I watched quite a lot this week.
Galaxy Quest (1999, US)
Hilarious movie about a group of middle-aged actors whose only famous roles had been in a Star Trek-type series 20 years before. Now the only jobs they can get are promoting merchandise and going to conventions. One day they're offered seemingly another job reprising their roles to entertain their fans, but soon discover that actual aliens have seen their show, believe it's real and require their help to defeat an enemy in outer space who's trying to kill their people. The whole movie is extremely funny, kind of a satire about the Star Trek genre and its fans. I particularly enjoyed Alan Rickman's performance.
The Book of the Dead (2005, Japan)
A rather unusual stop-motion animated movie, set in the Nara period when Buddhism was first becoming established in Japan. A young noblewoman named Iratsume has set herself the task of making one thousand copies of a Buddhist sutra. She repeatedly sees a Buddha-like apparition in the mountains west of her home at sunset. After completing the thousandth sutra, she finds herself irresistably drawn there. Upon arriving, she finds a temple, and discovers that the apparition she's been seeing is the spirit of a nobleman who had been executed there generations before. He in turn believes her to be the last woman he saw before he died. Iratsume then tries to find a way to bring him peace. It's a very deep and slow-paced movie. It's barely an hour in length but feels twice as long. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's not a bad movie; it just really takes its time. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I fully understood it, as I'm not well-versed in Buddhism and it's a very Buddhist story. The only thing I actually disliked about the movie was that, though the character dialogue was in Japanese, the movie is narrated in English by a British woman, which makes no sense to me. It should have been entirely in Japanese. But other than that, I quite liked it.
Trumbo (2007, US)
Not to be confused with the 2015 movie of the same name, this is a documentary about the life of Hollywood screenwriter and sometime Communist Party member Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted during McCarthyism. I rented this because I wanted to learn more about the man, but after seeing it I felt like I understood him even less. The documentary seemed to actively avoid addressing his politics, which were the main thing I was interested in. I wanted to learn about his political thought, what it was they targeted him for. But there was nothing about that. It was a documentary about Trumbo the father and Trumbo the persecuted but talented writer. It was ok. But it wasn't what I was looking for and I can't say I liked it much.
Sophie's Choice (1982, US)
This is one of those movies that I'm reluctant to even try to describe because I don't think I can do so eloquently enough to do it justice and convey just how powerful a movie it is. It's a well-known enough movie anyway that it shouldn't need to be summarized. Meryl Streep plays Sophie, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor living in the US shortly after World War II. She has a stormy relationship with Nathan, her psychotic boyfriend who shifts rapidly and without warning from charming and sympathetic to violent and terrifying and back again. We see her through the eyes of Stingo, an aspiring novelist who rents a room just below theirs and befriends the couple. Over the course of the film Sophie reveals her tragic past in Poland before and during the fascist occupation. Streep did an amazing job of playing a Polish woman, was very convincing with the Polish accent and also spoke impeccable German. I don't particularly like Streep as a person, but I can't deny she is an incredibly talented actress and I think this was her at her very best. The only problem I had, and this isn't the movie's fault, is that I knew what the "choice" part was before seeing it. It was spoiled for me years ago in, of all things, an episode of King of Queens, an American sitcom. So I knew what it was when I started watching, and it was no shock to me. Although frankly, so much tragedy had already transpired in the movie that it probably would have felt like just part of the flow anyway. Either way, though, this was without a doubt a real masterpiece of a movie, one of the best I've ever seen.
To be continued.
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Culburn (3638)
7 years ago
Kline is simply stunning here. It's his finest hour. He is glorious.
"Stingo" drives it, keeping it dancing on the edge of the kilter. He's so wonderful. I can only imagine him getting that script and then going to work. Bless-his-heart.
The bridge where Kline toasts "Stingo" after (conducting) in front of a myriad of reflection of personality split is the penultimate scene to the singular where Nathan's long suffering brother opens their bedroom door (for us) and the denouement we knew was coming has arrived.
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