Movies in August

First off, I think I burned my brain. It's been a few days now since I typed "The End", but I seemed to have lost all ability to summon words. If you try to have a conversation with me, it will be a lot of "you need to do that thing with the thing. You know, the thing, the thing in the freezer? That goes in the back of the whats-it? The yard?" and fifteen minutes later, in the middle of doing something completely unrelated, will finally burst out with "you need to take the compost out!" Sheesh!

So, let's see if I can remember the movies I watched last month and find something intelligent to say about them...

Since I was spending every possible moment writing, most of my movie watching was with Quin, and hence in English. The first was a heist film called Flawless, set in the 60s with Michael Caine as a janitor nearing retirement age and Demi Moore as a woman butting her head against the glass ceiling of the diamond company she works for. After she gets passed up yet again in favor of a younger man with less experience than she, Caine convinces her to help him pull off the heist he's been planning forever. He's not forthcoming about his reason for wanting to do this, but he has a very, very good one. I don't remember hearing anything about this movie when it was in theaters, but I do recommend it. Good story, good acting, and wonderfully plotted.

I can't really say any of those things about In the Name of the King. It is, in fact, a film based on a video game. But it does star Jason Statham and is tons of unpretentious fun. The film makers take every opportunity to rip off stuff we've already seen in The Lord of the Rings, and Ray Liotta as the bad guy is just one goofy hat away from being Jack Palance; clearly this is not a film that was ever aspiring to greatness.

In the category of fantasy films that do aspire to greatness is Beowulf, which I liked better than I thought I would. This style of animation has progressed since the zombie kids of Polar Express (that movie still gives me the willies), and the low lighting through most of it help to sell it. The monsters are really well done. It was intended as 3D, which is a bit distracting when you watch it in 2D, but storywise I liked this retelling of the old tale. But then, I also liked The 13th Warrior's retelling, so...

Because Quin insisted I had to see it: Priscilla Queen of the Desert. I was actually supposed to see this movie lots of times back in the day, it played as a midnight show at the Uptown for years. But everytime my friend and I would go to see it, we'd always end up at Bryant Lake Bowl, hanging with his friends, a diverse group that even included a Korean Elvis impersonator. This movie made me nostalgic for those days; that particular friend of mine tended to fall for guys faste and drop everything to follow them to far-off cities. This was in the days before mobile phones, and I wouldn't hear from him for months. Then out of the blue he'd call, back in Minneapolis with a long tale to tell. I haven't heard from him since just before I got married; I like to think he found someone he could settle down with. But I'm still here, same house, same phone number. Perhaps someday I'll get another call out of the blue. (Also, Hugo Weaving is the bomb).

So after setting up my super-PC I got rid of my TV and DVD player in my office/work-out room. So of course the DVD player in the PC promptly kacked. Now I read on walking days, but on walk/run days I like to watch movies. Otherwise I get bored; running is very, very dull (my husband, who runs 5-6 miles at a time, says otherwise, but I think that's just because he has a cat-brain that lets him think about nothing for great tracks of time. If I'm running and thinking, I'm mostly thinking about all the things I have to get done when I get off the treadmill. Which is mostly conducive to getting off the treadmill). I have a program that lets me record from my satellite receiver onto my hard drive, so I tried that out. My test run was with a movie from the same director as Marigold, something called (very generically) Playing By Heart. I remember when this movie was still in the works it was meant to be titled Dancing about Architecture, and I think they should have stuck with it. It comes from a line Angelina Jolie says, "talking about love makes as much sense as dancing about architecture", which fits the movie better; it's a whole series of scenes of people talking about love. There's an old couple, a young couple, a married couple, a middle-aged couple just starting to date. It was a quiet sort of movie but had lots of great dialogue. I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but Angelina Jolie looked like she was barely more than 20. It also had Gillian Anderson, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Sean Connery, and Madeline Stowe (and a few more, this is off the top of my head a month later).

I was less impressed with Notting Hill. I confess that, for no discernible reason, I just don't like Julia Roberts. I don't hate her, I don't avoid movies just because she's in them, but I always find her very cold and never feel like she has any chemistry with the guy she's playing opposite to. I did like the secondary characters in this one, particularly the roommate, but unlike Four Weddings and a Funeral, this wasn't a film primarily about a group of friends.

Something borrowed: Walk Hard, the musical biopic parody film. Not only was it funny, the music was good enough to stand on its own; they sounded like real country songs, real Brian Wilson songs. My favorite scene was the one when Dewey Cox goes to India and hangs with the Maharishi and the Beatles. The Beatles are played by a bunch of familiar actors (you'll probably know two right off, and the other two will be naggingly familiar - thank you, Wikipedia, who that was playing George was going to drive me nuts) with great love but no reverence whatsoever. Which is in my book ideal. I love the Beatles, but I love them as human beings with lovable flaws, not as near-saints of musical perfection. (Keep this in the back of your mind, being overly reverent of the Beatles is going to come up again next month...)

OK, I did squeeze in three Hindi films. Silsila is a film Amitabh Bacchan did with his wife Jaya in I think the early 80s, about a man who marries his dead brother's fiance because she's pregnant with his nephew/niece and then regrets it after she loses the baby when he drives their car into a tree. As the movie progresses and he continues to pursue the woman he wanted before his brother died, even though she's also now married, you will want to smack Amit with a brick (I'm not saying I found him unsympathetic or anything).

Eklavya is a more recent film starring Amitabh Bacchan, and this one was nearly perfect. There are no musical numbers, so it clocks in pretty short for a Hindi film. I found it very Shakespearean in terms of plot, with the assassination attempts and concealed parentage of children. I thought at first it was a period piece, the clothing and palace are so ornate, but Saif Ali Khan as the young prince returns in a helicopter, clearly modern. Part of the story is past vs. present, tradition versus new ways. Most of the story, though, is about dharma. I've read a lot of books that have mentioned dharma, but there is nothing like a good story with a memorable character like Amit's palace guard to make you really feel it in your bones.

(I did think the ending needed one or two more scenes; some characters went through major changes that needed to be set up a bit more. They weren't unbelievable in themselves, they just happened a bit too fast. Minor gripe, though).

The last movie was so old it was colorized back and white: Mughal-e-Azam. I had to see it; both Saawariya and Om Shanti Om referenced it. It was way, way cool. The colorization was an enhancement; it gave the movie a sort of fairy tale feel. And it was old school, casts-of-thousands for the fight scenes. It's weird watching those in these days of everything-done-by-computer; you see elephants charging and you realize someone had to actually make that happen, and control it, and film it. This film is based on an old story about Akbar, the Mughal emperor, and his son the prince who falls in love with a dancing girl. The sets were amazing; it reminded me a lot of Aleksandr Ptushko, especially Ruslan and Ludmila (a very cool movie with mindblowing visuals, highly recommend).

So my clip this month comes from Mughal-e-Azam. The director originally intended to shoot in color but the budget wouldn't allow it, so only this scene was shot in color. Watching it on YouTube probably won't do it justice, but the part where her dancing is reflected off the facets of all the jewels set into the ceiling is to die for: