time-wasting facebook movie thread continues
Wednesday 24 October 2007 | 4 cookies in the jar
Brava for glasses of wine and talking movies. Oh yeah, that wiggling ginger-root baby-thing too (and how stupid we definitively knew the captain was when he THREW IT IN THE FIRE)—maybe I’m just getting older. I mean, I’m obviously getting older; but maybe that’s why I seem increasingly disinterested in film that uses torture as a cheap way to ramp up the drama. I agree that the film belonged entirely to little Ms. Whoever-she-was, and her serious brown eyebrows.
And I love “grotesquely passive mother”—you should review movies! Although having said that, of course, it means you watch an awful lot of sickeningly terrible celluloid for not much pay, so forget that idea….but you know, losing friends because you hated something they loved? Classic symptom of underemployed critic.
I haven’t seen Children of Men but it’s in the queue (since I haven’t managed to find the independent video store in town, assuming there is one, which in this country of big-box retail and strip malls I somehow kinda doubted, so I caved in and joined Netflix). I think the last film with which I pissed off friends was Sideways, which au fond bored me, as some kind of male encomium to failed drunken novelists….I mean it was cute and all, but I didn’t wet myself over it the way many (male) critics did. The most interesting things on tap were far and away Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, and not the two dudes.
And then I was pretty meh about some other darlings too, like that damn penguin movie—the penguins were fine, it was Morgan Freeman telling me how to feel about the penguins which irritated me. But I’m an irritable girl. Thank God I had an unbelievably generous editor, who let me mouth off about movies even though I’m sure she frequently disagreed with me. As the sub-editor informed me dryly, my views were “not exactly populist” and yet I don’t think I was ever taken to task for any of my cranky rantings, or asked for rewrites, which, the more I think about it, is pretty staggering. Then too, when you hand in everything after the deadline, I guess there’s no time for rewrites—not exactly a strategy to recommend, but I suppose functional while it lasted. She heaves a sigh.
What about Crash (Haggis not Cronenberg) (or, for that matter, Cronenberg)?
As far as Nicholson, well….young Jack is dazzling. Older Jack often seems to be doing an impression of himself—like Pacino, who stopped acting somewhere around Scent of a Woman and now just hollers. Though in re: older Jack I will confess to a great corny fondness for a terrible movie with him and Diane Keaton and (dear God no) Keanu, the name of which mercifully escapes me, because I saw it a) right after a torrid breakup and b) in the sickroom of my dying godmother who loved terrible movies, and would watch them over and over to soothe her pain and nausea—I think my godsisters and I can probably recite all the dialogue of As Good As It Gets, except for the Greg Kinnear beat-up scene, which Maman invariably fast-forwarded.
One of my students wrote his pop culture paper on Meet the Parents. We talked about schadenfreude (okay, I talked about schadenfreude) and I asked if he’d ever read any of Woody Allen’s comedy pieces for the New Yorker. WHAT was I THINKING? Said student considered, and answered:
“I think I’ve heard of him….wasn’t he in a movie or something?”
And on that dire apocalyptic note I end this RIDICULOUSLY LONG meditation on cinema and betake me to my 33 terrible papers.
4 cookies in the jar
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Something’s Gotta Give, you silly
Good God, how could I have forgotten?! :o)
And how *are* you by the way, dear woman?
The penguin flim was atrocious, meretricious trash, deliberately confusing the life experiences of human beings and birds, only one of which, I seem to recall, are featherless bipeds. And only one of which is responsible for climate change, which is mentioned not once in the film, but is swiftly making penguin life unsustainable. And bless you for not being very populist, which in this day and age means: not being the kind of charming young sociopathic faux-populist rightwinger who gets the juicy paycheck churning out facile garbage for Rupert Murdoch & Co.
“Atrocious, meretricious trash”! Hey, have you ever thought about being a film critic? ;o)