Movie Update 17

And here's the rest of the current crop. I think I'll be watching at least four movies a week for the next six weeks, so... yeah. Busy.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High


This was the first movie Cameron Crowe wrote, although it was directed by Amy Heckerling. Kind of a standard high school sex comedy, but a well-written one, and I think it probably set a lot of standards for that particular genre. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the female lead and I thought her character was an interesting examination of a late bloomer type of girl, but I thought the standouts were Judge Reinhold as her older brother, who's just kind of a likable guy, and Sean Penn especially as the stoner Jeff Spicoli. It's not that it's a particularly difficult part to play, but I thought he actually brought a surprising amount of sadness to the role. Weird comment I guess, but hey, the movie has that scene where Phoebe Cates takes her red bikini top off.

The Lady Eve


Much like Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve is a good old comedy with some odd touches, like the opening credits featuring an animated snake. Henry Fonda is a rich heir to an ale fortune, and on a boat ride back to home a father and daughter pair of con artists attempt to take him in a high stakes card game. But the daughter, played by Barbara Stanwyck ends up falling for him after she sees how earnestly he feels towards her. Of course things get complicated once Fonda realizes who she really is. What follows is a mix of romantic comedy and some noir elements (mostly revolving around the femme fatale archetype) that generally works. Fonda's character is a bit too dumb to be believable and the plot sort of gives up on justifying the characters' actions at a certain point, but the dialogue and main performances are strong enough to pull it all together into a solid movie anyway. Flawed, but fun.

The Last Picture Show


I liked this one a hell of a lot, for reasons I'm not sure I can totally explain. It's another coming of age movie, although it treats the sexual subject matter with a lot more frankness that most movies, even ones made today, do. There's a certain melancholy about the whole thing, with characters passing and businesses closing, it sort of reflects the idea of small towns disappearing without getting too preachy about it. It's also notable for featuring a performance by an extremely young Jeff Daniels, before he had fully mastered the art of acting. The movie drifts a bit and is far from the most easily entertaining one on this list (in fact it's pretty easily the most humorless), but it just worked for me.

Roman Holiday


A nice movie about a gorgeous girl and a handsome man having fun in a beautiful city. Audrey Hepburn plays a princess of some country who's visiting in Rome, when she gets fed up with her controlled lifestyle and decides to run away for a night. She ends up spending time with a reporter played by Gregory Peck, who at first just wants a story, but changes his mind once he starts having feelings for her. He also has a photographer friend he abuses rampantly without repercussion. It's not the funniest comedy or the most emotional romance, but it's a good film all around, and it features one of the best endings I've ever seen in this type of movie. They often sacrifice realism for the sake of the story, but that's not the case here, and it works extremely well. It was definitely the part of the film that impressed me the most.

The Exorcist

It seems like scary movies don't hold up that well. Psycho is one of Alfred Hitchock's most famous and popular movies, but it didn't do that much for me. The Night of the Living Dead and its sequels are staples of the zombie genre, but I enjoyed them less than more recent work. And The Exorcist received a ton of award attention and was considered one of the scariest movies ever - and it's really not a very scary film. It hardly even tries to be. As a film, it's a good one - well shot by William Friedkin and his crew, and well acted by the whole cast. The story is pretty intriguing, as a woman's life is turned upside down when her daughter seemingly becomes possessed after a priest apparently unearths some ancient evil, and he must cast it out along with another who is troubled by the death of his mother. It has some truly iconic imagery, and it's a pretty enjoyable movie.

But it's just not scary. It thankfully avoids cheap jump scares for the most part, relying on the simple horror of its story's events. But while those scenes are well put together, there's little about them that I found effectively horrifying or even that creepy. I wasn't filled with a sense of dread or worried about what would happen next. Almost all of the horror attempts to be derived from simple shock value, a shock that has essentially disappeared in the nearly forty years since the film was released. I mean yes, it's unusual to watch a young girl mutilating and defiling herself while swearing and blaspheming in a man's voice. But it's not really frightening. In the culture that existed when the movie was released, I'm sure it was surprising and controversial stuff. But it just doesn't work anymore. And there's some grotesqueness to the girl's appearance over time, sure, but it's not enough to turn the stomach today either. The Exorcist is lucky that it's actually a pretty good movie, because otherwise there wouldn't be much to say about it.

Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream is about as different a film from The Wrestler as you could imagine, at least in terms of style. They're both good, sad films, but they tell their stories in very different ways. They're on completely opposite ends of the naturalism spectrum. Requiem uses the medium of film itself to convey mood, and along with all the stylistic touches it's a very effective technique. Very basically, it's a movie about addiction, as four interconnected all people go from casual users of various drugs to becoming completely addicted and stuck in horrible situations. Time dilation conveys the meaninglessness of time when under the influence, SnorriCam (a camera mounted so it's always looking at the actor's face) shots show disorientation and trauma, and a signature super close-up/fast cut shot depicts the many different ways the characters take their drugs. As they descend deeper into their struggles, scenes get shorter and shorter and the cuts get faster and faster before it all becomes overwhelming to watch, and sort of pulls you into the horrors they are facing.

It's a well-told story, although for whatever reason I found myself struggling to connect with the characters. Maybe it's because I knew they were doomed from the outset, but I found myself intrigued by their struggles rather than concerned. The acting is good - leads Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly are a likable couple before their need to get high pulls them apart, Marlon Wayans is surprisingly solid as Leto's friend who helps him get involved with dealing, and Ellen Burstyn got an Academy Award nomination for her startling descent from standard old lady to pill popping train wreck. But while the film work was good at putting you in another mindset, it was also at times gimmicky, and seemed to reduce the weight of what was happening when it was trying too hard to be clever. I have an inkling I would have liked it more in high school, but there was something odd about seeing something as heavy as crippling drug addiction often get depicted by cutesy camera cuts. It was less like a film and more like a visual experiment. A really good one, but less effective than it might have been otherwise.