seven DVDs in August

I’m backlogged on writing about the movies I’ve seen recently, in theaters and on DVD. So I’m going to catch up here with summaries of seven movies on DVD that I saw for the first time in August. (There were nine, but the Alice Adams and The Manchurian Candidate reviews were so long that I moved them to their own entries.)
It’s a little sad to see that I only went to a movie theater once, for The Manchurian Candidate. I had sinus hell for two consecutive weekends in August, and then I was home resting after the medical thing for another weekend (and couldn’t wear glasses for that long). But there weren’t that many enticing movies in theaters so I also felt relatively unmotivated. I feel satisfied enough that I saw nine new movies in the past month, even if they weren’t in theaters.

Moulin Rouge: 2001, dir. Baz Luhrmann. Seen on DVD (August 1). Most people I know either adore this movie and can’t get enough of it, or they hate it with the passion of a thousand Mel Gibsons. I thought I was probably going to be one of the ones who hated it (my boyfriend rented it) but I watched it anyway.
It’s okay. I guess I’d have liked it more in a theater. The problem I have with this movie is that I could not get absorbed in the storyline or in the movie as a whole because the pop-culture references kept pulling me out of it. As in, “Oh no. He’s not going to do the Paul McCartney song. He’s just not. Damn, he is.” And “That is straight out of Irma La Douce, I kid you not.” And most of all, “People should not mess with ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ like that, damn it.” These things were too distracting.
The storyline combines The Red Shoes (1948 movie), La Boheme, Irma La Douce (which was originally a musical), Cabaret, and probably some other movies I can’t remember or don’t know about. It references dozens of movies and maybe even hundreds of songs.
My favorite part was the number in Satine’s dressing room, “The Pitch,” which was funny as hell and reminded me a bit of Singin’ in the Rain, as I am sure it was supposed to.
You have to say this for Mr. Luhrmann, there isn’t much he doesn’t remember about musicals, and he combines old musicals with recent pop songs to create a fun, funny movie. Maybe he wants viewers to be pulled out of the plot to laugh at his cleverness and silliness, but that isn’t the movie experience I usually want to have.
I liked Jim Broadbent and Ewan McGregor a lot in this movie. Nicole Kidman wasn’t annoying, but I wish the role had been played by someone with a stronger voice. I liked John Leguizamo and the other Bohemians best, but then I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Bohemians.
I think I would really enjoy watching this movie with my sister, who adores musicals and pop music and who would get a kick out of the combination.
Outfoxed: 2004, dir. Robert Greenwald. Seen on DVD (August 5). We borrowed the Outfoxed DVD from someone who had hosted a MoveOn showing of the film, and my boyfriend and I watched it at home.
I have a degree in journalism. I used to work for a national newspaper chain. The trends that this documentary blames solely on Fox have been going on for quite some time, before Fox had any presence as a news entity. However, I suspect the filmmakers wanted a single point of focus so they could get everyone angry at one particular network.
It is true that Fox leads the pack in media bias. I was stuck in an auto repair shop next to a TV blaring Fox News this morning, forced to listen to its “fair and balanced” coverage of the Republican National Convention. (I am slowly recuperating and hope I’ll have no scars.) I didn’t hear very much straight news reporting apart from the weather. The Fox idea of a news broadcast seems to be to get two people together on opposite sides of an issue and have them shout at each other. I have never liked this particular type of “news” broadcasting myself.
However, you can see the two-guys-fighting technique used on all networks, particularly during “soft news” shows like Good Morning America. It’s entertaining (to some people … maybe the people who like those obnoxious morning radio shows) and it creates onscreen conflict, which is always good for ratings. Reporters don’t have to spend much time doing actual research or interviews, they just point the two angry people at one another and occasionally referee if they get too incoherent.
Admittedly, the difference that I see is that other news outlets at least try to achieve fairness whenever possible, and bias is often inadvertant. Fox News, however, does seem to make an effort to push specific agendas.
Outfoxed is blatantly propaganda, but its purpose is to tell you that Fox is blatantly propaganda. Why would you use biased reporting to accuse someone else of biased reporting? I would have preferred a documentary that looks at all the national news networks, at general trends in the media towards bias, and advises its viewers what to look for when watching or reading the news. In short, I’d like a documentary that reports media bias in a fair and balanced way, please.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control: 1997, dir. Errol Morris. Seen on DVD (August 8). I liked this movie, but it’s a difficult movie to like. You have to be able to fall into its strange and unnatural rhythm.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a documentary about four different people: a wild-animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a mole-rat specialist. Morris entwines interviews with these four people to make connections about humanity, etc. As in other Morris movies, he often layers all kinds of fascinating visual images over the voices of his interview subjects.
I had to focus hard on this movie to follow all Morris’s connections and to keep track of which interviewee was which and how what they were saying fit into the bigger picture. I thought the payoff was worthwhile and I was pleased with the movie.
However, my boyfriend didn’t like it at all and gave up before the end, because he hated all the cutting back and forth between different people. He felt it would have been a better movie if the interviews followed one after another in a more linear fashion.
It might have been a better movie, or at least an easier movie to watch and understand … but it wouldn’t have been an Errol Morris movie.
(Can’t wait until the rest of his movies are released on DVD in November, because I’d like to see more of his stuff without making the hike over to Vulcan Video for the grainy VHS copies.)
The Exorcist: 1973, dir. William Friedkin. Seen on DVD (August 15). I wanted to see this because I’d been rereading Joe Bob Briggs’ book Profoundly Disturbing. It was a surprising coincidence to see the trailers for the new “prequel” while the original movie was at the top of our rental queue.
I had seen some of The Exorcist before in high school, but I think I saw an edited version on late-night TV, and I was probably making out with my high-school boyfriend and missed most of the details of the movie. All I remember is one scene where something shocking happened onscreen and at the same time, the lightbulb in the lamp near my head popped and went dark. It was as close as I have ever come to screaming during a horror film.
Seeing it now, The Exorcist struck me as a movie that was missing a little something. I wondered if the director had originally assembled a longer cut, and then had to remove scenes that would have provided more background and explanation. For example, the movie starts with that long sequence in Iraq, but then we don’t see Merrin for maybe an hour afterwards. If I didn’t know the general storyline, I would wonder what the hell we’d been doing in Iraq. (Which is something I wonder fairly often, but not in terms of The Exorcist.) I found some information on the Web about different versions of this movie re-edited for TV and theatrical rerelease, and the extra scenes that had been removed from the original theatrical cut, but none of them filled in the gaps that I had noticed.
It may be that the film just tries to tell too much story in too compressed a period of time, which often happens with film adaptations of novels. If the film is primarily about Karras, why are there so many scenes devoted to Chris (Regan’s mom) and her acting career? I felt there was too much Chris and not enough Regan in the movie, so that the gradual change as she is possessed is not all that noticeable. And all Chris does once her daughter changes is emote in a very Best Actress way, which I don’t find interesting. And why are there so many Lt. Kinderman scenes—what does that have to do with anything?
Maybe it’s just that the things I would have found interesting are not the things that the writer and director found interesting.
Anyway, the scariest part of this movie for me is not any of the possession/exorcism stuff, it’s the spinal tap/EEG scene. I didn’t just take off my glasses, I hid my entire face until the scene was over.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: 1994, dir. Stephan Elliot. Seen on DVD (August 21). This was the perfect movie for me to see while stuck at home recuperating. I didn’t have to think too hard, it was generally pleasant, and if I felt bored I could look at the amazing costumes.
I saw Memento and The Return of the King in the past year, so it was rather strange to see Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving in lavish drag. (Someone asked why I didn’t find Terence Stamp in drag even weirder, but I realized I hadn’t seen a Terence Stamp movie in years and years. In fact I think the last movie was Superman 2, which is a real shame. I put The Limey in my rental queue.)
The storyline in Priscilla is fairly weak: two cross-dressers and a transsexual drive cross-country to a cabaret gig, with the usual road-trip fighting and bonding along the way. Like many other road-trip movies, though, the story is not the thing, but it’s the character development we’re supposed to enjoy. This may be the bitchiest road-trip movie I’ve ever seen. The bitching took some getting used to, but after awhile it became less annoying.
I hadn’t seen Hugo Weaving in any roles of substance—he didn’t have much to do in the LOTR or the Matrix films. I was pleasantly surprised.
I was also surprised by the upbeat ending. I have to say, I was sure something horrible was going to happen to these people at the end of the movie—they were going to get to the top of that mountain and Guy Pearce’s character was going to jump and plummet, or something equally tragic. Nope. Everyone grows a little, Weaving’s character takes responsibility of a son, Stamp’s character settles down with a nice man, and they all live happily ever after. With lots of sequins and feathers and ABBA music.
Isn’t that the cutest thing?
Bad Santa: 2003, dir. Terry Zwigoff. Unrated version seen on DVD (August 28). Oh, my.
I agreed to rent Bad Santa and see it with my boyfriend, but I wasn’t sure I would like it. I thought there was a very good chance one or both of us would find it unfunny and gross and leave the room before it ended.
But no. Bad Santa was the first movie in ages that we both liked. We laughed ourselves silly. I was still laughing after the movie ended.
Bear in mind that I hate gross-out and bodily function humor in movies. Remember that I walked out of Dumb and Dumber and it took six years for people to convince me to give There’s Something About Mary a fair chance. I didn’t even like Shrek because I felt it relied too heavily on fart jokes and lame pop culture references.
But I loved Bad Santa. (Well, I liked Kiss Me, Stupid too. Sometimes it’s the creatively vulgar ones that get me.)
Billy Bob Thornton is amazing. When I see him for the first time in a movie, I wonder why I’m seeing that movie in the first place. But by the end of the movie, I am captivated by his acting talent and completely absorbed in whatever his character is doing. I enjoyed The Man Who Wasn’t There immensely, although that was also because I liked the way it played with the standard James M. Cain plot twists.
Thornton plays the lowest of lowlives convincingly in this movie, and he is a pleasure to watch. Hell, he’s even attractive in some kind of weird and twisted way, which makes it plausible that his character would land so many encounters with so many women. His character is totally disgusting, sometimes mean and nasty, and always crude, but we can still sympathize with him.
I read somewhere that Bill Murray had originally been the first choice for the lead, which I think would have made the movie more palatable to a wider audience, but his genial appeal would have weakened the movie considerably. Thornton was ideal.
Bernie Mac and John Ritter were fabulous. I have not seen most John Ritter films (this was his last one) but his prissy store manager was priceless, especially when teamed up with Bernie Mac’s security guy. Tony Cox did a beautiful job as Thornton’s height-impaired sidekick.
Apparently Joel and Ethan Coen hatched the original story idea, and while you might wish they’d made the movie themselves instead of remaking The Ladykillers, the writers and director involved with Bad Santa
have done a fine job. I do not think it could be improved. Terry Zwigoff, the director, was also responsible for Ghost World and Crumb.
Oh, the scene in the Ladies Big and Tall dressing rooms. And the sex scenes with Lauren Graham. And the grandma death scare.
You start watching this movie, and the characters are unappealing. You’re not sure you’re going to make it all the way through. I mean, Santa pissed himself? And somehow, I’m not sure how, you can’t stop watching. And then it gets funnier, and funnier, and nastier, and you hope they won’t cop out with a mushy ending, and they don’t, and it’s wonderful.
You have no idea how tempted I am to bring this movie with me when visiting family at Christmas. Very, very tempted. (I know better, though. My dad would love it, but my mom would be entirely disgusted and start running the vacuum cleaner. My sister has already made it clear that she saw it and hated it. Oh well.)
Gregory’s Girl: 1981, dir. Bill Forsyth. Seen on DVD (August 30). I had to watch this movie in segments because I kept running out of time. It took three viewings for me to get entirely through the film. Which is a shame, because I think I would have liked it even more if I’d seen it in one unbroken viewing. Maybe next time.
Gregory’s Girl is a sweet little movie written and directed by Bill Forsyth, who isn’t worried very much about plot and who likes to give us very quirky yet very human characters.
Gregory is a gangly teenager who falls in love with the first female soccer player on his school team, Dorothy. Unfortunately half the guys at school fall for her too (at one point, they’re all buying photos of her). That’s about it for the storyline.
But it is a delight to get to know Gregory, who is very amusing, and his friend who likes to bake, and his wise little sister, and the poor little kid who likes his sister, and the two guys who want to hitchhike to Caracas because the male-to-female ratio would be so much better for them. The characters come and go with incomplete subplots, and that’s okay.
The movie captures teenage awkwardness and boy-girl relations in a way that puts Booth Tarkington and John Hughes to shame.
I was hoping for a little more soccer and a little more time with the female soccer player, but I can always watch Bend it Like Beckham again if I want to see that sort of thing.
Eventually Gregory ends up spending time with the only girl in the movie who doesn’t have Scary Eighties hair. It’s all very cute and low-key and laid-back.
I wish there were more Bill Forsyth movies on DVD. I’d like to see Housekeeping next, especially since I’ve read the book.