Village Vidiot

  “Dreamgirls,” 6 December 2008 (2006), DVD.  We both enjoyed this Broadway musical come to the screen (and I don’t like many). Wonderful singing from Beyonce,. Jennifer Hudson, Jamie Foxx, and Eddie Murphay as standins for Motown by any other name (Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, Barry Gordy, and Marvin Gaye). We follow them from the…

  “Lars and the Real Girl,” 29 November 2008 (2007), DVD.    We both really enjoyed this offbeat indie film starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, and Patricia Clarkson. Lars (Gosling) is a socially isolated young man in Minnesota who lives in his brother and pregnant sister-in-law’s garage. Folks try to reach out to him and…

  “The Sting,” October 17,  2008, (1973), DVD.   We wanted b to see this Paul Newman-Robert Redford classic con flick. We loved watching it again. Newman and Redford have amazing chemistry, Robert Shaw as the villain is fantastic, Charles Durning as a corrupt cop is really a pleasure. The film making is relatively primitive and…

  “The Counterfeiters,” October 15, 2008 (2007), DVD.   We finally got to watch this excellent German film about the German plot to counterfeit American dollars and British pounds and destroy the allied economy during WWII. . They relied on Jewish concentration camp inmates to do this, including a renowned counterfeiter. Quite an amazing story made…

“Touch of Evil,” 6 September 2008 (1958), DVD.  B slept through this classic film noir with a difference from Orson Welles featuring Charlton Heston, Welles, Janet Leigh, Akim Tamiroff, Dennis Weaver, Marlene Deitrich and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  What a weird, surreal, study of corruption, cruelty, violence, racism, deception, and much more comic in moments most…

  “La Vie en Rose,” August 17, 2008 (2007), DVD.    We enjoyed this rather traditional biopic about Edith Piaf starring Marion Cotillard in a marvelous performance. Excellent side work by many including Gerard Depardieu, who has truly learned how to subordinate his ego to his craft. Cotillard ages in breathtaking and horrifying manner as…

  “The Dark Knight,” 9 August 2008, theater.  With B and b at camp, I went to this violence festival with Dan Stone. Why is this rated PG-13? The whole rating system is horrifyingly screwed up. And why would parents bring their much littler kids to this? There were 8-11 year olds there in abundance….

  “Dial M for Murder,” 6-7 August 2008 (1954), DVD.  We both enjoyed his Hitchcock chestnut. I’d never seen it. A washed up English tennis star (Ralph Milland) hires a hit man to kill his straying wife (Grace Kelly) who’s ex-boyfriend, Robert Cummings, a mystery writer, is in town Sophisticated banter and a light touch,…

  “The Darjeeling Limited,” 5 August 2008 (2007), DVD.   We watched this odd Wes Anderson brother/buddy travel pic on our 18th anniversary. Hurrah to us!. Three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody,. Jason Schwartzman) travel to India at the behest of one to reconcile after being alienated following their father’s death. It is a journey of…

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” 26/27 July 2008 (2007), DVD. Wow, this is the goriest Sondheim imaginable. I prefer the stage vision of the murders to this bloodfest from Tim Burton. Johnny Depp stars as Benjamin Barker aka Sweeney Todd, returned from transport to find his wife and daughter or take his…

  “I’m Not There,” 25 July 2008 (2007), DVD.    We liked but were also perplexed by this Todd Haynes (Superstar, Far From Heaven, Safe, etc) movie about Dylan that featured 6 Dylans, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger as bobbie/Robbie/the band, Richard Gear as bobbie/Billy the Kid, and Christian Bale as Jack the Christ who…

“Alexander Nevsky,” 5 July 2008, on airplane.  Very big and rather boring Russian story of their great hero. No, not the Eisenstein but the more recent one of the hero who does no wrong but defends the glories of the Orthodox world. Look out world, old mother Russia’s comin’ back!

  “There Will Be Blood,” 17 June 2008 (2007), DVD.  We both were fascinated by this brutal Paul Thomas Anderson character study of greed and falsehood based very loosely on Upton Sinclair’s “Oil”. Starring Daniel Day Lewis in a brilliant star turn (Oscar, 2008, Best Actor) as the obsessed oil man, Daniel Plainview, the film…

  “The Boss of It All,” 24 May 2008  (2006), DVD.  We (well, I, Bronwen fell asleep) enjoyed this sly, low-key Lars Von Trier Danish comedy about an actor hired to play the boss no one’s met by the real boss who, for ten years, has masqueraded as a worker at a Danish IT company. He…

“Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” 27 March 2009 (2008), DVD. Woody Allen wrote and directed this musing on the difficulties of love and sex (what else?) among the upper-middle classes (business and artistic—who else?) in the US and Spain. Two young American women Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson go to Barcelona, one to study Catalan culture (which,…

“Akeelah and the Bee,” 7 March 2008 (2006), DVD. Wow, it’s been forever since I’ve seen a movie. I’ve been really tired from work and just not feeling really well of late. So it goes. B4 and I watched this excellent family film with Laurence Fishbourn (he also produced) about a little girl in S…

“The Devil Came on Horseback,” January 15, 2008 (2007), community meeting on Darfur. Only film I saw last month. Weird to do so little. Sick and tired too often. Anyway, this was an interesting documentary about an American observer working for the Organization of African States in Sudan and how he learns about the genocide/ethnic…

“Balls of Fury,” 31 December 2007, DVD.  Yes, it’s amazingly stupid. But it is funny and that’s what I was looking for. Stupid and funny on New Year’s Eve. Randy Daytona fails in the 1988 Olympics as a child prodigy table tennis whiz, his gambling dad dies because of it, and he finally washes up…

  “Sleepless in Seattle,” 31 December 2007 (1993), DVD.  We must be the last folks in the country to see this Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan light-Nora Ephron comic drama about a boy who calls up a radio shrink because his dad (mom dies in scene 1) needs to find someone and can’t act. Ryan, of course,…

  “Enchanted,” 25 December 2007, theater.    We enjoyed this Disney feature that both satirizes and reaffirms Disney’s artistic and ideological matrix but in a very funny and creative way. Princess Giselle meets and falls for her “one-true-love” Prince Edward. They are to be married immediately when the evil Queen sends Giselle to the real…

“For Your Consideration,” 24 November 2007 (2006), home DVD.  We all felt disappointed by this weak Christopher Guest comic offering. A very lame purported period piece “Home for Purim” starring B-to-C list actors is shaken up when TV entertainment reporters start talking up the film and three of its actors for Oscars. Egos run amok…

“Into the Wild,” 5 October 2007, theater.  Sean Penn has taken John Krakauer’s non-fiction look at young Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who hit the road and eventually starved to death (not really a spoiler) when he went alone into the backcountry in Alaska. He went to both learn about himself and test himself, to live…

“3:10 to Yuma,” 29 September 2007, theater.  The Hollywood Western is returning with a vengeance. Men die by the wagonload in this new take on an old Western starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, with fine performances by such warhorses as Peter Fonda. Bale, as Dan Evans, a rancher in financial trouble due to nefarious…

  “Hairspray,” 8 September 2007, theater  We both enjoyed and were disappointed in this film version of the Broadway musical about an overweight girl becoming a teen dance star and fighting racism on TV in 1962 Baltimore. Based on John Waters’s classic comedy, the musical has some good, nasty songs but, in the end, I…

  “The Bourne Ultimatum,” 1 September 2007, theater  The tensest and best of this fine action trilogy. We’d just watched the other two on DVD (B3 had never seen them). There’s lots of inter-textual stuff, so it actually would be good to see them again before you watch this. Jason Bourne sets out to find…