Sam’s Place

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) 

Sam: ***

• Predictable but not quite terrible. Eddie Izzard is a funny stand-up comic but he still hasn’t found a film roll that works for him.

Emma: ****

• I usually find Uma Thurman annoying but she was funny playing the neurotic superhero.

Love Serenade (1996)

Sam: ****

• Unsatisfying but a good performance Miranda Otto, a good 70s soul soundtrack, & an extra star for being a quirky movie showing rundown industrial rural Australia, though some people might want to deduct a star for that.

Emma: **

• Weird & not laugh-out-loud funny.

The Real Blonde (1998)

Sam: ****

• I first saw this on dvd circa 2000, was surprised how good it is, & thought there might be some sort of hard-to-fathom “message” — possibly de-evolution. On 2nd viewing it didn’t seem quite as good & I now doubt that there’s a message. Still, great cast — Matthew Modine, Catherine Keener, Daryl Hannah, Marlo Thomas, Buck Henry, etc. —, & pretty funny. Sort-of a less challenging Being John Malkovich crossed with a bigger budget Living in Oblivion.

Emma: ***

• Catherine Keener was good.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Sam: ****

• Not that great of a movie but I laughed during the movie & I laughed during the deleted scenes; that’s worth 4 stars.

Emma: ***

• I liked the little kids becoming good, Sacha Baron Cohen, the deadbeat dad & his cougar, & the outtakes but it didn’t succeed in being laugh-out-loud funny.

Hollow Triumph or The Scar (1948)

Sam: ***

• Paul Henreid — Victor Lazlo of Casablanca, six years earlier — in a so-so Twilight Zone-ish noir.

Emma: ***

DOA (1950)

Sam: ****

• Flawed but not-bad noir that Crank apparently copied. Extra star for being set partly in San Francisco. Godard’s Breathless, released ten years later, was inspired by movies like this one, & maybe this one.

Emma: ***

• Good, but stupid.

Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noel) (2005)

Sam: **

• A European film — with French director, Christian Carion — about the Christmas truce of 1914.

Emma: **

• A disappointing movie about a fascinating subject. There are 4 main characters & we don’t end up having much empathy for any of them. Oh! What a Lovely War & even Black Adder did more with the material.

Lifeboat (1944)

Sam: ****

• 4 stars only if you cut it some slack for being war propaganda. Spoiler alert: There’s a German on the lifeboat & at first your not sure if he’s evil or not. I checked the date of the film & guessed right.

Emma: ****

• It was a challenge for Hitchcock to film this entire movie in a single lifeboat. I liked the weird camera angles. The DVD commentary was interesting. Hitchcock apparently lost about 100 lbs filming this so he used photos of himself in a mock weight-reduction newspaper ad shown in the movie. Tallulah Bankhead was a diva, & difficult for the other actors to work with. She supposedly refused to wear underwear, even when she was wearing a skirt & had to climb a ladder.

Casino Royale (2006)

Sam: **

• Alright, finally a post-baby birth movie on the big screen. Unfortunately, it was this movie. A great opening chase scene & some well-shot exotic locales. And that’s it. Skip this & see Layer Cake instead.

Emma: **

• It’s fun watching Daniel Craig but this movie doesn’t work. The violence is too graphic for the Bond franchise, especially in the torture scene. The plot doesn’t hold up. And I don’t like Eva Green, the new Bond girl; her ears stick out.

 

Millions (2005) 

Sam: ****

• The best Xmas movie (more or less) of the 2000s. Maybe it’s the only Xmas movie of the 2000s that I’ve seen but besides that it’s a good movie. We saw this at the Dinard British Film Festival a couple of years ago. After weeks of no tv & no movies Danny Boyles flashing directing was amazing. 2 years later it’s still impressive — from Trainspotting’s junkies to a movie about a child obsessed with saints. With James Nesbitt of Cold Feet, etc.

Emma: *****

• I like the vibrant colors, & Alex Etel is very good as the child lead.

Picnic (1955)

Sam: ***

• One of those 50s melodramas of the type homaged by Far from Heaven a few years ago. William Holden was his usual good self; Kim Novak… Did she ever take an acting class?

Emma: ***

• It’s a pity we don’t have picnics like that anymore. I particularly like the pouring-water-into-men’s-trousers game. Rosalind Russell was funny, until the melodrama part started. And what’s up with Kim Novak’s hair?

Re the previous posting’s comments. Here’s “The Joys of Rising From the Cultural Dead: Are HBO shows best experienced on DVD?” by Sam Anderson:

…I live, by choice, in a permanent HBO-lag: My viewing occurs entirely on DVD, a year or two behind schedule. I’ve become the undisputed king of the obsolescent spoiler: While the culturally savvy are fretting over recent developments, I’m telling people about the ducks leaving Tony Soprano’s pool in Season 1. …

Though watching a show on DVD is better in about a thousand ways than watching as it airs — you get to see an episode as many times as you want, on your own schedule, with special features — it requires the temporary sacrifice of your social currency. Six Feet was particularly tough to fall behind on: Though it was never the most subtle show, it might have been the most emotionally engaging. …I began to feel like an aesthetic amputee, haunted by phantom pains of the missing season. I had to avoid certain Web sites, avert my eyes from the paper’s arts section, and walk away from potentially revelatory conversations. Inevitably, details leaked out: I heard rumors of a major character’s death and some kind of mind-blowing season-ending montage. …

Back in the VHS era (1980-2004), watching a show late was either an unfortunate coping mechanism (”Oh no, the dog is vomiting in the kitchen! But Roseanne is coming on! Somebody hit ‘record!’ “) or an act of superfan homage (”If I’m not mistaken, friend, I believe you are thinking of Season 2, Episode 1, in which Detective Dale Cooper meets the gum-dispensing giant! Mother, fetch the tape!”). …

Over the past few years, however, we have witnessed the end of simultaneity: everyone lives in different cultural time zones. Retro-watching has become big business. TV on DVD (can we agree to call it “TVD”?) has boomed into a $4 billion industry. And since 2000, when the first full season TVD came out — Season 1 of The X-Files, seven years after it originally aired — the show-to-disc lag has been steadily shrinking. HBO DVDs used to trail their shows by at least two years — now they come out before the next season airs. Falling behind isn’t a minority position anymore, it’s a legitimate first-time viewing strategy. Thanks to TVD (along with newer technologies like DVR and on-demand cable), the first broadcast of a show has lost its old magic—around 60 percent of The Sopranos‘ DVD audience, for instance, doesn’t subscribe to HBO. Most of my friends are still scattered, with little sense of cultural loss, throughout Six Feet’s first four seasons.

… Six Feet is less like TV than serialized film, and it benefits more than most shows from feverish immersion. I doubt my reaction would have been quite so strong if I had diluted the drama with a week of real life between every episode. This was my reward for the wait.

 A few weeks ago my wife got impatient again. Having watched The Sopranos on DVD, she wanted to see the final season in real time, so she signed us up for HBO. After watching the first few episodes, it’s become clear that TVD has ruined me. I’ve gotten so used to the lag I can’t take it straight anymore. The few conversations I’ve had with people about new plot twists don’t come close to compensating for the frustration of having to wait a week between episodes. It’s one thing to watch a show late — it’s unbearable to watch it too soon.

The Wire Season 1 

Sam: ****

• Yet another very good HBO series. British actor Dominic West has a very convincing Baltimore accent. The final eps were somewhat anticlimactic, though unavoidably, since the unresolvable nature of the drug war is one of the show’s themes.

Emma: ****

• Interesting because you get involved in the cops’ and the criminals’ stories. I also like that the cops are such a bunch of misfits rather than stereotypical heroes.

Black Christmas (1975)

Sam: **

• This movie was influential in the slasher genre but years before Halloween & Nightmare on Elm Street. Still, it’s pretty bad, & its main innovation — the ending (I won’t spoil it) — was particularly annoyng.

Emma: *

A Christmas Story (1983)

Sam: ****

• Black Christmas & A Christmas Story were both directed by Bob Clark (as was Porky’s). The latter is a good movie but it was almost ruined by the narration. There’s a delicate balance between seeing the story from a child’s point of view & from our own — and the grown-up narration keeps upsetting the balance with smug adult commentary.

Emma: ****