Watched in 2003
Submitted by Amie on Fri, 01/03/2003 - 05:56
Tags:
- January:
- Vanilla Sky (2001): An inebriated film school graduate acquaintance of mine, when I asked him aboutVanilla Sky, couldn't say anything about the movie, but kept repeating, while shaking his head and swirling his vodka on the rocks, "It's wack, it's wack." I thought he had spent way too much money for the education he received in film school until I recently saw the movie and realized that, indeed, it can be neatly summed up in one word: wack.
- Funny Farm (1988): I never caught this back in the day, and I got sucked into it while channel-surfing after work. Yellow Dog is my favorite character.
- Ma Femme Est Une Actrice (My Wife is an Actress, French with English subtitles)(2002): I liked this movie, directed and starred by Yvan Attal opposite his real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg, loosely autobiographically based (well, maybe not so loosely, the names of their characters in the movie are Charlotte and Yvan) on how Yvan can't stand watching Charlotte's love scenes. I thought the turmoils of a relationship were more interesting to watch than a fall-in-love movie, and the pair had great, comic chemistry. The movie had been given some bad reviews because of the claim that Yvan concentrates too much on himself/his character, but I thought that was the point, right down to the movie's title.
- Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997): Delved into my rather sparse video collection to rewatch this movie for a few laughs.
- Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002): Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, playwright Arthur Miller's daughter, I liked this movie about three women and their attempts to change their lives--I especially liked Paula, the last character's story--but I would have liked the stories to have more of a connection.
- Bowling for Columbine (2002): This movie opened my eyes to my own exaggerated anxieties over safety due to a fear-generating media. Perhaps the media is not feeding my fear of death by gun, exactly, but with daily headlines such as, "A Nation Braces for Terror," "Terror Alert High," and "Should we Stock Provisions?" I'm not scared of nothing...
- February:
- La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children)(1995): I loved Jeunet's Delicatessen and liked Amélie, but The City of Lost Children, although a beautiful alter-world, was too fantastical for me.
- Adaptation. (2002): I didn't realize that there is really a book called The Orchard Thief, by Susan Orlean. I love screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's creation of a twin brother to show he sometimes feels like a hack and the way he both embraces and ridicules formuliac movies with the action movie-in-movie scene at the end. What I thought was really beautiful, though, was that Kaufman actually was able to translate the ghost orchard into feelings of disappointment, of where, like in real life, nothing really happens and characters never change. Where, like the ghost orchard, most things are better in the imagination or always just out of reach.
Comments! You know that makes me very happy. :-) So is "whack" good? I personally liked it quite a bit, and I'd like to see it again one of these days. And who hasn't wanted to run down the halls screaming for tech support?
My bad, the word is actually "wack." According to the Ultimate Rap Dictionary on the Internet, wack means: weird, crazy, bad, as in (I quote) Fuck's wrong with you, wack nigga?!.
Vanilla Sky: weird, crazy, but not entirely bad, although I wish Aames actually did kill someone and his confusion and the mystery played out with a real psychiatrist to a conclusion or that he just died in the car accident, not later. Finding out that the majority of the movie was due to Aames' Life Extension Lucid Dream Package caught in snags with his subconscious seemed thrown in there. I also couldn't help but think that I was watching an inferior made David Lynch movie.
Yup, Vanilla Sky was and is trash.