TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Art imitates Life imitates Art…

by

A beautiful opening paragraph from a review of one of my favorite movies, Brazil:

In Brazil, Terry Gilliam asks the audience to imagine a world where the government wages a never-ending war with shadowy terrorists, a world where civil liberties are being destroyed in the name of security, a world where torture becomes official state policy in order to conduct more efficient interrogations of suspected terrorists. What’s more, in Gilliam’s fictional world, the central government is not just secretive but incompetent. Mistakes are made, leading to the imprisonment and torture of innocents. Most offensive of all, Gilliam implies that such a government could exist without its citizens staging an armed revolt. I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief, but this goes too entirely too far.

Took me long enough…

by

Last night, Prairie and I went off on a search for two particular movies that she’s going to be showing her kids (that is, the ones she teaches) at school: The Pursuit of Happyness and Noises Off. TPoH was easy enough, but NO was a little more difficult. The Blockbuster closest to us is fairly new, so is stocked almost entirely with new releases, and the next closest Blockbuster didn’t have it either. “Where now?” I asked.

Prairie thought for a moment. “Well, Scarecrow’s just down Roosevelt a ways, and it’s supposed to be good. We could try them.”

So, we headed down and wandered into Scarecrow Video for the first time. It was bigger than we expected, so we started by finding one of the guys at the counter to see if he could tell us where to find NO. “Oh, sure,” he said. “It’s right over there in the directors’ section, under Peter Bogdanovich.”

The director’s section? It was just what it sounded like, shelf after shelf of films organized by director. How cool!

Prairie and I spent about the next half hour just wandering through the store, dodging in and out of rooms (“Look — a ‘literature’ section…it’s organized by playwright!”), laughing at the ‘genres’ used to organize (“Christsploitation?!”), and generally trying to figure out why it had taken us this long to actually discover the place!

Of course, at this point, local movie aficionados (ahem, kalyx…) will be giving me your basic (and well deserved), “Well, DUH!” ;) I’d heard about Scarecrow for years, knew that it was supposed to be ‘the’ place to go locally for movies, but for some reason, just hadn’t ever actually wandered in.

Well, that’s just been fixed, and Blockbuster just lost a couple more accounts….

Quote of the Day

by

There’s a long standing theory that Hollywood action movies deliberately play up US urban gang violence…a part of a propaganda effort to persuade foreigners that America is not to be [messed] with. The British equivalent is Faulty Towers and Monty Python, which simply makes people want to stay the hell away in case it’s contagious.

— originally somewhere in this forum thread, via learethak

Marie Antoinette

by

Last weekend, Prairie and I went down to the Blacklight, and they were playing Marie Antoinette on the projection screen. Neither of us had seen it, and from the nearly universal panning it got when it came out, it wasn’t terribly high on our ‘to watch’ lists. However, the costumes really caught Prairie’s eye while she was watching it, and we figured it would be worth a rent to see the pretties.

As it turns out, we both really enjoyed the flick. The dialogue, which Prairie said looked fairly insipid when seen in bits and pieces as subtitles at the club, actually worked — it’s rather minimalist, and there’s a fair amount that is just presented as snatches of gossip heard in the background. The gloriously anachronistic soundtrack fit perfectly (for the most part, at least, there was one scene that neither of us liked the music choice for), and we ended up grabbing the soundtrack from iTunes. And, of course, it’s gorgeous to look at.

So don’t let the bad reviews steer you away from this one — for us, at least, it was worth the rent.

In other, unrelated news: this morning, we went out and doubled the size of my shoe collection, replacing my boots and adding a new pair of all-black Converse and some light shoes perfect for wandering out to the pool or walking along a beach.

And after a nice couple hours wandering around Magnuson Park, I know have something a bit more cheerful leading off my photo page. There’s more photos from the day to come, but I have to start paying attention to homework at some point….