The Interpreter: 2005, dir. Sydney Pollack. Seen at Alamo Lake Creek (April 23).
I wasn’t all that wild to see The Interpreter. I’d read reviews that were lukewarm at best about it. I heard that it was disappointing, slow, predictable, badly cast, and silly.
I was pleasantly surprised. The Interpreter is a solidly entertaining little thriller with a good cast, well-paced and not at all dull or irritating.
It is true that there are no major surprises, and that the movie adds nothing new or innovative to the action/suspense genre, but that’s all right. Every film cannot be innovative. The Interpreter still provided us with a good afternoon’s enjoyment.
Category: films seen in 2005
Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Bride and Prejudice: 2004, dir. Gurinder Chadha. Seen at Arbor Great Hills (March 9).
I couldn’t resist seeing Bride and Prejudice, because I am such a huge Jane Austen fan and I delight in watching all the weird adaptations and permutations of Austen novels on film. Would it be as charming as Douglas McGrath’s adaptation of Emma, would it be as annoying as the recent Mansfield Park, would Lizzy be transformed to someone as passive and silly as Bridget Jones? I had to find out.
I liked Bride and Prejudice much better than Bridget Jones’s Diary or Clueless. It is a successful (and cute) transformation of Pride and Prejudice to contemporary India, L.A., and London. Light and frothy, yes, but fun to watch, especially if you know the source material.
Sin City (2005)
Sin City: 2004, dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. Seen at Galaxy Highland (April 3).
Sin City is a difficult movie to review. I started writing this review on April 4 and you can see how long it took me to finish it.
I can say that it is one of the most visually impressive movies I have seen in recent memory. It captures a comic-book world better than any other film. It is an excellent adaptation.
But does an excellent adaptation equal a good movie?
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle: 2004, dir. Danny Leiner. Seen on DVD (March 4).
I know, I know. I am always complaining that I never have time to see wonderful little movies like Maria Full of Grace and The Cooler and whatever the hell is playing at Dobie right now … and yet somehow I managed to see Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Not only that, I deliberately and voluntarily rented this movie. I was not forced to see it against my will.
And I have to say that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was pretty funny in a dumb-dumb comedy kind of way. I usually avoid dumb comedies because, okay, primarily because I don’t find them funny. I am willing to forgive a lot of things if a movie makes me laugh, like Bad Santa.
Kinsey (2004)
Kinsey: 2004, dir. Bill Condon. Seen at Paramount (Feb. 20).
Kinsey is not a movie about sex. Kinsey is a movie about nerds.
My boyfriend pointed this out after we saw the movie. He noted how refreshing it was to see a movie in which the main character, with whom we are sympathizing and identifying, is a nerd. And a geek. He gets more excited about the lifespan of the gall wasp than anything else.
I have to say I like the nerdy parts of this movie, and of the character, much better than the sex parts. And no, I am not a prude.
Last Days of the San Jose (2005)
Last Days of the San Jose: 2005, dir. Liz Lambert. Seen at Alamo Downtown (Jan. 12).
Last Days of the San Jose premiered at Alamo Downtown as part of the Texas Documentary Tour. It is a documentary about the San Jose Motel, a notoriously seedy joint on S. Congress Ave. in Austin, which Liz Lambert bought with the idea of tearing it down to build a cool boutique hotel. But it took her two years to get a bank to loan her the money, and in the meantime she decided to manage the old motel in order to make ends meet. She used a digital video camera to document many of the colorful characters and odd experiences she encountered during that time, which were cut into this documentary.
If you have lived in Austin for many years, Last Days of the San Jose is a kind of loopy Valentine to the days when S. Congress was more disreputable, before anyone ever thought about using the abominably pretentious term “SoCo” to describe the area.
About Schmidt (2002)
About Schmidt: 2002, dir. Alexander Payne. Seen on DVD (Jan. 20).
I had not actually intended to watch About Schmidt. My boyfriend rented the DVD and I figured he’d watch it one night when I wasn’t around. I was around when he put it on, and I thought I would do some computer work or read in my room, but I ended up watching the movie anyway. If you think this means that About Schmidt is an absorbing and entertaining film that I would recommend … you’re wrong.
We ended up seeing About Schmidt a week or so after we saw Sideways, which was adapted and directed by the same filmmakers. The problems I encountered with Sideways were magnified in About Schmidt.
Jackie Brown (1997)
Jackie Brown: 1997, dir. Quentin Tarantino. Seen on DVD (Jan. 8).
This is what I get for waiting a month to write a damn review. All I can think of was, “Damn, this was a good movie, and much different than what I expected.”
A lot of people have called Jackie Brown Tarantino’s least typical film. There are a few of his trademark touches: using 1970s actors (Pam Grier), the thin and slightly crazy blonde (Bridget Fonda instead of Uma Thurman this time), nervous trigger-happy criminals, Samuel L. Jackson, odd jumps and rewinds in time, scenes in which the camera is placed oddly for stylistic effect, and so forth.
However, the storyline is stronger and the dialogue is less annoying to me than in other Tarantino films, and for that I wonder if we ought to thank Elmore Leonard. I did not know this until after I saw the movie, but it is adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch (although Michael Keaton made me wonder … he plays the same character in Out of Sight). Sometimes Tarantino movies make me feel like I am supposed to stop and marvel at the wonderfulness of the director and his unique style of filmmaking, which annoys me and makes me want to throw things. That did not seem to happen in this film.
Sideways (2004)
Sideways: 2004, dir. Alexander Payne. Seen at Arbor Great Hills (Jan. 15).
Sideways was an enjoyable movie, although I don’t see why so many people feel it ought to be raking in the big awards. But then I feel that way about most of the 2004 movies that have been nominated for Oscars and other yearly awards.
It took me awhile to get to the theater to see Sideways, and not just because I am a procrastinator and lazy and all that. I got the impression that this was a movie about two guys going through a mid-life crisis, and I could not have been less interested. But then people started talking about Paul Giamatti, whom I enjoyed very much in American Splendor. I heard further rumbling about Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen. And then everyone was going on about A.O. Scott saying that critics only liked this movie because Giamatti’s character was the type to appeal to most critics, who would sympathize with such a person. Somehow I found that weirdly tempting.
And then it took us two or three weeks to see the movie because it kept selling out whenever we wanted to go.
I realized after seeing Sideways why it was that everyone was telling me to go see it for this performance or that one, and talking about the actors rather than the movie as a whole. This movie is as good as it is because of the actors in it. If it had been differently cast, it would be a much less entertaining film, if not downright unpleasant.
Baadasssss! (2004)
Baadasssss!: 2004, dir. Mario Van Peebles. Seen on DVD (Jan. 14).
I cannot stop talking about Baadasssss! I have been urging everyone to rent it. I wish it had been nominated for some kind of award. I think it was one of the best overlooked movies in 2004.
Baadasssss! tells the story of Melvin Van Peebles trying to make a movie in 1972 in which black characters weren’t relegated to the horrible stereotypes common to Hollywood films. His movie, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, featured a character who fought back when corrupt cops tried to beat him up, and who most importantly did not get caught or die at the end of the movie. Melvin Van Peebles scraped together money from all kinds of sources, used a porn-film non-union crew because he wanted a cast and crew with a racial mix that reflected the racial mix of America, practically went blind in one eye trying to shoot and edit the film the way he wanted it, and then had to find theaters that would actually show the finished product in public.