I see very few movies in theaters anymore, though I do try to catch up on the smaller indie and foreign releases from Netflix later. Three movies I saw during their theatrical released and liked quite a bit are worth mentioning:
1. Breach, in which a young CIA agent helps bring down a turncoat; Chris Cooper, of course, was excellent as the bad guy, but Ryan Phillippe was surprisingly good as the "kid" who gets Cooper to take him under his wing so he can betray him. The fabulous Laura Linney is fabulous, though she doesn't have enough to do. Same goes for Dennis Haysbert; this is really a two-man show.2. Grindhouse, the B-movie double feature from Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez. I like the Tarentino half better, though my partner makes a good point that Grindhouse should be considered as one whole since the two films were presented as one program, complete with fake trailers, film scratches, and projection room glitches. I probably wouldn't want to sit through the Rodriguez half again, but I'm also angry that the two movies were released separately on DVD. Once they've gotten their money out of those, watch for a greedy repackaging of what should have been packaged together in the first place.
3. Hairspray, the movie of the stage musical of the non-musical movie. It's not the second coming of the musical, but it's fun and fluffy and colorful, and survives the miscasting of John Travolta in Divine's role. The final number, "You Can't Stop the Beat" was glorious on stage and is just as good on film, one of the all-time great show tunes, and frankly, I'm happy to have a recording of it that isn't ruined by Harvey Fierstien's croaking as on the Broadway cast album.
4. The Vamp and Camp double feature of She Done Him Wrong and Cobra Woman at the Ohio Theater in Columbus. I haven't seen an audience have this much fun in a theater since the Sound of Music sing-along.
5. On DVD, I was pleased to catch up with Dick, the 1999 Watergate comedy with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams (great 70's soundtrack) and The History Boys, the 2006 comedy/drama about a group of English working-class students spending a year preparing for entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. The play was almost certainly better, but the film has fine acting all around. Richard Griffiths gets all the acclaim, but the other teachers (Stephen Campbell Moore and Frances de la Tour) are just as good.
6. This was my year of living dangerously and immersing myself in the works of Leni Riefenstahl, German actress, dancer, and director of the notorious Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. I read two books about her, rewatched Triumph and the first half of Olympia (the second half never came from Netflix), and saw a number of her earlier mountain films, which are fascinating quite apart from Riefenstahl's participation--I'll be reviewing them in January on my Moviepalace blog.
7. Seeing Godard's Contempt and Breathless for the first time. Breathless in particular was quite enjoyable (with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, above), though I don't know how much else of the French New Wave of the 60's I'll try to track down.8. Books I enjoyed: Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (I'm not sure I'm ready for the Bold Print Atheist label, but I liked that fact that Reason now has a movement and some smart public voices--I'm gonna catch up with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens soon); No Applause Just Throw Money, a history of vaudeville; a chilling office politics novel called The Exception by Christian Jungersen; well-written biographies of Stepin Fetchit (by Mel Watkins) and Phil Spector (by Mick Brown); a wonderful graphic novel/kid's book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan which finds brilliant visual metaphors for the disorientation an immigrant feels in a new land.
9. On TV, there was Pushing Daisies and Burn Notice and The Big Bang Theory, and then this damn writer's strike! I'm tired of going through Jon Stewart withdrawal!
10. Finally, a complaint: American Life Network, a pathetic little cable channel, dropped the three reasons they were worth watching at all: 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside 6, all early 60's detective shows. I have vague memories of them from my childhood, and though they may not be great TV, they are fun (and are filled with handsome young men). Now American Life has dropped these hard-to-find shows in favor of the same old shows that you can find in syndication all over the local and cable dials, and even on DVD. 77 Sunset Strip (see Efram Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Moore at left) is an especially good show which is now in limbo, available nowhere, and since American Life Network seems to pay no attention whatsoever to e-mail that they themselves ask for, I have no use for them.
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