Catching up on flicks...
Last Saturday, contessa_maggie and I caught an afternoon screening of Waitress. The glowing reviews are essentially spot on. The movie was at once devastating (which came as a huge surprise...I actually cried a bit) and uplifting and always wonderfully honest in its treatment of the characters. Just all around great. If this doesn't seem like the sort of movie you'd be interested in, see it anyway. You'll be glad you did; Waitress is darker and more meaningful than you might expect. After the movie, we went out for a pre-birthday lunch. :)
BTW, the acclaim Waitress is garnering is bittersweet. Adrienne Shelly, who wrote, directed and starred in the film was murdered last November. Her killer, a 19-y/o construction worker, said he was "having a bad day."
contessa_maggie and I also saw First Snow a few weeks ago. This flick, about a man who is told by a prophet/fortune teller that he will die when the first snow falls, is bleak and oppressive and quite nearly profound. The theme of survival is fairly straightforward, but about half way through the movie you begin to wonder WHY these characters care so much about preserving their meaningless, aimless, "lifeless" lives; the amount of effort the main character puts into solving the mystery/cheating death begins to seem absurd. Wouldn't it be better to just give up and welcome being put out of his misery? Maybe... Anyway, highly recommended.
Tristan and I saw The Valet a week or so ago. It's a completely harmless/weightless flick about a guy (the titular valet) who is hired to help a philanderer out of a jam. Tristan felt it was true to the spirit of 1950's French comedy ("comedy for the people"), though you shouldn't consider that an endorsement. ;) We were both lukewarm on the movie. And wtf was up with completely wasting Kristin Scott Thomas! :(
T and I caught the German flick The Lives of Others recently (I wrote about this movie a while back, but didn't give my impressions.) You may recall that this movie won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; to say the award was deserved would be an understatement. The movie is breathtakingly, unerringly brilliant and deeply moving. The story takes place in East Germany a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The stasi is completely out of control. One of its members is assigned surveillance of an artist couple (an actor and a writer) who come under suspicion for reasons best revealed by the film. What follows is a tense, sophisticated character study that is enormously gratifying. Definitely picking this up on DVD.
The last of the in-theatre movies seen recently. Caught this opening weekend with
projectsen and Victoria. Because so much negative press preceded our screening, I went in with extremely low expectations. Maybe that's why I actually enjoyed it? lol. Yah, I didn't hate it! I didn't love it either, but I'm not really a huge fan of the Spider-Man movies anyway (which is something of a personal tragedy considering Spider-Man is my favorite superhero of all time.) In fact, I don't own any of the Spider-Man DVDs...I'm just not that into Raimi's treatment; so, I wanted to see SM3 mostly for closure and came away happy to have found it fairly entertaining.
Also, we recently watched Curse of the Golden Flower and Music and Lyrics on DVD. I really wanted to like Curse (considering I'm up to my eyeballs in readings on the period), but the movie fell flat. Music and Lyrics...well, what did we expect? ;)