Saturday, June 10, 2006

Brief Update

It's been a hectic month or so, so without further adieu...

Tristram Shandy
R: I was the only one who got to see this. I loved it. I believe that it displaces many, many years worth of "movies about movies." Adaptation, for example, just went from being kind of crappy to being obsolete. See this.

The Promise
R: I didn't think that this was entirely terrible. Some of the special effects are pretty unconvincing, and the story is some flavor of unimpressive -- to labor over what kind of unimpressive it is would be a waste of time. I'm willing to cut some slack on both of these because it's clearly a fairy tale, and I think such things should be judged on their own terms. but even on it's on terms, the movie is pretty uninspiring.

K: I was even less inspired. Usually martial arts movies suffer from too much plot and too little martial arts. But this one didn't have enough martial arts to justify the poor plot.

Art School Confidential
R: Fan-freaking-tastic. The portrayal of the art world almost exactly matches my preconceptions of it, so I couldn't be happier. As a nice corollary, it's hilarious.

K: The best part was the portrayal of his fellow art school students. There's a scene with an aquarium full of orange ping pong balls that is crazy funny. And it is pretty astute about what makes an artist great.


The Purple Rose of Cairo
R: Kind of fun. Not Woody's best. A little heavy-handed.

K: I enjoyed this one, especially the end. Good meta-comment on film.

Water
R: I'm going to describe this as Pretty Woman, but in India. And with a sad ending. And Ghandi. Beautiful photography, but the rest of the movie doesn't always live up to it. Interestingly, one doesn't come away with a strong sense of place -- one of the usual redeeming qualities of "Bad Movies for People Who Aren't Supposed to Like Bad Movies." I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

K: Yeah, I was out of town for the rest of these. Sounds like a good thing.

Poison
R: Craptacular. At least the 30 minutes I saw of it was. I assume that it played some important historical role in the development of queer cinema. Which might excuse some things, but doesn't explain why it would be part of the "Sundance Series." This certainly supported my general feeling on "Queer Cinema," which is that it is composed of bad movies that cannot be labeled as such because they also contain guys kissing.