Slow Sunday and Movie Reviews

This weekend Willimantic celebrated its Victorian Days. From Afternoon Tea Sandwiches to the guided tour of Willimantic Cemetery to the 10 Victorian Gems (one of which is where our neighbors live). For two days we listened to the clomp-clomping of horse-drawn wagons. (Predictably, the streets of Willimantic are now covered with horseshit.) We watched much of the commotion from our windows – the horses and some big celebration over at the neighbors’ house. But we took no part in any of it. Maybe next year.

I’ve been trying to take it easy this weekend. Some e-mailing. Some slow unpacking. Some minor shopping. Some movie-watching. Speaking of which, here’s my new list of “recently watched.” Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
I know, it’s almost shameful that I hadn’t seen any of these before. I fell in love with the ending of the first one. (Just like everybody else, I guess.) The second one wasn’t as good, but I liked the sequence in what used to be a subway station. The third one was just plain silly. I have to admit though, Kim Hunter was strangely likable as Zira.

Player
Robert Altman’s movie about movie business. It’s famous for its incredibly long opening shot. If that’s what movie business is really like…then I don’t understand why Movie Dictator wants to be a part of it. I loved the moment when Peter Gallagher suggested that writers could be eliminated from the movie business altogether. (Somehow it made me think of publishing business.)

The Incredible Shrinking Man
A man is exposed to radiation and begins to shrink. Watch him struggle with a cat and a spider. Very Gulliver’s Travels. It got a little boring somewhere in the middle. But the ending was really good. Made in 1957, it could use some of the modern special effect. And what do you know? The remake is scheduled to come out in 2008.

Paper Moon
I couldn’t believe this was made in 1973. It had a total feel of a depression-era movie, which was, of course, the whole idea. Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal are a pair of crooks who are made for each other. She’s eight (or nine?) and she’s a natural. He might be her father. Of course in real life, he is.

Go West
My first introduction to Buster Keaton. What a face! He’s a cowboy on a ranch. There’s a girl. There’s a cow. There’s a train chase. There’s love. I hope there's more to come.

The Last Man on Earth
The man in question is played by Vincent Price, and the reason he’s the last is because of a vampire infestation. They are sluggish vampires though, sort of like zombies but slower, and the movie itself is, well, sluggish.

Lifeboat
Hitchcock at his best. World War II. A ship is sunk by Germans, and a few survivors are stranded in a lifeboat, along with one accidentally captured German. Is he to be killed? Is he to be trusted? Tallulah Bankhead plays a hard-as-nails reporter. (She reminded me of Bette Davis.) Now, you know how Hitchcock always made cameo appearance in his movies? Guess how he managed it in this one!

Soylent Green
Near-future circa 1973. Extreme poverty, pollution, and over-population. The rich get apartments equipped with live-in concubines, who are referred to as “furniture.” Food as we know it has all but disappeared (unless you’re one of the privileged few). Instead, the masses are fed by something artificial. And one police detective (Charlton Heston) is about to find out exactly what it is. Fun, but a bit dated.

Breach
A spy movie – based on a true story. I thought it was okay. (Plus it had Laura Linney.) Movie Dictator thought it was predictable as hell.

Venus
An ailing old man (Peter O’Toole), who was once a famous actor. A grumpy young girl, his best friend’s niece’s daughter, who appears one day at his best friend’s flat. An unlikely connection. Either he’s being taken advantage or she is being changed and seduced by him. Or both. A quiet gem of a movie. Peter O’Toole is glorious, and the casual banter among the characters is so much better than any Hollywood dialogue. The movie’s got the look, feel, and pace of a European movie. It felt almost Russian.

Mommie Dearest
Faye Dunaway plays an aging Joan Crawford, who adopts two little children and proceeds to make their life a living hell. The most famous line: “No... wire... hangers.” It’s based on a memoir of her adopted daughter, Kristina, and while I feel the woman’s pain, it doesn’t make for a very interesting movie. Once you realize that the "Mommie" in question is genuinely psychotic and needs medical help, there’s very little left to say. Instead of the daughter’s sob story, I would much rather see a story of Joan Crawford herself, from her early days (see Grand Hotel!) to her disintegration.

An Evening With Kevin Smith (1 and 2)
Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob, aka the director of Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, etc., etc., goes on tour. The first installment is a compilation of the talks he did at various universities. In the second one, he goes to Canada, and then to England. The talks are not really talks but q&a sessions, except he doesn’t really answer questions, but tells stories. He does it very informally, and he goes on tangents a lot, so a typical answer can easily take 20 minutes. He’s very funny. Everything he says feels improvised. Movie Dictator totally loves him – because the man can talk! a lot! (He also loves his movies and general attitude towards life.) I love him too -- watched the whole thing while packing and scanning papers in preparation for the move – but I’m also more critical. I though in part 1, he was a bit evasive in his answers/stories. I mean, when a young college kid asks you how to finance a movie, and you tell him, charge it on your credit card… I don’t know. Even if that’s what you did, it’s still not cool. Funny, yes, but not very generous. But that’s just some minor criticism. He got better in part 2. There were so many highlights I could write about here, but it would take forever. So just find the DVDs.

Lord of the Rings
Extended version! I’d seen the first and the third one when they came out, but missed the second one. Now I got to see them all – on three consecutive evening. There are plenty of fans out there, both of the book and the movie, so I don’t feel like I need to say much. (There are detractors, too. Just ask Kevin Smith!) I myself read the book back in Russia – in Russian! -- and “Baggins” was translated as “Sumkins” (“bag” in Russian is “sumka”). What I love the most about the book and the movie is that incredible sadness that comes at the end. The journey changes and darkens you somehow. You should be celebrating, but you can’t.

Fired!
A documentary by a young actress (Annabelle Gurwitch), who gets fired by Woody Allen. (Apparently, he tells her she’s so bad it’s like she’s retarded.) But the young actress won’t be deterred. She gets her revenge by gathering up some actor friends and other individuals and doing a film about the experience of getting fired. Turns out, almost everyone has a story to tell, and much of them are hilarious. But it gets serious, too, when she interviews the workers at a GM plant or talks to the woman who is fired for being a smoker (turns out, in some states companies are allowed to do that and more). Overall, the movie is really well made. It’s entertaining and tongue-in-cheek (imitating the style of Woody Allen’s movies themselves); it’s informative; and Annabelle Gurwitch is charismatic enough to make the whole thing work. Good for her!

The Night of the Hunter
A stylish black-and-white movie about good and evil. A murderous preacher, two little kids on the run, and the old woman with the heart of gold who rescues them. Movie Dictator is convinced that this is something that must have inspired David Lynch. I sort of agree, especially given the movie’s eerie opening scenes.

Paprika
A gorgeous anime from Japan about dreams being invaded, modified, corrupted, stolen, etc. The logistics of the plot can be a little tough to follow, but the morphing images and the surreal, dreamy quality of the whole thing make up for any glitches in the plot. It’s so vivid, you just can’t look away.

Autumn in New York
Oh Hollywood! I had to keep my mouth shut, knowing how much Movie Dictator loves Winona Rider. But I had to wonder, what kind of a log line you write for a script like that? Let’s see: a handsome womanizer (played by Richard Gere) falls for a young dying girl (Winona Rider). She changes him forever. But only miracle can save her. How do you sell a script like that -- especially when the dialogue is trite and the characters lack any sort of personality? How do you get away with a scene when a girl starts collapsing at a skating rink? Haven't we seen it in The Love Story already?

Crying Out Love, in The Center of The World
More sickness. More death. A Japanese melodrama that’s way too long. A young man is supposedly searching for his fiancé (a young, beautiful, limping girl, who disappears after discovering a tape she’s long forgotten about) and in the process, he is remembering his high-school love, long-lost to leukemia. It could’ve been okay, in a good tear-jerker sort of way, but it needed some major cuts. I did wonder how they were going to tie up the guy’s memories to his limping girlfriend’s story. This kept me going for a while. But in the end, I was too tired to care, let alone feel anything.

Piter-FM
A rare treat from Movie Dictator, who found this one for me. A Russian movie with subtitles, which means we watched it together. It was just before our move, and I desperately needed a diversion, something sweet and beautiful. The movie isn't terribly orginal. A young woman is a DJ at a radio station in St. Petersburg (or Piter). A young man is an architect who's about to move to Germany for work. She loses her cell phone, he finds it, and then they try to meet and keep missing each other. Sounds familiar? Sure! But that's not the point. The whole movie is so gorgeously filmed, it's like a love letter to St. Petersburg. Plus it has a great soundtrack. I'm getting a little soppy here, but this simple movie made me feel so many things, a bit of nostalgia (even though I'm from Moscow), a tiny bit of sadness because I'm a city girl moving to rural Connecticut, all the small ways in which I identified with the characters, or perhaps recognized something of them in myself. And what I want now is the ring-tone from from the cell phone the girl has in the movie.