies made in other non-US countries in 2008 that were much better.
On DVD:
I was reading something about the career of Marlon Brando and that’s why I decided to rent this. He is great in Streetcar! And cute! But the Blanche DuBois character (played by Vivien Leigh) was a complete turnoff. I guess that’s on purpose, but knowing that didn’t make it easier to watch. The theatricality of the whole thing was a bit much for me, but I could more or less appreciate the directing and so on. Seeing Streetcar for the first time also made me want to re-watch that episode of The Simpsons in which Marge and Ned Flanders perform the play in a local theater production. I bet it will be funnier to me now.
I think I rented The Remains of the Day because I had recently read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and I learned that he also wrote the novel that this movie is based on. And I like Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movie was very good—sad and frustrating to see how their relationship plays out, but also interesting to see the day-to-day lives of the butlers and maids in an English manor in the 1930s. If you haven’t seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in 15 years, I would recommend it.
This 1981 movie was finally just released on DVD. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s two guys eating dinner and talking for two hours. Quite literally! This is my favorite line from the film:
“OK, we are bored. We are bored now.”
At least at that particular moment, it perfectly summed up how I was feeling about My Dinner with Andre: a lot of the time, I found myself wanting to interrupt Andre (played by Andre Gregory, as more or less himself) and change the subject from boring artist-hippie retreats to something, anything else. It certainly was a different kind of film, and that was a little interesting, but I just wish that the conversation had been a little more balanced. Wallace Shawn (also playing himself) makes some attempt to counter Andre’s nonsense in the second half, but they’re both speaking from within what seems to me like a very dated worldview (dated even for the early ’80s), in which people and experiences are either “fake” or “real,” with nothing in between. Bleh.
On TV:
Sometimes I watch (usually bad) movies on TV because I have nothing better to do, but not this month.
Other:
On Friday John and I took a bus to New Hampshire, and the traffic getting out of the city was so bad that the driver played two movies instead of the usual one. The second one was Last Chance Harvey and hey, I like Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman has his charm too. Too bad that the movie was pretty mediocre, even for a romance about an older couple. I don’t really have much else to say about it, except that it was a fine way to spend a couple hours of a 7-hour bus ride.
Boy this post turned out much longer than I had expected! Maybe in the future I’ll just write about movies as I see them instead of saving them for the end of the month.
Look Around You
Apr 22nd
Here is a new (to me) television show that I’m pretty excited about. Look Around You is a British spoof on early 1980s educational science shows, done in a deadpan style that is totally spot-on. (Anybody remember 321 Contact?) Most of the people I’ve mentioned it to haven’t seen it, so I thought I would post a clip here.
The show originally aired in the UK a few years back, and it’s now being shown in the US on Adult Swim. (The later episodes include a cast of friendly hosts, but I think I prefer the documentary-style episodes like the one above.)
Stop Driving Us Crazy
Mar 6th
One of my Christmas presents last year was Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation by Amid Amidi. I finally gave it a good thumbing through last week, and after seeing so many fun and interesting stills from mid-century experimental animations, I was eager to find what was available on Youtube.
Happily, one of the more obscure-seeming mentions from the book was an easy find. I encourage you to watch at least part of this strange and wonderful 1959 animation made for the temperance board of the Methodist Church, of all things. It’s about the dangers of driving recklessly, it stars an alien who resembles a stylized automobile (or maybe Rainycloud, even), and it’s truly fascinating in its modern design and incorporation of jazz music with the moving images.
