More recently watched: the good, the bad, and the silly...

Grindhouse
This was fun. Not my favorite genre exactly, so I was a little weary of this 3-hour experiment, allegedly filled with much violence and gore. But no worries. Grindhouse is a glorious send-up of bad B-movie thrillers. A double-feature embellished with fake trailers. But you already knew all that. The first part, Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez, was a parody of zombie flicks, so colorful that the red of wounds and lipstick was practically bleeding off the screen. The second part, Death Proof, was by Tarantino: a crazy stuntman, chatty girls, and car chases. I particularly liked the second part of Tarantino’s film, which featured Zoe Bell, a very cool stuntwoman from New Zealand, who apparently did all the stunts for Uma Thurman in both Kill Bills.

Kill Bill (I and II)
And so my introduction to Tarantino continues. I had avoided Kill Bill, but after watching Grindhouse and Zoe Bell, and I was eager to see what all the fuss was about. The gore -- of which I’d read so much – didn’t really seem like gore. There was more choreography in it than violence. The scene that made me genuinely uncomfortable, though, was the one with Uma Thurman being buried alive.

Plane Dead
Zombies strike again. This time on a plane bound for Paris. Nice, lighthearted flick, where you know pretty much right away which characters are dispensable and which will survive in the end.

Ginger Snaps
High-school girls and werewolves. High-school girls turning into werewolves. Need I say more?

Long Way Round
Travel-around-the-world genre is quickly becoming my favorite. (Have I mentioned I'd watched yet another season of the Amazing Race?) This documentary involves Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman (his daddy directed Deliverance) traveling around the world on motorcycles. More specifically, the trip begins in London and takes the two through Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Siberia. Then they fly to Alaska (along with their motorcycles) and the journey resumes. They get to New York – their unofficial finish line – where their families greet them -- and then fly back to England. Lessons learned: Mongolia has the worst roads. Ewan McGregor is alergic to bugs. There was some amazing footage along the way: friendly Russian drunks, a Ukrainian policeman with a guitar and a gun, Alaskan bears catching fish. But after a while, the whole thing got a tiny bit tedious. I am afraid they spent more time showing the preparations for the journey and the logistics of the filming and the support crew than the trip itself. And there were way too many recaps and repeats.

Black Book (Zwartboek)
The director of this movie, Paul Verhoeven, is generally known in America for such movies as Basic Instinct, Total Recall, or Robocop. My introduction to his work, however, was Soldier of Orange, a WWII movie he made back in Europe. Black Book is his new one, and like Soldier of Orange it was made in Holland and takes place during the WWII. It’s got a structure of a good old adventure. The heroine, Rachel (or ‘Ellis’ as she is later known) is a Jewish girl, formerly a singer, and in the course of the movie she runs away from Germans, joins the Resistance, infiltrates the local branch of Gestapo, has an affair with a Nazi, etc. What amazes me here is the way American (and some English) reviewers responded to the movie. Before saying a word about the movie, they make it clear that they just don’t care for Paul Verhoeven, whether he’s making his movies in Europe or in America (and that nothing will ever change their mind) Imagine the nerve! He shows a Jewish girl undressing in front of a Nazi! Repeatedly! And she falls for him… Well, I never… What’s worse, Verhoeven dares to imply that some of the Resistance members were anti-Semitic (No way! They are the good guys!) and that some of the liberated nations (and their liberators) acted no better than Nazis (Impossible!). The reviewers call such suggestions, “loosey-goosey moral relativism” (see the New York Times). Oh really? What does it mean exactly? “Jewish survival remains a never-ending story,” tells us the New York Times reviewer. Fair enough. No argument here. But does it mean all Jewish people must be portrayed as saints? Must we accept the story-book version of history to justify the existence of Israel?

Jacob’s Ladder
Yet another war movie. Vietnam War. One of those that are listed among modern classics, and yet something I’d never seen before. Since I love all the movies that feature parallel realities, I instantly appreciated this one. Also, as someone who as a kid got sick at the mere sight of hospitals, I fully appreciated the gruesomeness of the main character’s nightmares.