...i watched 5 movies this weekend. it's a little sad, i know. first was 'get carter'. although i was not personally a fan, a little too brown and grey and not as good as 'the long good friday', i think i can safely say that this is the type of film that guy ritchie has consistently found himself unable to make. he keeps tryin', though.
second was 'band of outsiders', which has already had quite enough written about it, so i'm not going to try and add anything other than the fact that i thought it was sublime, especially the dance scene in the bar.
the third film i mightily regret, and wish i could get my twelve dollars back. i should have known, reading the overly effusive new york times review of 'synecdoche, new york', that something was up. namely the fact that i'm not sure the reviewer and i even saw the same film. i mean, it started out so strong, but just disintigrated into being painfully pleased with itself. there were some great moments, most notably tom noonan's final lines, but seriously. i was in pain by the end. you want to like it, you do. but all of the characters were reprehensible and spent all of their time making pretentious dialogue and navel-gazing. it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. and your wallet.
the fourth was a surprise. i'd just happened to read a blurb on 'dear zachary' and decided to see it. the thing is, i have only ever cried at one movie, and, given the number of movies i've seen, that's impressive. or maybe i'm just a cold fish? (that one movie was 'broken english', with a screechy parker posey and a mouth-watering melvil poupaud -- there's a scene when a fortune teller calls after posey's character "your father misses you." her father was dead, my father is dead, and i completely lost it.) this is not to say that i cried at 'dear zachary'. i was wearing a ridiculous amount of black eyeliner and mascara, and the ensuing scene wouldn't have been pretty. but i certainly had to fight it. it was one of the most depressing things i've seen in a long time -- a filmmaker sets out to make a film, through interviews and clips, for the almost-born son of his childhood best friend, who was murdered by the almost-born child's mother. and then things get so much worse. but it's a beautiful film about resilience, and the impact that one person can have on a small corner of the world, or several, as it turns out, and how tragedy doesn't always have to end there.
number five was a documentary called 'girl 27', about a cover-up of a rape at an mgm party in 1937. maybe if i hadn't watched 'dear zachary' so soon beforehand, this would have had a bit more of an impact. it seemed a little heavy-handed, honestly, and a little tacky somehow to track down the woman who lost the case against her rapist so many years before. maybe some would consider a 'vanity fair' article 70 years after the fact vindication, but it seems a little thin to me.
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