Good Time for a Change

We watched The Town last night. Good movie. Highly recommended. Heist movie that transcends the conventional genre. Better than The Departed. Etc. Etc.

No, I mean it. It was this good. For 18 years, I've been in the Matt Damon camp. I've felt highly certain that if he'd met me before he met the Italian bartender, she'd still be tending bar. But Ben Affleck's performance + Affleck's excellent directing + Affleck's attractive similarity to my husband means: Ben > Matt. I know; I can't believe it either.

Here are the only two pieces of cognitive dissonance in the movie: (1) the car chase through the North End that appears not to result in fatalities (but is still awesome) and (2) the lack of Muffin Top on the townie girl played by Blake Lively. Where does an Oxy addict get abs like that?

Bad Feminist?

We watched The Hangover* last night and I about died laughing. This is the kind of movie my kids will know every line of in 10 years. Okay, maybe hopefully more like 15 if I am a good mother. I recall that at the time this movie was released, I heard that it was misogynist and had no strong female characters. Seeing the movie confirmed for me that I am apparently incapable of thinking like a good feminist anymore, because my reaction after watching it was: Of course there were no strong female characters! It was a bachelor party movie! And somehow its misogynistic to show strippers IN VEGAS!?

No one should expect to see strong female characters in bachelor movies, old war movies where women didn't see combat, football movies (but see Any Given Sunday. Or don't.). It would make very little sense for a narrative realism perspective, and they aren't necessary to make a decent movie.

Also kudos to the filmmakers for building a movie around a city's tourism board slogan.

* Actual dialogue in my life:

Mr. Scobie: What are you blogging about?

Me: The Hangover.

Mr. Scobie: You mean the one you had Christmas morning?

Me: No, the movie we watched last night.

Mr. Scobie: You should also blog about the one from Christmas.

Some Additional Thoughts about E.T.

1. The John Williams score does not hold up well. It's corny and distracting. The movie would be even scarier and more affecting if the soundtrack were subtle. 

2. I haven't watched ET since probably 1982 because the end scared me so much. I will still near tears (except for the annoying score) for the last 35 minutes.

3. Critics probably said this at the time, but since I was 8 I wasn't hip to it, but the story is so obviously an allegory about the affection that children have for their immigrant caregivers in a world of displaced, unfinished suburban sprawl and a burgeoning divorce rate. Recall that this movie was released the last time that immigration reform was on the horizon, and "aliens" and their roles in the lives of Southern California children would have been pretty salient. Also interesting is that Elliott's father has left their mother and moved to Mexico. The implication being that he's left his family for another woman there. 

4. Hipsters of my era (who are in their 30s now) clearly developed their sense of style from this movie and others of that time. There are aviator glasses, trucker hats, puffy vests on C. Thomas Howell, et cetera. Yup, he's in that movie too. It's funny to me that the style of my contemporaries is based on 14-year olds in a movie released in 1982.

Beardo

And another thing: Tim Harrington has a tv show on Pitchfork.tv called Beardo. Enjoy episode 4:

Missed Opportunities

One thing about me that has annoyed Mr. Scobie since we first met is my willingness to form an opinion about something before I have ever read or seen it. I made it through college by learning about many books in the following fashion:

1. Develop a theory about a book based on its cover, back cover, first chapter or overheard conversation in the "C" Shop.

Note: I also read whole books, but since the UofC is a Great Books school, many of those books were totally opaque and impossible (for me) to comprehend. Thus my opinion of the book or author is still based on this applied technique.

2. Confidently extol this theory to Mr. Scob (after the first week of college he was the only one who had the patience to endure my "theories").

3. Have "theory" eviscerated by listener, who cites the actual content of said book or movie as "evidence" that I am mistaken.

4. Revise "theory" based on new "evidence" and test on new listener.

5. Repeat 3 - 5.

By the time an exam rolled around, I'd have a firm grasp of the subject matter. The downside, of course, is that while I may now remark that something is "Aristotelean" or "Kantian" or "straight out of Kierkegaard", I'm in the right universe but I can't get more specific than that.

This tendency of mine is a time saver, money saver, and a shield to struggling with anything that might be intellectually or emotionally challenging. For example, in 1996, a bunch of kids wanted to see Crash, the creepy Cronenberg movie, which was basically a snuff movie. I refused to go see it on the basis that the movie would be sensational, violent and upsetting to me. B confronted me with the fact that I knew nothing more than what had been written in the NY Times about it. I said, "I don't need to see a movie to have an opinion about it." I have, to the annoyance of many, stood by that proposition (and likely will forever).

B saw the movie, hated it and has declined to confront me so directly about my cultural . . . prejudices? foresight? since that time.

Why am I going on about this? Because it turns out that instead of seeing this an annoying quirk of my personality, he should have recognized it as a money making opportunity! There is a new book out called How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which I DID NOT WRITE, to my consternation. (Here's a review)

Worse, I don't even have an opinion of this book yet.

We saw Breach on video this weekend. Ryan Phillippe carries his lusty pouting to a new level in this taut, spy-vs.-spy-with-a-dash-of-Opus-Dei thriller. This movie had the suspense that The Good Shepherd should have had, and made way more sense than The Departed. See it.

JFB speaks truth to power. Teach!

Blogspot won't let me enter a title today. What's up with that?

NY Times has Wineries Gone Wild article. Which reminds me, since this is a "movie review" post, I can't believe I never blogged about how much I hate Sideways. Maybe I have never written about it because I don't even know where to start. In fact, I have writer's elbow or whatever it's called when you can't write because I am festering with so much hatred for that movie. All those people were immature slobs, petty, lying, half-hearted alcoholics. The sex scenes were sickeningly gratuitous and I still regret I didn't leave the theatre when my instincts told me to go. I could go on in this vein but I think you get the picture.