Movies in June

Not much seen in June. Novel writing will do that to you. At any rate, I caught Quills, starring Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade. I've met writers who insist that they have to write, that if they don't write they will go mad. In this movie, de Sade is the extreme of that sort of writer. (I'm not that sort of writer. I love to write, but when life gets too busy and I don't do it, I don't go mad.) I liked the movie up until the final scene. There was no part of the conclusion that I was buying; it was like every single character did a complete 180.

Good Night, and Good Luck I've been meaning to see for a while. It was interesting, and visually gorgeous. Smoking in black and white movies just looks so moody and cool. As far as movies about the McCarthy era go, I would put this just after Woody Allen in The Front. Good movie, but without the rewatchability that The Front has.

Easy Virtue was amusing in parts, but a little too much a movie version of a play. Some of the dialogue sounded awfully artificial, particularly Jennifer Biel's dialogue. Not her fault, I think the playwright was using her character as the speaker of his philosophical ideas. I did like the use of music, music from the 20s but also modern songs redone as if they were from the 20s, and it's hard to go wrong with anything with Colin Firth.

And in the world of Cary Grant, we caught The Philadelphia Story, which is just marvellous. James Stewart makes the world's cutest drunk, and he and Grant and Katherine Hepburn are perfect together (sharply written dialogue helps).

Matador was another movie I wasn't sure what to make of from Pedro Almodovar. I do believe this is Antonio Banderas' first movie; he certainly looks puppy-young. There were a lot of likeable moments, but also a lot of disturbing ones and I'm not sure they sat together happily in my mind. I might have been too tired to watch this the night I put it in, though.

Lastly I watched the DVD Doctor Who, the Specials, filling in the gaps between the last series I caught on DVD and the one I've been watching on BBC America. The boys watched these too. "The Waters of Mars" in particular had a big impact on them (Oliver watched large chunks of it from between his fingers).