Movies in July

Well, as it's nearly September my memory is already rusting on some of these...

Started out the month by borrowing a few movies: Aparajito (The Unvanquished) is Satyajit Ray's sequel to Pather Panchali. I love this story; poor Apu is having a very tough life indeed. Sadly this is a trilogy and I can't find the third movie anywhere.

The Golden Fortress is apparently meant to be a children's movie, or so we were told and we watched it with the boys, who were bored out of their minds. Well, it is in Bengali with subtitles with lots and lots of talking. There was a character who turns up near the middle who is a writer of adventure stories (and speaks Hindi; it was exciting for me to all of the sudden understand what someone was saying). He was amusing.

Rang Birangi is another farce where a wife thinks her husband is cheating on her, only he isn't. I've seen this plot done a couple of times in Bollywood and this isn't the best, although there were some jokes specifically about the movie industry and its relative morality which were pretty funny.

Oliver read The Man in the Iron Mask (well, a children's version of it) for history, so I picked up the movie from the library to see how it compared. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich, Gabriel Byrne and Jeremy Irons among others. It is not very much like the book at all. Not a great film, but the aging musketeers are fun, particularly Depardieu's Porthos.

Sticking with the Dumas vein, we also watched The Count of Monte Cristo with James Caviezel and Guy Pearce. This was quite good, beautifully shot with gorgeous costumes and some well executed sword play.

Quin wanted to see The Searchers, the John Ford epic starring John Wayne. Again, gorgeously shot and you can totally see why filmmakers like George Lucas reference it. A bit problematical in the story department, though. While it was nice that in the end John Wayne didn't kill her niece to put her out of her misery or for the sake of their family's honor or whyever exactly he felt that she had to die after living among the Comanches, there was nothing leading up to this complete turnabout in his motivation. It's a rather major change of heart; it would be nice to see what caused it.

One more gorgeously shot movie this month: Jean Renoir's The River, a story about an English family living on the banks of the Ganges. The colors are dreamy. The scene where everyone is napping, the younger children entwined together, is wonderful. Most interesting was the interview with Martin Scorsese that was a bonus feature on the DVD, talking about what it was like to see this movie as a young boy. That man has an infectious enthusiasm, and I love to hear him talk about movies.

I'm a voracious reader of blogs about books and movies, and a lot of what I read and watch I heard first from someone else's blog. The problem is I don't always remember afterwards where I first heard of something. Such is the case with Once, an independent film about a young singer/songwriter in Ireland who befriends a piano-playing woman from Eastern Europe. It's awkward and genuine, and the music in it is amazing. He reminds me a bit of Cat Stevens, perhaps more like a stripped-down Coldplay. This was a cool little nugget of goodness to find, I just wish I remembered who recommended it in the first place.

I watched two more seasons of Two and a Half Men. The writing and acting are sharp. My love of it is only hampered by my deep need for a sense of progression. This is very much comfort TV, where no one really changes no matter how often they seem to get close to it. I guess some folks like that. Me, I'm looking forward to season 4 of How I Met Your Mother.

While Aidan was at camp, Oliver was home alone with me. I had made the decision not to try to get any writing done that week even though we weren't doing school. Oliver was having a tough enough time not having a brother around; Mom couldn't abandon him for the world inside her head too. So it's perhaps ironic that in the middle of that week we watched Coraline, a movie about an only child whose parents are both writers hard at work on separate computers and tuning her out. I didn't like this as well as the book, but it is a visual treat and Oliver enjoyed it (and later Aidan as well).

Do you know what deeply disappointed me? Knowing. I love Alex Proyas, but I think the time has come to admit that he just doesn't have another Dark City in him. Knowing is wonderfully directed; visually cool and the suspenseful scenes had me squirming (he knows when to hold a shot, as opposed to most "more fast cuts the better" directors). But the story sucked ass. It made absolutely no sense. Why didn't the aliens just take the kids they liked and run, why bother with all the math clues? Are there really so many parents still around who don't like having honest conversations with their children? So much could have been simpled up with a single dialogue between Nick Cage and his son. And the movie presents this dichotomy: everything is predetermined or everything is totally, inexplicably random. And Nick Cage's character is supposed to be a foremost thinker in cosmology, but he still believes in this false dichotomy. He speaks of "random" the way creationists do, not the way a scientist does.

Which should have tipped me off, but when the movie ends and the two kids are Adam and Eve I was still deeply pissed off. Lame.

And yeah, that was a spoiler. But you know what? You don't want to see this movie. Trust me. See Dark City instead; now there's a fine bit of filmmaking.