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Tape

I must be on a Richard Linklater kick. Even though I don't like Ethan Hawke, and even though I though Uma Thurman was a bit annoying, I thought this was pretty powerful. Yeah, I am now one of those people who watches those things. Yeah, I felt like some stuff was captured pretty well. Like the denial.

Waking Life

This was almost in the "maybe" category, but the animation (all drifty and bobby) saved it. The dialogue was, well, a bit like a pedantic documentary, which is sometimes fun but often annoying. And sometimes the observations about dreams were all too trite, or just too hippy. But the amazing animation made it fun to watch. And the soundtrack (this sort of sedate jazzy stuff) was good too.

Mulholland Drive

Saw this with Mike, who I met at a Modest Mouse concert (well, while waiting in line in an attempt to get into the concert). I still have a lot to puzzle out with respect to this movie, but I have to say one thing -- I really really like it when movies do things that are hard to do in books, and Mulholland Drive succeeds at just that. The whole switching of characters thing, that's pretty difficult. I've only seen one book that does that -- Dictionary of the Khazars -- and it's one of my favorites.

Intimacy

This could be the loneliest film I've seen all year. Okay, I was feeling lonely already -- a combination of weather, hormones, and actual solitude -- but this pushed it over the top. (But, weirdly, in a good way, in the way that taking a plunge into an ice-cold bath can be.)

Based on a collection of stories by Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy explored the physical rendezvous of a head bartender, and a woman who turns out to be married (and an amateur actress), and the emptiness and fulfillment that their relationship somehow provided. Weirdly, the bartender reminded me of L, who I always thought was cute but not so amazing in bed, while the husband reminded me of larger, plumper D (ugh, I know too many Ds), the only person I've ever felt like fucking, immediately upon meeting, not that we ever did anything.

Amelie

Absolutely wonderful. A whimsical girl (looking so much like Bjork), detached from close human interaction, but good at light interaction. Nice, though occasionally vengeful, though not too meanly so. Falls for someone in a sweet, crazy but cowardly, but playful way. Not all gushy like so many love stories are. I love Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

The Others

A horror movie, I know, but good. The twists are nice, and I hafta say, I adore Alejandro Amenabar. His first movie, Open Your Eyes, was just great, and he is incredible at doing a lot with almost no special effects.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Rented this in wake of the terrorist attacks. Who says the attacks killed irony? Not us. We still get seafood after visiting the aquarium, we still rent Dr. Strangelove. Anyway, I had actually seen this in college, but was not paying much attention at the time. Maybe I was drunk, or screwing around with ohIthinkitwasDavidOhatthetime or something. Well.

It was good. Very nicely done, and scarily, well, accurate, game-theorywise and stuff. Peter Sellers can be amazing. Sellers as President Muffley was great, just because he sounded (voicewise) like my oh so beloved Professor Lazarus. And Buck Turgidson, he reminded me of Tony Cavaluzzi from law school. Oh yeah, and having the *best* pizza (from Vici in Coolidge Corner, which gives extra scoops of minced garlic, for free!) while watching the movie helped, fer sure.

Cannibal Holocaust

Uh, what the name says. I love stuff like this. It is terrible that I love stuff like this. I am surpised that the Coolidge did not cancel the showing of this movie, given that it had shots of the World Trade Center in it. But oh, it was laden with irony, and intentionally so. Cannibalism shots interspersed with sweet theme music that goes (if it was in the key of C, which I don't know if it was because I don't have perfect pitch) ..FDEF....GFAG....FDEF...GFAG and so on. Oh was it fun. I wish I knew people who would watch this stuff with me.

Ghost World

Man, a teenage angsty girl movie I identify with. Ooh. And I adore Steve Buscemi. He is my hero.

And to preempt the annoying but inevitable "Zwigoff and Clowes are just awful awful men dreaming about girls too good for them, because no real girls could be attracted to their geekiness," I have to say, no, that's not true, I'm one of those girls. When I described the movie to my best friend from high school, Louise, she thought of the same thing that I had, my huge crush on J__, who I really should track down and email.

And I miss that kind of obsessive geekiness, being in the more mainstreamified world of lawyers. Some days I just want to slap everyone, as if it's their fault I feel so isolated. But then I control myself, because I know it's not.

Still. Ghost World a great great movie. Or it was a great great movie for me, at least, all sad and funny and reflective of me me me. Mmm.

(Update 081801) Louise points out that Steve Buscemi, in the movie, looks an awful lot like our English teacher Mr. Ford, whom we loved loved LOVED!

Memento

So now that I've seen the movie twice, I can say wow, yeah, it's good. Okay, I could've said it the first time I watched it, but now I can say that it holds up upon rewatching. The movie was pieced together amazingly. And, wow, I identified with the need to record everything. Not in the same way, I know (as, yeah, I do have some sort of short term memory), but kind of. I mean, that's in part why I get tattoos, to record feelings I might otherwise forget. It's a good movie for those of us who feel the compulsive need to log.

It's rare to see a movie with not only so many unexpected twists, but also with nifty insights about The Nature of Things. Puzzles and metaphysical musings all at once. And about some of my favorite topics, like the nature of memory. Oh, and so many scenes that completely changed the viewers' perspectives on the other characters, and on what's going on. Man, if I made that movie I would be so proud of myself.

Oh god, and Guy Pearce is hot hot hot.

Oh, and there's something to be said about the motivation of revenging his wife's rape and murder.

One possibly downer revelation, though. There's actually an old episode of Seinfeld that does something similar, the whole backwards episode thing, to much humorous (but also puzzle-solving) effect.

Update: (Cut and pasted and edited from an email.) So I was talking to my friend Andy, and telling him he should see Memento. Andy, like me, is doing the one-year judicial clerkship thing, only in Oklahoma City. He says he hasn't heard of Memento, and doesn't think it's playing in the Sooner State, and asks me what it's about.

Me: You'll like it, it's filmed kind of backwards and it's about this guy who has no short term memory.

Andy: I like it already! Didn't I tell you I once lost my short term memory for a day and a half?

(in a kids soccer accident.) So apparently I personally know someone who actually went through something similar. But he says that he has no memory of the whole thing (which figures), and that all he knows of it is what people told him about it afterwards. He says that people noticed because he kept asking the exact same question over and over.

I can't wait to get his take on the movie next week, after he tries to see the movie in Denver (which he has to go for the same reasons I periodically go to Cincinnati). Not that there's anything in his memory for him to relate to, though.

Cure

Japanese thriller I saw with my parents at the Memphis International Film Festival. Pretty creepy, though the ending was a bit anticlimatic. The deaths were gruesome (yay!) and the mind-control aspect of the movie made you nervous for the protagonist the whole time. But the evil culprit was infuriatingly languid. Like that annoying girl Darlene I knew in college. My parents liked it too, which was pretty amazing given their usual confusion about the plots of most movies (even Chinese movies).

Still Life with Animated Dogs

Not a movie, but so terribly cute that I had to log it. Animated short film on PBC by Peter Fierlinger. Too cute to describe.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Not the best of the Coen brothers' movies, but still fun. Saw this with Wayne while drunk. The music was great, the adventure was amusing. It was nothing like the Odyssey, though.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Good, but not amazing. I mean, it was fun and the action was great, but not more so than the Hong Kong kung fu movies of the 1990s that I'd seen. I think the reason why this movie is wow-ing the American public is that to them, this is totally new. Whereas hip young Asian American boys like Ed and my brother and hip young Asian American kung-fu watching tomboys like me have seen this kind of movie before. As a note, though, my dad actually did think it was amazing. But he's been living in Memphis, without the aid of theaters like the Brattle to show him what's been happening in Asian cinema recently.

State and Main

Cute movie! Mike and I laughed our way through. Though you can tell Mamet has issues. And Alec Baldwin's character was creepy. But it was nice seeing a geeky dorky guy like Philip Seymour Hoffman have the lead. I'm a big fan of geeky dorky protagonists.

maybe

Sleepy Hollow

Rented this with Andy. It was okay, but a little bit overacted. And the second half, which was almost action-adventure, was totally different from the first half, which had great atmosphere and such. Which the first half could've extended, well, throughout the movie.