moviegoer

[jfb]

To be honest, I'm a bit adrift since I got back. When the trip was looming, it gave me something to structure my efforts around--planning the route, contacting friends, finishing the EP, etc. Now I have a lot of things I should do ASAP, and several large-scale things I should begin work on, but somehow I can't focus on any of them, or on anything else. Here's one measure of ennui: I haven't set my clocks back yet.

But one thing I have done, and often do when I'm adrift, is go to the movies. I can't top artname, who wrote to tell me he'd seen seven movies in the first two days of the Hawaii International Film Festival, but here's the rundown for the last week and a half, slightly out of order:

• I don't know if School of Rock was a good movie, but it sure was a feel-good movie. In general I kind of think rock is silly--not the music but the culture of it--which at first got in the way but eventually might have been why I enjoyed it. So far I've liked every movie Mike White has written, except for Dead Man on Campus.
  
• On two straight L.A. days I saw two movies that take a distanced, dispassionate approach to multiple murder. Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, based on a 1958 midwestern killing spree, is great, but... maybe not as great as I first thought. I think I now prefer his The Thin Red Line. Although it's not as funny.
  
• Nor is Gus Van Sant's new film Elephant, based on the Columbine shootings (but set in Portland), which watches a cross-section of the school day, culminating in a lot of blood. Before seeing the movie I read an LA Weekly review that makes a lot of good points against it, but I was moved by the depiction of more-or-less everyday life, beautiful as it can be, and the knowledge that it was about to be cut short or thrown drastically off course.
  
• It was weird to watch John Cusack, in Runaway Jury, play a character who was not immediately likable. Well, he was likable at first, because he's John Cusack, but he soon displayed some unsavory characteristics. Aside from that, it was mostly a fun, light thriller, with a liberal dose of cynicism about the American judicial system. I still like Fleder's debut feature, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.
  
• I saw three movies featuring popular actresses playing against type, starting with Pieces of April, in which Katie Holmes is all punk and neurotic, I think. Good if you like Thanksgiving movies.
  
• Reviews of The Human Stain are mostly about whether Nicole Kidman can play working-class, and Anthony Hopkins can play black. I say yes to both (although my real answers are more complicated), and indeed all the performances are good. But the script has a problem common to novel adaptations--it tries to stuff too many events into one movie, and comes off feeling superficial and scattered. Pretty good anyway, though, and worth something just for the scene where Hopkins and Gary Sinise dance to a Fred Astaire recording of "Cheek to Cheek".
  
• And Meg Ryan in In The Cut plays a character referred to in synopses as a "bad girl" but really more a lonely and confused one in a bad situation. Reviews of this one are fairly negative, which I suspect boils down to opinions about Ryan--people who like her perky and want her to stay that way, and people who don't like her at all. Some reviewers have criticized the plot, and they may be right, I don't know. For me, the movie wasn't about plot, about the game of guess-the-killer. It was about experiencing a distrustful, untrustworthy, dangerous New York, conveyed with jittery cameras and disjointed dialogue in which questions are rarely answered. So yeah, I liked it. Don't go if you're squeamish, though.
  
• Finally, Scary Movie 3 had a few funny moments--the best of which, surprisingly, are not in the trailer--but mostly it just reminded me how genuinely creeped out I was by The Ring.