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August 13, 2006
Movies I've Seen Recently
A couple of week's ago I went with Ms. Secret Blog's Boy for dinner and a movie. She was out of town, he is always delightful company, and the fajitas at Rio Grande Cafe are my favorite. We saw You, Me, and Dupree, which was better than The Wedding Crashers, but not as good as Old School. And that about sums it up.
About that time I went with Ms. ADA to see A Scanner Darkly. It was, to quote the best review I've read: a complete mindfuck.
That is, most of the time you're not sure what's going on, and, even when you do, you're not sure whether the events are real. As a result, you tend to sequester everything you see into a a little mental cubbyhole marked "Conditional," ready to purge it if a subsequent revelation reveals this particular scene to be false, or take it out and stamp it "authentic" if it is later verified as real. Unfortunately, you never really get any confirmation one way or the other in Scanner, so you walk out of the film with a head full of loose puzzle pieces instead of a complete picture. And we all know what happens to loose pieces over time: you lose them, one by one. I saw the film last week and already can only remember half of it.
Amen, brother. I liked it (and it made me want to read the book), but I can't honestly say what exactly I liked about it. Not so for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a movie that came out several years ago but which I only saw last weekend during my last, fateful date with The Octopus. Aside from being totally tense during the v-e-r-y long movie (with The Octopus trying to make a move every 2 minutes, that's 69 chances to cop a feel), I did enjoy it. Yes, there were moments when the roiling seas gave me a touch of nausea, but the men in jodphurs and fancy hats quite made up for it.
And then, of course there have been the Netflix movies. I suffered through another viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean (my dad INSISTED)--which just gets worse every time I see it. But the independent movies, Aimee and Jaguar, Before Night Falls, and The Sea Inside more than made up for it. Although about totally different topics--lesbianism during the Holocaust, Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas' story, and euthanasia--they were powerful in conveying a time and place so specific and detailed that they stayed with me for days after I popped each happy little red envelope back in the mail.
