movies

That’s one way of putting it

A.O. Scott on Angels & Demons:

This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than “Da Vinci.” Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, unfolds with the locomotive elegance of a Tintin comic or an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Mr. Howard’s direction combines the visual charm of mass-produced postcards with the mental stimulation of an easy Monday crossword puzzle. It could be worse.

Personally, I was bored and annoyed by The Da Vinci Code — the movie; I’ve never read the book — more than anything else, so I don’t expect to watch this prequel-turned-sequel.

Movie signs

I recently — last Saturday and tonight, to be more precise — watched a couple of movies: Timecrimes (aka Los cronocrímenes) and The Man from Earth (aka Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth).

Both were solidly entertaining, Timecrimes for the enjoyable time travel puzzle it creates, and Man for the intriguing ideas it raises. In fact, it’s essentially nothing but ideas: 90 minutes of very good actors just talking to one another. Man has the feel of an old-school Twilight Zone or Star Trek episode — no wonder, given its late author’s background, and the fact that it was first conceived in the 1960s. But that’s not to say it feels padded out to feature length. I think it’s exactly the right length.

Timecrimes was a solid B, B-minus, and I think I liked it better before it was clearly a time travel movie. In its opening scenes, when you don’t quite know what’s going on, it’s actually quite atmospheric and scary. But it’s entertaining beyond that, if never entirely surprising or scary afterward.

(I did like how binoculars and rear-view mirrors were used — maybe intentionally, maybe not. I don’t think this qualifies as a spoiler. In theory, we use these things to see further, to magnify, but they cut off our peripheral vision, the binoculars especially. Anything that fall out of frame can sneak up on us. And in a movie like this, they often will.)

I’d recommend both movies. Both short and entertaining, interesting in their own ways.

Other than that, I’ve mainly been watching some television, including old-school Doctor Who. Having finished Peter Davison’s run on the show (well, aside from Snakedance, which I had trouble finding until recently), I’ve decided to risk Colin Baker’s interpretation. I’m worried, though, that Betty may be right about the character, certainly in her problems with his first episode. Still, it would be hard to disappoint after The Caves of Androzani, Davison’s last. Aside from the always low production values — and a completely superfluous man-in-rubber-suit monster — that was some really excellent work.

“Glad to be weirdly close.”

I watched a couple of movies this weekend.

On Saturday, I watched Synecdoche, New York, which writer-director Charlie Kaufman describes on the DVD as like “going through a dream reality — even though it’s not a dream.” I feel like I need to see it again. I’m just not yet sure that I want to. I liked it a lot — it’s clever and funny and breathtaking and strange — but what it’s not is immediately accessible. It’s a challenge, a movie that makes you really work to understand it — which probably sealed its fate at the box office. In a roundtable discussion by bloggers included on the DVD extras, the film gets compared briefly to David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive, and I think the comparison is incredibly apt. Yet Kaufman’s is a much warmer and more humane surrealism than Lynch’s, less interested in peeling back a facade to reveal the seedy, nightmarish reality beneath than in lifting back the layers of our shared nightmare to reveal the humanity within.

On Sunday, I watched State of Play, which I don’t think I’ll need to see a second time, but which I also quite enjoyed. It’s a smart, funny, and tense political thriller — maybe not the best of its kind, or even as good as the original BBC miniseries*, but well acted and a lot of fun. It does fetishize print journalism and make fun of news bloggers maybe just little too much — and Scott Tobias isn’t wrong abut the “the politics of [t]his political thriller get[tting] muddled in all the rug-pulling” — but none of that really bothered me. It’s a lot of fun for what it is, and it’s kept moving by some tense scenes, smart dialogue, and engaging performances.

* So I hear, anyway.

“I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening.”

First of all, I loved Rachel Getting Married.

It’s actually a fairly pedestrian story, about a troubled addict returning home from rehab for her sister’s wedding, and all the stress and painful revelations that the weekend entails. And yet it’s buoyed by a warmth and grace and the sheer joy of that occasion, as well as by an almost flawless direction from Jonathan Demme, and some truly remarkable performances. (Anne Hathaway, as Rachel’s sister Kym, is the obvious standout, but there’s not a bad performance in this thing.) It’s equal parts rapturous and heartbreaking, and I was sorry to leave its world when it was done. As Roger Ebert notes, “A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.”

I can’t recommend it enough.