1. "Transamerica" - I really enjoyed this, but I still believe it got more rave reviews than it probably merited. If it hadn't had a Big Star in the lead role, I don't think most people would have ever even heard about it. I also think that it got so much press because it treated a topic that most people are uncomfortable even thinking about, but in a "safe" way, so it gave them a chance to claim that they loved "that movie about the transsexual person." I very much appreciated that, for the most part, Felicity Huffman played her character as just a regular person—no scary friends in drag, no weird sexual encounters, no kinky fetishes—and didn't bother trying to explain to us why he wanted to be a she. The movie starts just a week before the sex-change operation, while s/he is well into hormone therapy and the decision is a foregone one, so we don't have to get into the hows and whys. In most ways, it's a very small, nice, quiet movie—and you know those are some of my favorite movies!—and well worth seeing. Andy went off to bed before it was over; he didn't find it compelling enough to watch through to the end—he said he found that he didn't much care what happened to any of the characters, which is always his main criterion for staying up or hitting the sack.
2. "Seven Up/7 Plus Seven" - These are the first two installments in a truly remarkable British documentary series begun in 1964. For "Seven Up," the filmmaker sought out fourteen 7-year-olds from all walks of life—girls and boys, urban and rural, filthy rich and dirt poor. A girl from the housing projects ("council flats") hopes to grow up to work at Woolworth's; a well-heeled suburban boy knows he is destined for Cambridge. I got a little mixed up with the terminology (I know that "public school" in the U.K. is what we call "private school" here in the States, but I wasn't sure what was meant by "comprehensive" versus "grammar" schools, and some other words), but for the most part it was painfully obvious that the poor were going to stay poor (One boy is asked whether he thinks he'll go to university; he says "What's university?") and the rich were going to get richer (Another boy—7 years old, remember—says he reads the Financial Times every day!). There's a horrible snobby girl who says she's never met a "colored person" and hopes she never does. In "7 Plus Seven" (from 1971), the kids are 14 years old, and not much has changed. You can't help but like the three East End girls, who seemed nice and friendly and honest and content with what they had; by contrast the three preppie boys were just despicably snobby and self-congratulating and thoroughly out of touch. Fascinating stuff, and I can't wait until the next few installments show up in my queue—so far they've got "21 Up" (1978), "28 Up" (1985), "35 Up" (1992), and "42 Up" (1999). I wonder if they're shooting "49 Up" this year?
3. "Requiem for a Dream" - Holy crap. The Netflix description says "Not for the squeamish," which I now know means "Don't watch this!" If you think you've ever seen a realistic, gritty, depressing, powerful movie about drugs, you're wrong until you've seen this one. Roger Ebert calls it "a travelogue of hell," and I don't think that's too dramatic a phrase. The lovely Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and Ellen Burstyn all play hopeless, helpless junkies (the first three are hooked on heroin or crack or whatever is available, the fourth on diet pills), and you just watch as they all hurtle toward sure disaster. The end is so very devastating that you can't help wishing they were all dead instead. If you can stand a brutally honest look at drug abuse, you'll be rewarded by remarkable performances by all four lead actors. This was a gutsy movie to make, for all involved—positively no glamour or soft-focus to be had here. Just bare-bones acting and really effective camera techniques. I won't say I'm sorry I saw it, but I just hope the images from it stop haunting me soon.
4. "The Blind Swordman: Zatoichi" - Apparently there have been dozens of Japanese movies about the 19th-century blind swordman Zatoichi, but this 2003 version is the first one directed by and starring "Beat" Takeshi, who I'd never seen before but I learned is a huge star in Japan. The movie is great fun if you like almost cartoonish martial arts battles (complete with lots of paint-red blood squirting all over the place and limbs and appendages flying about) and stories about revenge. I loved Tadanobu Asano as the ronin who has to take a job as bodyguard to a sleazeball gang-boss in order to afford medical care for his sick wife. He has a very cool look about him and really embodied what I imagine as the moral warrior who has to decide for himself what is right and what is wrong in any given situation. The movie ends with a terrific all-cast song-and-dance finale ("Everyone onstage for the production number!" as Andy says!), sort of a Japanese-style "Riverdance." Fun.
Didn't you review Zatoichi once before?? I thought I remembered you saying you liked it. I know I liked it. In spite of how cheesy and schlocky it was.
Posted by: scott | June 26, 2006 at 03:47 PM
Nope, never saw it. In fact, I think you're the one who told me to put it in my queue! We've seen a lot of similar movies, though.
Posted by: Karen | June 26, 2006 at 04:16 PM
See? I told ya. I cannot watch that film without bawling my eyes out at some point. Apparently while Ms. Goldfarb was telling Harry how lonely she was, the camera drifted a little to the side, and when the director went to see what the heck the cinematographer was doing, he found him crying - and he left that take in the film. Yes, I own it, and I LOVE the Kronos Quartet part of the soundtrack. Perhaps I am a masochist.
Posted by: kontakte66 | June 26, 2006 at 06:18 PM