100 in 2010! Holiday Inn (1942)

This was a re-watch but a watch nonetheless. Sweet holiday song and dance movie with incredibly racist moments (a black face number celebrating Lincoln's birthday).

Quick 2010 Catch Up!

I haven't posted since October! It's not like I haven't seen any films in those two months--just busy busy with life and the other movie blog. So, here's a quick rundown of the last films I watched in 2010 before I start my first film of 2011:

Dance Girl Dance (1940): Interesting enough but, eh. Lucille Ball is super though.

Legion (2010): Ugh. Stay away. I love Paul Bettany but this film just isn't worth it.

Christine (1983): Maybe if I'd seen it years ago, I'd be creeped out.

Frailty (2001): Er. Yeah. Little transparent.

When in Rome (2010): Why does everyone hate romcoms all of a sudden? This one is perfectly cute and enjoyable.

Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008): Who greenlighted this project? And why did I watch it?

Drag Me to Hell (2009): Ah! Yick! Good but YICK!

The Warriors (1979): Just a TAD dated.

Tangled (2010): Brilliant.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010): I just wanted this to be a complete movie in and of itself and it's not.

Santa Claus (1959): Oh. My. God. Import from Mexico complete with racism, the Devil (and devils), and creepiness unlike anything in any other supposedly Christian-leaning Christmas movie I've seen.

Valhalla Rising (2009): Gorgeous. But, what?

The Proposal (2009): Seriously, why do people hate this movie? Singing? Dancing? Betty White? I laughed out loud at it.

The Bounty Hunter (2010): Ok people. THIS is a bad romcom.

The Snow Creature (1959): A pair of American botanists go to Himalayas (Japan) and are guided by Sherpas (Japanese people who speak Japanese), find a Yeti, bring it back to LA, and loose it on the city accidentally. Not as fun as it sounds.

True Grit (2010): Brilliant. But I want the girl to get higher billing rightnow.

The King's Speech (2010): Genius. I adore Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. Helena Bonham Carter is lovely and restrained. And there's a whole scene of yelling obscenities.

Black Swan (2010): So, yeah. Not what I expected. Good but a tad misguided in it's metaphorical thread perhaps. Gorgeous in a lot of places. Hideous and cringe-worthy in others.

I also watched these (since Sept but I forget which I mentioned here) but talked about them on the other blog: Umberto D (1952), In the Year of the Pig (1952), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), La Strada (1954), The Battle of San Pietro (1945), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), An American in Paris (1951), Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Gandhi (1982), and White Heat (1949).

That makes for 99 films in 2010. (A few might have slipped through the cracks in the past two months because I wasn't keeping  a good list but I was also busy so I doubt many slipped through if any.)

Starting off 2011: The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Red (2010)

I have no clue why this is getting lukewarm reviews. In what world do you give a movie in which Helen Mirren saunters around in a white fur coat with an automatic weapon, in which Bruce Willis simply steps out of a spinning car to shoot a guy, in which John Malcovich carries around a stuffed pig and accosts people, and in which Mary-Louise Parker and Morgan Freeman are utterly charming a lukewarm review?

It's a funny, amusingly action packed little love story of a movie.

The Young Victoria (2009)

My only complaint is that I would have liked the movie to have more of Victoria and Albert's relationship. I loved them together and the end was heart-wrenching so I can only imagine there was more to their love story. Beautiful movie with great acting and an interesting look at how Victoria came to be Queen.

Easy A (2010)

Fun, campy, 80s referencing, update to the teen high school drama genre. Emma Stone is cute and hilarious. The story is cute and hilarious. All in all, yep, cute and hilarious (while dealing with some very real issues of bullying, teen sex, etc.) How can I not love a movie that includes a scene combining John Cusack with the iconic boom box and Patrick Dempsey on the lawn mower?

Watchmen (2009)

I will admit that I don't think I was in the mood to watch this film but it didn't help get me in the mood either. I've not read the graphic novel and have only limited knowledge of this world. I found the movie too insular. It operated much too much within itself without explaining enough to get me involved. I was lost at 15 minutes in and basically gave up understanding what was happening and surfed the internet while J watched. Maybe I'll give it another try now that I have some base knowledge. Maybe.

I Married a Witch (1942)

I'm fairly certain that I've seen at least parts of this film before. I only remembered scenes, not the plot as a whole--but that's not usual for my memory. Anyway, this is an odd little Halloween appropriate film with Veronica Lake as a witch who at first wants to get even but falls in love with her target. A tad madcap, a tad absurd, totally watchable.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010)

I've got quite the backlog of posts to write!

I finished this book way after the Rumpus Book Club One-Off Franzen Group had it's chat with Franzen but I'm happy that I attended the chat anyway and that I took my time with the book. One, it's ginormous and, two, it's genius and deserves the time spent on it.


Franzen may well be the "Great American Author" of our time; chick lit authors be damned. Sorry, you can hate him all you like but the man is an incredible author from the most basic word choice and sentence structure to the larger picture of character development and plot to the much larger grasp of American society. I've not read a contemporary female author who does the same. Give me one and I'll read her because Franzen is one of the best authors to read and I wish there were more like him.

Freedom takes a look at politics, ecological concerns, the war, 9/11, family life, depression, rock music, drug use, racism, marriage, the arts, money, and on and on and on. But it's not an "issues" book. Franzen doesn't give an answer to any of these problems. He doesn't preach and he doesn't make examining these concerns easy. None of the characters are people you'd want to have over to dinner (unless you're a glutton for punishment) and you certainly don't want to be friends with any of them. But Franzen makes these characters real and relatable and incredibly readable.

This is one of those books where I breathed a sigh of relief that it was over but I immediately missed being in the throes of reading it.

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this film is that there was a remake in 1989 that stars Loni Anderson in Barbara Stanwyck's role.Regardless, this is a quiet suspense thriller with a dark sense of humor. It's a little melodramatic but that goes with 1948 and the subject matter.

The Last Station (2009)

I don't know if I like this film. I liked the acting. I liked the settings. The plot was just fine. But smush 'em all together and *eh.* And I'm not sure what made it only *eh.*

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang (2010)

This was the Rumpus Book Club's September selection. I *tried* to finish it before the chat but didn't quite make it and didn't feel well once the chat rolled around. I did finish it in 2-3 sittings, though. It's an easy read in terms of actual sentence structure but a tad difficult in that I found none of the characters likable at all. Even the less outright obnoxious characters were not likable.

It's the story of a MFA poetry student and his life afterward. What is done well is the depiction of graduate school. I wasn't in a MFA program but I was in an English grad department that included an MFA. Sounded about right to me.But the main character annoyed me to no end and is definitely one of the more self-involved characters I've ever read.

That's not to say I didn't like the book. I did, very much, which is quite a feat by the author to make me like a book that contains no character I like.

Designing Woman (1957)

Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck. Mmmhmmm.

Apparently this was the first movie Bacall did after Bogart died which makes it a little sad but Bacall and Peck are well-matched for humorous sparring and physical comedy in fun he-said/she-said confusion.

King Kong (1933)

J and I are being King Kong and Anne Darrow for Halloween and somehow I've missed this King Kong. I've seen Peter Jackson's version, though, so I'd really basically seen this one since the two are so similar. Anyway, I was paying attention for costume ideas more so than film-watching (esp. since the plot is exactly the same) but, interestingly, it holds up in a weird, outdated special effects way so that was fun.

The Town (2010)

I've got some catching up to do!

This film is very watchable. Ben Affleck works out just fine, I can ignore Don Draper's floppy hair, and Blake Lively can actually act! Jeremy Renner is, well, Jeremy Renner but that fits in here. But then the end gets a tad *ick* saccharine with a voiceover that needs to just be chopped.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Or, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. THIS is the movie I watched in college for a Spanish class that I liked but couldn't remember the title. I *thought* it was Like Water for Chocolate but then I watched that movie again (I thought it was again at least--it was actually for the first time) and, while I like the movie a great deal, I'm extraordinarily happy that I didn't have to watch that one in a language lab of a small college at 18.

Regardless, it's fun to see how well Women holds up and what are now anachronisms. The situational comedy works wonderfully but a lot of it is centered on a land-line phone and missing phone calls. Nevertheless, it's one of my favorite Almodovar films (the other being Volver). Also amusing is Antoinio Banderas less than a decade into his career at 28 and playing not sexy at all.

Get Low (2010)

And I topped off my 31st birthday day with a movie about a hermit throwing his own funeral in the 1930s. Makes total sense, right? When it involves Robert Duvall (especially Robert Duvall explaining his relationship with Sissy Spacek as "We had a go") and Bill Murray (especially Bill Murray as a funeral home director with the driest humor ever), it makes more than total sense. The movie has many many moments of a few of the funniest lines ever as well as some honest-to-god brilliantly-accomplished pathos. I hope there are Oscar nods galore and an awesome dvd.

Machete (2010)

I rang in the wee hours of my 31st birthday in the middle of this movie on Friday night/Saturday morning and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm a sucker for faux-chauvinistic movies and kitschy blood/gore. What exactly is more kitschy than Lindsay Lohan in a nun's habit? A lot, actually, and it's all in the film. I can only hope for more and more and more films in the Grindhouse genre because I love it.

Also seen:

I'm also blogging over at Docs on Film for a 1001 Movies Project. First up was Umberto D; spoiler: not a favorable review :)

Inception (2010)--2nd theater viewing

Nolan is a smart smart smart filmmaker. We watched this one again late one night because we could and this time around I paid attention to a few small details that had been brought to my attention by some review or another. Somewhere someone pointed out that DiCaprio only wears his wedding ring in the dreams and this proved something or another that's not particularly relevant here. What is relevant that upon second viewing when I knew the plot (because unlike others, I didn't think it particularly difficult to grasp), I could pay attention to things like whether DiCaprio had on the ring. What's interesting to me is that not only is the continuity fantastic--you never see the ring on DiCaprio when he's not in a dream--but that Nolan, and thus DiCaprio, carefully play with whether you can see the ring. Yes, you only see the ring in the dreams but in some dreams DiCaprio's hand is purposefully obfuscated. His left hand is under a table or he's only using his right or the ring finger on the left hand isn't visible. So you can't run with the ring theory entirely but the ring is obviously a trope to be paid attention to. Nolan is smart and clever and careful enough to give us an inkling of a thread to pull but he won't allow that thread to unravel the movie or give us any answers. Impressive.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

I don't know how I managed to not see this movie until now especially with all the movies I've seen from this era and with these two actors. Fun, quick, witty, screwball comedy with two of the best actors to ever be on film. If we're going to re-release films to the theater, we should start with this one; not others (ahem, Avatar).