Hollywoodland

Movie: Hollywoodland (2006)
Watched with: My mom and stepdad

This movie does a terrific job of evoking its period in a way that's continually interesting, but never pulls you away from the characters or action (maybe these people should've made The Great Gatsby...).

I wasn't too keen on either of the leads before, but Ben Afflech makes a surprisingly good George Reeves and Adrien Brody does a good job of keeping his fictional detective likable even when he's being a jerk.

I left the theater kind of unsatisfied. The movie seemed much longer than it needed to be and the ending felt unsatisfying. But now, I'm still thinking about it, and in an increasingly positive light.

Not great, but all around pretty compelling. Worth seeing.

PS: What's up with the title? The "Hollwood" sign lost it's "-land" in the late 40s and the movie's set a decade later.

Heavenly Creatures

Movie: Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Watched with: Maggie

The only part of this I'd seen before was the part where the girls imagine they're being chased around by a CGI Orson Welles and then end up making out while her creepy journal voiceovers, so my expectations were kind of high.

The movie wasn't bad, but that was basically the best part.

My problem with it was that I never understood why they want to kill Pauline's mother. Juliet's mother betrayed the family and is forcing them to be separated; Pauline's just questions whether a publisher would accept their crazy novel and won't let her daughter take off to South Africa.

Obviously they're kinda nuts, but this whole thing must have made sense to them, and by the same token it seems like it should be made to make sense to us.

Weird fact: Kate Winslet's character is now a successful mystery writer. A convicted murderer writing murder stories!

The Great Gatsby

Movie: The Great Gatsby (1974)
Watched with: Nobody again!

I think that in order to make a really good movie out of The Great Gatsby, you'd have to downplay the period elements. It would be bizarre to set it in the present, but by devoting most of the attention to period costumes and cars and blah blah blah, it feels more like watching a particularly tiresome Jane Austen movie than Fitzgerald's powerful novel.

The movie is faithful in a really bland way. They don't take any real liberties with the source material, but they bury it under obnoxious glitz. I like Robert Redford a lot, but he's too suave to make a good Gatsby and everyone else is pretty much forgettable.

I found out later that my mom saw this in the 70s and considers it one of the worst movies she's seen.
My mom grew up in a world without Dracula 3000 and Kaena: The Prophecy, so I can't really say the same, but it certainly is far worse than it should be.

Gods and Monsters

Movie: Gods and Monsters (1998)
Watched with: Nobody

I've been thinking about old people a lot, so the story of the senile and lonely James Wale (played by Ian McKellen) and his relationship with a ficticious gardener played by Brenden Frasier really grabbed me.

I also like the way it freely admits that movies like Bride of Frankenstein are thoroughly ridiculous, while still finding something poignant in them.

This story could have been really corny and tedious, but it's done very well and makes for a good little movie.

Weird side note: I was struck by the parallels with Sunset Blvd (faded Hollywood figure who lives alone with weird housekeeper developes a strange relationship with a much younger person) and then it ended in an eerily similar way!

The Illusionist

Movie: The Illusionist (2006)
Watched with: My mom

Even setting aside the magical elements, this is more of a fantasy than any kind of real historical thing, but it has everything that a movie like it should.

It's just a big fun romantic (in the Percy Shelley sense, not the Fabio/Harlequin sense) tale.

I don't know what to call stories like this, with larger than life characters and exotic-but-vague historical settings, but when done right, it's really cool. Aside from also being about magicians, it's tone (if not the actual story) reminded me a lot of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of my favorite books.

It's not a perfect movie--the pacing's weird and the ending's kind of cheap (a twist that only works because of information that was concealed from us...though that's arguably appropriate for a story about a magician).

But it's still probably the best time I've had at the movie theater this year.

Wag the Dog

Movie: Wag the Dog (1997)
Watched with: Angelo

Bah.

You can tell that the people who made this thought they were so damn smart for their "biting satire" of the Clinton administration (and, to a lesser degree, the first Bush administration).

I guess it does a competent job of skewering its subjects, and the dialogue has a good clip (and is well-delivered), but once the premise is established, the plot goes nowhere that isn't obvious, and nothing creative or insightful happens.

The best political satires (say, The Manchurian Canidate) work long after the specific situation which bore them has faded away.

The worst ones generate a lot of buzz when they come out, and are tedious and useless a decade later.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Movie: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Watched with: Angelo

The girl at the video store recommended this, and we kind of just rented it to be nice to her, but I always vaguely intended to see it.

Turns out, it's pretty amazing. It's really long and by the end I pretty much had no idea what was going on, but I really enjoyed it all the way through.

Like Ziggy Stardust, it's an effective combination of the raw artsiness of the proceding years and the poppy glitz of the following. It's not as great a movie as that is an album, but it disserves its reputation as a classic.

I'd say The Man Who Fell to Earth would make a good double feature with 2001: A Space Odyssey, though I don't know if even the most mind-blown among us have that kind of attention span.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman

Movie: Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003)
Watched with: Angelo

The thing that was great about the 90s Batman cartoon was that it was filled with goofy superhero fights, but they were done in a really artistically appealing way. It was simultaneously dopey and a little bit classy.



This movie manages to recapture that pretty well. I liked looking at it, and I enjoyed the story in a Batman sort of way. The twist ending was something that I had guessed as a joke, but that's okay by me.

I could never get into that Justice League show they made, but I still do like this one. I hope they do more little movies like this.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Movie: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Watched with: Erika

I feel like I should've been really shocked by this, but I kind of wasn't. It all seemed about what I expeceted, except the part that implied that Enron planned for Arnold to be elected governor of California, which I felt like they needed more evidence to justify. But then, I guess it made sense for them to mention what they had...

Anyway.

Stylistically, I appreciated that this movie didn't copy the Michael Moore style (which is done pretty well sometimes, but sometimes is pretty abysmal--like in that fucking Wallmart movie), though the style it did have was kind of bizarre.

The archival footage from the company and from the news was mixed to pretty good effect, but the metaphor-heavy voiceover, pop music soundtrack (hi, Marylin Manson...) and recreations (hi, naked strippers with operatic music) were, needless to say, bizarre.

This is probably one of the better movies in this genre, but it's still a bit wonky.

Dune

Movie: Dune (2000)
Watched with: Angelo, Cameron, Cameron's girlfriend's brother

I'll say this about "Dune"--it's better than the David Lynch version.
However, I consider the David Lynch version to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, so that's not saying much.

This one replaces the original's arbitrary goofiness and too-dense exposition with relentless tedium and terrible CGI.

It was two discs. When we went to switch them, we found out the second one was scratched and unplayable. We took it as a sign.