Review: Boston Legal

More Mark Valley!! Of course everyone is awesome on Boston Legal – it’s definitely tailored for a specific audience but for people who really appreciate this particular brand of humor it’s AWESOME! I can’t help it. I love William Shatner AND James Spader AND Candice Bergen and I love how Valley really embraced being the butt of Spaders “Ken doll” jokes – I can appreciate an attractive actor who’s totally willing to look like an ass (David Boreanaz in Bones). Naturally I was unable to convince my parents of the obvious wonderfulness of this show – my mother has a really low tolerance for perky people. Luckily, I’m an adult and don’t need their approval anymore. I think I left off somewhere in season 4…

Review: Keen Eddie

Totally adorable. There’s a large part of me, by the way, that can’t understand why anyone cares about Sienna Miller but it doesn’t matter – she’s totally charming in this and is the perfect foil to Mark Valley. There’s lots of too cute stuff – they bicker like they’re married, the dog destroys something, Mark Valley ends up in his boxers at inappropriate times – it all comes together in a nice way. Of course I was desperately sick when I watched the series so that needs to be taken into account but I swear it wasn’t the DayQuil.

Review: Sweeney Todd

I used to think that I really like musicals. Then I watched a lot of them and realized that a lot of them are really annoying. This isn’t saying that they’re all bad – everyone should watch Cabaret if a quality version comes to town and I grew up on Rogers and Hammerstein. I think my issue is with the structure. If you’re going to have people waltzing around, singing in public and overacting the story must be really compelling; Nazi’s always provide an excellent foil to the musical format (Cabaret, The Sound of Music, The Producers), poverty’s generally good (The Wizard of Oz, Les Miserables), crime’s pretty good (Chicago, Guys and Dolls), issue’s with culture are winners (Fiddler on the Roof, The Flower Drum Song) – there must be some element of reality that the viewer can really understand and latch on to since the rest of the show is SO ridiculous. And a crazy killer could have been just the excellent dash of reality that this movie needed. The problem is that the songs seem to be from another musical – the music is nauseatingly lighthearted and the lyrics are often beyond dumb. I guess this would have been less annoying if the story wasn’t so annoying on its own. I have no patience for musicals that exist for the sake of people who like participating in musical theater productions. I also have no patience for prose which is nauseatingly purple. Toward the end of the movie I was hoping that everyone would die in a fire or something. No such luck.

Review: Junebug

I don’t know if I can be completely objective about this movie. It was totally adorable and I loved it but there are so many things about it that remind me of trips I’ve taken to Kentucky with my husband that I was bound to love it. Eric felt similarly – I think he was a little more thrown by the familiarity of certain things (the church, the people, the architecture, the relationships). The only thing he didn’t buy was the art that Embeth Davidtz sells – he couldn’t believe anyone would really buy it. But from art classes I know that ridiculous stuff like Civil War scenes of naked soldiers with giant penises would sell like hotcakes. And, though I can never appreciate how good the re-creation of Southern life is to the level that Eric can, I can still remember my trips to Kentucky and see those experiences reflected to a large degree on the screen. I’ve decided to take this recognition as an indication of a job well done. And, on top of all of this accuracy, the movie was really enjoyable (I don’t really go in for painful accuracy). Amy Adams is rad as usual, Embeth Davidtz is terrifyingly thin but perfectly citified, Benjamin McKenzie blew away my low expectations and Alessandro Nivola is just a sex-pot. Celia Weston gives such a subtle performance and Scott Wilson is so hen pecked by her – it makes their relationship so good and complicated. All the relationships were good and complicated. And I think it was a really even-handed version of Southern life. I think it showed that it’s easy for non-Southerners to be snarky and bigoted about the south and people who’re from there but their complicated relationships between the characters, miscommunications and clashes between mores should be much needed common ground between disparate groups of people – Southerners are people too.

Review: The Black Donnellys

I bypassed this show SO many times for no good reason. Then people started recommending it to me and that never does any good. I don’t know why I finally picked it up but I’m totally glad I did. I mean besides the fact that it’s incredibly well made and the acting is totally on and it’s got just the right amounts of style and grittiness there’s also the Irish thing. I don’t know anyone like these people, really, but I did grow up in an Irish family and every once in a while I see something familiar. The clannishness, the crazy family responsibility thing, the food. I don’t know. There have been shows like this before (The Sopranos) but there’s something about it that I really like. It probably glamorizes Irish-Americans and everyone likes to be flattered. Whatever.

Review: The West Wing

Apparently I wasn’t alone in this (according to my local independant movie store, right around the election there was a big resurgence of interest in the West Wing) but all I want to do these days is watch the West Wing. I hate being predictable but it’s one of the things you eventually have to accept as you mature that you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. I guess I’m just not as snarky as I would like to believe – I let the tide of “hope” and “inspiration” and “patriotism” move me along with everyone else.

It’s nice to watch it again, though, because it really allows me to look at the show and Aaron Sorkin’s style objectively. Particularly if you’ve watched Sports Night or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, his style is almost unbearably distracting. I finally figured out, though, that one of the things I like so much about it is the theatricality of shows made by Sorkin. And I’m not talking about the music or the storyline. I’m talking about the structure of the “scenes” and the dialog – the structure, the nerdiest part, of each episode and the show as a whole. He looks at the bigger picture, he has lofty ideas. I like that. It becomes totally rediculous and redundant a lot of the time but then there are totally brilliant bits that make it totally worthwhile. Even Studio 60 had it’s moments. The West Wing, though, seems to be where he really found his voice; he created wonderful characters that really live in that show. Tobey Zeigler? Josh Lyman? C.J. Cregg? Sam Seaborn? I can go back a million times.

Review: Choke

Eric and I shockingly PAID full price for the movie because I really like Chuck (Palahniuk) and, honestly, I had high hopes despite depressing reviews. Sad. Eric ended up giggling through the entire movie because he thought that it was awesome everytime I sighed in exasperation and disappointment. He thinks my expectations were too high and that it was bound to fail because I know the book so well. He’s totally right of course and I’m not saying that the book was super deep and moving and stuff. But it seemed that the director totally missed a lot of the deep stuff that the book did have; he made it another dirty movie for teenage boys. My argument is that there was more to the book than just that. And, geez, just because it’s a dirty book doesn’t mean that it has to be treated with so little maturity or sophistication.

And I LOVE Sam Rockwell! He’s so so cool and he did his best with all the silliness. There just wasn’t a dark edge to it and that’s one thing that’s consistent in all of Chuck Palahniuks books – they are DARK… There’s no darkness to Porky’s.

And the part about his mother… they made her super attractive and basically eliminated her psychedelic drug experiments. Her freakyness is what makes her interesting and believable!

I don’t know – the problem is that I’ve got the book on CD. Chuck, with his weird voice and cadence, reads the thing and puts emphasis in unusual places. I really wanted the movie to do something unusual and, instead, it was just way way too conventional. It was made for mass consumption and Palahniuks books are made for the alienated. Totally lame.

Review: The Squid and The Whale

It’s taken me way too long to see this movie. I mean there’s been a kind of arc to the anticipation: there’s the part before I knew anything about it, then people who know what I like started telling me things like “Oh you should see it! You’ll like it! See it so we can talk about it!”, then there was a sort of critical mass where EVERYONE was telling me to see it which precipitated my predictable rebellion where I say something like “THEY don’t know ME!” which inevitably puts the movie on the back burner for years or makes me irrationally hate it – see: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

At this point, though, it’s been SO long that everyone has given up on me and there’s no pressure at all on me to see it which is just perfect because I could probably not say that Jeff Daniels was awesome with a straight face if I’d seen it any sooner. But he was. And now I FINALLY know why all the men I know have this THING for Laura Linney – she’s soft and forgiving and smart and beautiful and is married to a SON of a BITCH and brushes him aside. She’s sensitive but human and it’s easy to see an exagerated version of most 70’s and 80’s mothers in her – I can see mine. The best part of the movie by far were the kids. TOTALLY. And the tennis coach. The kids and the tennis coach. The older son wants to BE his SON of a BITCH father and wraps himself up in this aura of greatness that isn’t backed up by any actual genius (just like daddy). The youngest son quietly develops some fabulously disturbing habits like binge drinking at the age of, say, 9 and masturbating all over the elementary school library books and classmates lockers. Awesome. And the totally level headed tennis instructor provides just enough balance so you remember that, yes, these people are just as nuts as you think they are and, no, it’s not you.

Review: Blood Simple

It was good. It was really good. And it was exciting to see flashes of what the Cohen brothers would eventually become. There’s not much else to say.

Review: Blood and Black Lace

Some things just don’t stand up to the test of time without the aid of props and booze. I can see, with the correct amount and type of alcohol, party attire, lighting and guests, this movie would make an excellent backdrop to a really awesome party. Alone and sober, however, it just fell really flat. It was the sort of movie where time and place is EVERYTHING but I’m sure the nostalgia factor can overcome a lot of bad ambience. The thing is I was sheltered from the really normal stuff – my husband finally took it upon himself to show me a smattering of 80’s horror movies just so we could communicate. So needless to say, I haven’t racked up any nostalgia for a 1950’s Italian horror movie since I’m super American and I wasn’t born till the bitch’n 70’s. However there are some stylistic details that are recognizeably Italian – lots of hot women, lots of random colored lights and lots of really pretty blood which leads me to believe that this movie was made for date night: giggling, sneaking drinks of something awful, and not really paying attention to the movie except when you hear a scream or the scary music comes on. The rest of the time everyone’s speaking in Italian which just promotes romance anyway. Of course it’s probably not everyone’s idea of a great date. The key ingredient is that you absolutely CAN’T be paying too much attention to the movie. It has to be a background distraction like a rock show or something. It’s there for awkward moments for you to pretend to be interested and for acting scared or grossed out. Plus there’s some kinky subtexts so that could spark some interesting drunken conversations. If I’m gonna be alone, though, I’d rather watch La Dolce Vita. More relaxing.