I saw a bunch of movies this year I never blogged about.
Adaptation: One big self-referential in-joke of a movie, but better than that sounds. The ending really had me going. It has more to do with a certain scene from Being John Malkovich than is apparent at first glance. What I want to know is, are all New Yorker writers brilliant withdrawn wallflowers like Streep's Susan Orleans, and if so, how do they get people to talk to them?
City of God: Wow! Lund and Meirelles have figured out how to harness Quentin Tarantino's hip quasi-retro thing and use it to drive social realism. A more unlikely combination is hard to imagine but it works. And just when we thought the Pixote/Christiane F./Salaam Bombay vein had been thoroughly explored and could offer nothing new beyond a change of scenery.
Far From Heaven: Great stylistic fun, especially for Todd Haynes fans. It should be in a hypersaturated triple feature with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Lola. But best see it before The Hours lest its melodrama fade in comparison.
Gangs of New York: Somewhere in the Dickensian plot my suspension of disbelief got suspended. The Low Life adaptation I really want to see is a documentary.
Gaudi Afternoon: For some reason I really want to like Judy Davis, but the next time I make plans to see one of her comedies, just go ahead and put me out of my misery. Pity -- the subject of a translator living in Barcelona should have been irresistible.
The Good Thief: if he was really good, he'd give my six-fifty back. Shot and partly acted like an art film, but scripted like a B heist movie. Nolte is believable as a junkie has-been gambler but his Hemingway noblesse oblige thing with Nutsa Kukhianidze's charmless prostitute is like Pretty Woman with needle tracks and vomit buckets. And as a caper flick it would have been straight-to-video. (Even so I thought it was better than either version of Ocean's Eleven.)
An aside for the linguablog crowd: The language setup in The Good Thief is interesting in its inconsistency. Although it's not clear until well into the movie, apparently the English dialogue is supposed to represent French. But there's one scene where the characters suddenly start shouting in French and Arabic with English subtitles, whereupon Nolte speaking English is supposed to be interpreting from Arabic to French. They should have passed out scorecards in the lobby.
The Hours: Damn. The best depression-inducing movie in recent memory. Must see, must read, must see again.
Lagaan: At last a Bollywood movie we can watch with the kids! Most popular Indian releases are far too violent, but Lagaan has nothing worse than a little bullying. If the 19th-century rural setting is a bit stylized, at least it's not the shiny plastic crowns of made-for-TV Mahabharat and Ramayana. The cricket scenes are not as overly long as everybody says and the song-and-dance numbers are great, assembled from folk elements rather than disco or rap. Malini- and Uma-approved!
Laurel Canyon: The buzz on this one is mostly right, that Frances McDormand finally gets a well-deserved turn as a sexy middle-aged woman and the movie is worth seeing on those grounds alone. But the plot concerning her relatively tame son and daughter-in-law crowds out what should have been a focus on her character. I have questions about verisimilitude -- in the areas I don't know anything about (recording sessions, molecular biology, and kinky seductions for instance) they more or less sold me, but my doubts were stirred by the areas I do (since when do first-year medical residents have time to sit around drinking coffee with their mothers in the mornings?).
I also found the movie geographically interesting: never having been to LA, I thought everybody outside of South Central lived in a modernist cube hanging off a cliff (think Get Shorty, Limey, and about a thousand others). I had no idea there was any part of LA this lush, and now I understand what Joni Mitchell was singing about.