First Time:
Days of Being Wild
Echo Park
Quiet City
Living on Tokyo Time
Rewatch:
In the Mood for Love
Cold Weather
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Take This Waltz
This Week: 8
Total:118
Movies Watched 4/23 -4/29/2013
Movies Watched 4/16- 4/22/2013
First Time:
Valhalla Rising
Man on the Moon
Lost Highway
A Matador’s Mistress
How to Marry a Millionaire
Rewatch:
The Darjeeling Limited
Hot Fuzz
This Week: 7
Total: 110
Movies Watched 4/9 -4/15/2013
First Time:
Adventureland (Hit the spot in the summer weather happening in North Carolina right now)
A Royal Affair (Lovely, dramatic and sweeping)
Monsoon Wedding (Fun and light one second, fairly dark the other, but a really interesting picture of an Indian family during a week-long wedding ceremony)
Five Easy Pieces (Blindspot pick for this month)
No (Feels a bit like a political thriller for Mad Men fans)
Capote (Not as good as I expected)
Rewatch:
Metropolitan
This Week: 7
Total:103
I’m honestly chomping at the bit for the next episode of Hannibal. The first two episodes were easily the most engaging thing I’ve watched this week.
Movies Watched 4/2 – 4/8/2013
First Time:
Pull My Daisy
Working Girl
Border Radio
Rewatch:
The Manchurian Candidate
Dead Poets Society
This Week: 6
Total:96
Netflix Challenge: American Graffiti
Directed by George Lucas (1973)
Starring: Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Wolfman Jack, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams
In George Lucas’ nostalgia flick, a group of teenagers spend the night cruising their town on the eve of the new school year. Best Friends Curt (Dreyfuss) and Steve (Howard) are flying to their East Coast college in the morning, but Steve’s girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) doesn’t want him to go. Curt and Steve vacillate between going away and staying at home all night and all their various reasons why one would be better than the other. Their friends John Milner (Le Mat), hotrod hullabaloo extraordinaire, and Terry “The Toad” (Charles Martin Smith), the nerd, are busy cruising for girls they can drive around all night.
I was feeling kind of burnt out on male-driven stories about halfway through the movie. And then I felt guilty that I was seeing this as a Feminist instead of seeing this as a story, especially when the women in the story (although they aren’t main characters) are well-rounded and interesting and fun to watch. And then I realized that it’s stupid for me to feel guilty about this – if I feel like I can’t relate to a story as a story, that’s not my fault. Some stories out there aren’t there to be understood by everyone on a universal level, even if they’ve been packaged and sold as such.
So I peaked up when the story was about car races and witty banter and punks kidnapping Richard Dreyfuss. And I zoned out when it was about Steve trying to decide if leaving his girlfriend behind to go to college was worthwhile. Although I think that was me desperately ignoring what’s going on in my own life – feeling indecisive and insecure about my own future, I don’t necessarily have the emotional flexibility to shift that to a fictional character. The repeated line “Why leave home to find home?” didn’t so much as strike a chord as make me wonder what home really meant in 1962 as opposed to 2013 and what home meant before I went to college versus after.
WHICH I GUESS MEANS THIS MOVIE MEANS MORE TO ME THAN MY INITIAL ATTENTION SPAN CONSIDERED. How did this happen? I liked the car chase and the girl who drove around with the nerd! I hated the dumb “Where are they now?” frame at the end. I loved the soundtrack and Wolfman Jack (but who wouldn’t?).
Movies Watched 3/26 – 4/1/2013
First Time:
Brooklyn Boheme
Holy Motors
Vamps
The Craft
Rewatch:
What’s Up, Doc?
Steel Magnolias
Kicking and Screaming
What a Girl Wants
The Illusionist
This Week: 9
Total: 90
Ugh, I forgot to write a Netflix Challenge review for this week. I’ll try to double up this week, but knowing me I’m going to get sucked down into a Grey’s Anatomy marathon.
Movies Watched 3/19-3/25/2013
First Time:
Ready to Wear
Goodfellas
Rewatch:
TiMER
Girl Walks Into a Bar
Deep Blue Sea
Mona Lisa Smile
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
James and the Giant Peach
Jumanji
This Week: 9
Total: 81
On Mona Lisa Smile: This was one of those movies that seemed really, really important to me when I saw it in the theater. As a young feminist who didn’t know much about what being a feminist meant in the 21st century (I mean, I was 12; what did you expect?), I grasped onto this look back at a simpler, more fucked up time. Later on DVD, my sister and I would watch this at least once a month for an indeterminable length of time (more than six months, less than a year). Now, it’s easy to look back on it and say that it’s the girl version of Dead Poets Society, but we kind of need a girl version of Dead Poets Society.
Mona Lisa Smile wasn’t a cultural zeitgeist movie or even Oscar-nominated, but it was important to young me and a few of my similarly youthful cohorts. While it gave me a retro style to aspire to when I scrounged around in vintage shops, it also presented pre-Second Wave Feminism in a light that was much more complex than anything textbooks had given me. Namely, emphasizing the choice between working or staying home with the family, which had never seem like a common view, instead of the Have It All, Do It All mentality. It also presented this through the “bohemian” lens of Modern art, against the more conservative mores of painful marriages and WASPish expectations.
(Although let’s not ignore Mona Lisa Smile for setting high expectations. As I watched this with two of my roommates, we couldn’t help but exclaim over the school, dorms, having a steady boyfriend (much less a husband), etc etc. And I couldn’t help but think that my early preoccupations with swing dancing and bohemian writers came from somewhere, the pinpoint would have to originate here.)
