Movies I’ve watched recently:
- Stranger than Fiction
- Entertaining exploration of the boundary between reality and storytelling
- The Departed
- Over the top but it’s Scorsese
- Flags of Our Fathers
- There was something a little too pat and obvious about the story after the return from Iwo Jima but sometimes life is like that, too
- Mystic River
- Liked the doom and darkness of the story although I didn’t exactly buy the local shopkeeper as the leader of a gang
- Babel*
- I don’t buy how all the white people lived through it
- Man of the Year*
- Was going to write this story as a book for my thesis project in 1990 but had to write about Shakespeare instead
- Thank You for Smoking*
- All of a sudden we were getting a lot of movies with references to people dying from smoking or trying to quit smoking, this was the only one I deliberately chose
- Children of Men*
- Something about this one irked Barbara but she couldn’t put her finger on it, OK by me though
- The Da Vinci Code
- I only got it for the much-hyped Smart car chase scene, which sucked
- For Your Consideration*
- It wasn’t Spinal Tap or Best of Show, but we got some laughs
- Paths of Glory
- This movie should be shoved down the throats of every Iraq war planner
- Taxi Driver
- Somehow I’d never seen this before, but I’m really glad now I did
- They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?*
- Another old movie I’d like to force some people to watch, although the people who need it would probably just hoot and holler at Jane Fonda’s demise
- The Constant Gardner*
- We’re suckers for Le Carre
- Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
- I was disappointed by this, it just seemed slapdash, but then Greenwald’s just sort of churning them out
- Apocalypto
- The Running Man, set in Mesoamarica, a tried and true formula with little dialog needed; you may not admire Mel Gibson but he knows global marketing for action movies
- Richard III*
- This was the first movie I deliberately chose from what I’ve seen before; it’s a great turn by Ian McKellan who does a fantastic job with the 1930s retelling of Shakespeare
- Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie
- Realized I’d seen part of this on TV before; it’s pedantic and extremely repetative, although there is some interesting information buried in there
- Good Night, and Good Luck*
- Missed it in the theaters, but it worked well on TV, the medium it portrayed
- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind*
- A hell of a career for Chuck Barris, even without the killing
- The Last King of Scotland
- I can’t wait for the sequel; seriously, Forest Whitaker was a fantastic Amin, it just seemed like the movie focused too much on the doctor and that there wasn’t enough of what was going on around him
- Nuts in May
- A seriously odd ’70s British telemovie about snooty “nature-loving” prigs messing up a camping vacation for the “lesser” people around them
- Bill Hicks: Sane Man*
Bill Hicks Live: Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-up Comedian* - I’d seen some clips of Hicks, so I got a couple of his shows, but something about his delivery just rubs me the wrong way after a little while; it was just a little too mugging and too obvious
- God Said Ha!*
- After what I said about Hicks, I suppose people would wonder how I could like Julia “It’s Pat!” Sweeney’s cancer show, but it didn’t seem as forced and it was more of a storytelling style I’ve always thought worked well
- Passport to Pimlico
- Could anything subversive like this or The Mouse That Roared get made in the US any time in the past decades and be at all successful? A suburb of London finds out they’re actually part of France and uses the fact to get around post-war rationing, with not entirely beneficial results
- The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill*
- Obsession about animals; I recognize it
- Rashomon
- For some reason, this is always trotted out as an example of relativism and different people telling different versions of the same story (Rashomon-like) but now that I’ve seen it, it’s just different people telling different stories, sort of like in criminal court, which is what’s going on in the movie
- I’m All Right Jack*
- An old British film about missile defense plant owners sending getting their stupid upper-class twit relative a job in the workers ranks to muck things up and cause a strike; except that the workers are portrayed as not too bright either. A pox on everyone’s house. Entertaining, but not one I screened for dad.
- Wages of Fear (and bonus disc)
- A very interesting movie from the ’50s, about the relationship between the US, Europe, and covered with a thick sheen of oil.
- Richard Pryor: Live in Concert*
- I’d only ever seen the expurgated version of this on TV. I like Pryor, but it doesn’t live up to the hype as the best comic concert performance movie ever and not just because it’s dated.
- The Battle of Algiers (and 2 bonus discs)
- Very gritty and oddly-entertaining portrayal of the French vs. the Algerians.
- Z
- More old-style political drama I’d never seen, but found quite gripping
- You’re Gonna Miss Me*
- Roky Erickson’s adult life on video. Some days I think I’ll end up like Roky, just without the talent.
- American Hardcore*
- This just depressed me. Not because I wasn’t in the scene in the big cities or because it exploded, but the bands featured were just the ones I really didn’t think were all that good.
- Donnie Darko: Director’s Cut
- I’ve heard about this movie for years but while I liked it’s playing with time and space and I could see how it might be appealing to a teenage crowd, it didn’t hang together for me.
* Barbara watched it