What I’ve Been Watching

Since tonight is the Oscars night, it seems appropriate to talk about movies. Except I haven’t seen many nominated films, despite all my recent movie watching. So, no Oscar predictions here.

However, I did manage to finally see Little Miss Sunshine, just the other day. It was nice. But not great. Maybe I’ve heard too much about it. Yes, it was funny and quirky and fairly intelligent, and some of the writing and acting was great. But it was also familiar. The same quirky family we’ve seen so many times. The same Toni Collette in the same odd/hassled mother role. The same familiar trajectory – the outrageous/annoying characters are allowed to develop and show us their humanity. Movie Dictator loved this movie, actually. My sense is that despite his international movie-geek expertise, he hasn’t seen as many American “indie” films on the subject of dysfunctional family as I have.

Speaking of which, what is an indie film these days? (We had a discussion about it.) Movie Dictator pointed out that to produce a movie like Little Miss Sunshine, with actors of Toni Collette/Greg Kinnear/Alan Arkin caliber, they had to have a significant budget. Granted, not the kind of budget that, say, Babel had, but still, significant. My understanding – or rather a guess – is that anything not produced by one of the major studios is considered indie. This would include total dark horses that come to light at Sundance, and the bigger players like Little Miss Sunshine. Am I wrong? I might be.

Actually, the best and most surprising thing about Little Miss Sunshine was the music. Most of it was by DeVotchka, one of my favorite bands. Their music is gorgeous, a mix of instruments and influences, Gypsy, East European, Italian, Mariachi. Find it. Listen to it. Like the stupid Natalie Portman character says in Garden Sate, “It will change your life.”

Okay, enough of Little Miss Sunshine.

The movie that I recently watched and really liked was The Lives of Others – a German movie, set in East Germany before the fall of Berlin Wall. (Something in me seems to respond to the communist angst. The spying! The repressions! The plight of artists in a totalitarian state!) Seriously, though, the movie is smart and subtle, and there’s something to be said for subtle. What I liked the best is reading the face of one of the main characters (as he’s spying/listening on others). Nothing is explained, and yet one can see what he’s going through.

And while we’re at it: why does everything has to be so over-explained in American movies today? It didn’t use to be that way. Here’s an example. A few months ago, Movie Dictator introduced me to Black Christmas. The original version. Black Christmas is a horror movie about sorority girls who start getting crank calls and end up getting killed one at a time. (And no, in case you’re wondering, in the original 1974 version the sorority girls are not slutty. Well, except for one.) The movie’s not exactly a masterpiece, and it’s got some degree of predictability in it (i.e. one girl will survive and you know pretty much from the beginning which one it will be). What makes it interesting, though, is that crank calls are never explained. They’re odd crank calls, There’s a story behind them, and you can glimpse some parts of it, but the story is not explained and not revealed completely. By the time you get to the end of it, you’re still not sure who the killer is.

Now fast forward to 2006. Black Christmas is remade. The sorority girls are finally slutty. (Hooray!) The killer is revealed right away, even before the killings begin. And the back story of the killer, his connection to the sorority house, his family, his horribly abusive mother (made to look like a fairytale witch – just so we don’t miss the point that she’s horrible and abusive) – all of it is given to us immediately, in a heap of ridiculous flashbacks and lengthy explanations by some secondary characters. The dialogue is trite and clunky and obvious. More importantly, the movie is completely stripped of mystery.


Moving back to the good, quality movies and the Oscars: The ones I’m rooting for this year are Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men. The former one is a beautiful and scary fairytale -- the kind you can’t take your eyes off. It’s set in Franco’s Spain. The latter one is dark, apocalyptic, and set in England. Both are strange and haunting.