Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Make joining us one of your New Year's Resolutions! All you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme. That's it! It's fun!
A new year, a new round of Thursday Movie Picks categories! I'm very excited to see what this series has in store for us this year. I have to say, I think we're starting off with a pretty good category - movies that have a character name in the title. Sometimes, naming a movie after your main character is the simplest, best thing to do. Especially if your movie is about an historical figure (think Frida, Wilde, The Glenn Miller Story). But I decided to go with movies NOT about real people.
Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007) Michael Clayton is a fixer at a corporate law firm. But when of the senior partners develops a conscience and goes rogue, Michael starts to develop a conscience as well. Which is a bit of a problem for anxiety-prone corporate counsel Karen Crowder. George Clooney gives a great performance in the title role, but the real revelation here is Tilda Swinton, who deservedly won an Oscar for her tremendous performance as Karen. Gilroy, good a director as he is, owes most of the film's tremendous tension to her and her alone.
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004) Bill likes to train his lovers to be assassins. Or he likes to take his trained assassins as lovers. One of the two. But one of them got away, so he takes his assassins to her wedding to kill her. Except that she only ended up in a coma. And when she wakes up, there's hell to pay. Uma Thurman gives the performance of her career as The Bride, whose mission it is to kill Bill, in what is, for my money, the best film of Tarantino's career (Part One). What I wouldn't give to see the unseparated "The Whole Bloody Affair" cut that Tarantino sometimes brings out.
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Dr. Strangelove is the strangest of Peter Sellers's creations in this darkest of pitch-black comedies - a wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist who can't quite keep his Nazi sympathies in check. If you've somehow never heard of this, the basic idea is that we're going to nuclear war with Russia, but the reason is trumped-up by crazy General Jack Ripper. So it's the war hawks (led by General Buck Turgidson) versus the diplomats (President Merkin Muffley) fighting over the fate of the world. One of my all-time favorite movies, Dr. Strangelove is political satire at its absolute finest. There are few casts more stacked than this - George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, James Earl Hones, Keenan Wynn - and even though director Stanley Kubrick may not have liked the idea, Sellers is BRILLIANT in his three parts here, absolutely nailing each one and, in Strangelove, creating a comic character for the ages.
