Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. You can take part too - all you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme and write a bit about them!
Well. Here we are again, back in TV Land for this week's Thursday Movie Picks. And we're talking about one of my favorite things: Adaptations of books! Novels actually lend themselves better to TV mini-series than they do to movies, in my opinion. The extra time allows you to include the full scope of the novel and paint in all the little details of the world. Films can be good for getting to the heart of a novel, but for my money, I'd nearly always prefer a TV mini-series. This week, I've picked one great mini-series, one great short-lived full series, and one absolutely terrible clusterfuck of a full series.
Big Little Lies (2017) What is there to say about Big Little Lies that hasn't already been said? I devoured each episode at least twice by the time the thing was over, and it was worth every second for these richly drawn, beautifully performed characters. It barely even needed the murder mystery framework, even if that was the supposed hook of the series. I can't believe they're doing a second season, let alone that they now have Meryl Streep(!!) and Andrea Arnold(!!!!) involved. This was so perfect as it is, I really hope they don't tarnish it with the next installment. I could heap praise on this for days, but in the interest of time, I'll just say this: Nicole Kidman's character arc, ESPECIALLY the therapy scenes, is the most compelling thing I've seen on TV in a long time. She deserved every award for it - and actually got them!
The Leftovers (2015-2017) The show that introduced The Great Carrie Coon to the world, The Leftovers is based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta - or at least the first season is. The second and third seasons were written by Perrotta and series co-creator Damon Lindeloff as expansions of the world that Perrotta created in the novel, and holy WOW is this show tremendous. I get why people didn't want to watch it or stopped after the pilot episode: The premise and execution are downers: 2% of the world's population just up and vanished some time ago, and the people who remained are having a hard time dealing with it. Some go about their business like everything is fine. Some have a newfound death wish. Some are just doing their best to get through each day. And some have rebelled by refusing to speak, wearing only white, chainsmoking cigarettes, and accosting people as living reminders of what happened. And yes, the show is pretty depressing. But it is also utterly fantastic, producing several all-time great episodes. View each episode of the show as a short story set in this world, and its brilliance becomes more clear. I can't recommend it enough. Get past the first two episodes and OH what riches of writing and acting await you!
The Magicians (2015-Present) OH what wasted potential! Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy is stunning: Imagine if Harry Potter was an American high school student and Hogwarts was a college, and that gets you about halfway there. Grossman brilliantly deconstructs every single fantasy trope, making for a decidedly adult version of books like The Chronicles of Narnia. After the success of Game of Thrones, this could have been another great adaptation. But instead, it's listless, and most of the changes they've made to the novels make no sense and bear no fruit. I hate-watched three-quarters of the first season on Netflix before giving up because life is just too short to spend that much time watching something you don't like. Any fans in the house? Does it get any better? Or did I do the right thing?
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join the fun by writing about three movies that fit the week's theme.
The Sundance Film Festival is coming up soon, and will surely bring around another crop of quirky indie films that will barely get a theatrical release despite generating tons of buzz (Call Me By Your Name, anyone?).
Picking this week was actually harder than I had expected. It was difficult enough to narrow it down to a list of my ten favorite films that played at Sundance; I had to take out anything that I'd already featured on the blog to even get that far! And then I just decided to hell with it. I looked at the list, and went with my gut. Here you go: My Three Favorite Sundance Movies (That I Haven't Already Used For Thursday Movie Picks)
Once (John Carney, 2007) This minor miracle of a movie musical follows two musicians in Dublin who meet while he's busking on the streets. Before you know it, they're making beautiful (Oscar-winning) music together, and it's clear that they are "meant to be"... except that she's married with a kid and he has a girlfriend in London. Helped greatly by the natural chemistry (both musically and otherwise) of non-actor stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, but also by John Carney's intuitive, intimate direction, this is one of the all-time great movie musicals - and for those of you who hate musicals, don't worry: The musical numbers take place naturally within the context of the story. And as a bonus, Once was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, which was one of the most magical things I've ever seen live on stage.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) When done well, magical realism can touch us like nothing else. Beasts of the Southern Wild is magical realism at its absolute finest. Taking place in an alternate version of the Louisiana bayou that has left communities completely isolated and fending for themselves, a girl named Hushpuppy and her daddy live in an area called The Bathtub. Hushpuppy's daddy is very much a rolling stone, and while she's tough, she's still just a child. But the child's eye view this takes of the world is infectious, and ultimately beautiful, creating sequences of such devastating beauty (and not just audio-visually) that you'll leave smiling through tears. Quvenzhené Wallis, who was all of five years old at the start of filming, got a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her tremendous performance as Hushpuppy (the youngest ever nominated for Lead Actress), and Dwight Henry, a New Orleans native and baker by trade, is just as fantastic as her father.
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) A girl has sex with a hot guy. She wakes up afterward tied to a chair in her underwear to hear him telling her that now some... THING... is going to be following her, at a walking pace, and won't stop until it kills her. The only way to stop it is to pass it on to someone else (by having sex, of course), but unless they pass it on, once it catches them it will move on to her, and then to him, and so on down the line. The perfect dream-logic of this "Why Hasn't Someone Thought Of This Before?" premise is perfectly complemented by the film's cinematography and score, as well as the setting of Any Suburb, USA. A near-perfect metaphor that can be applied to almost anything, It Follows technically falls into the horror genre, but it transcends that by truly feeling like a waking dream all the way through; it's a mood piece where the mood is that nightmare we've all had where we're being chased by something, don't know what it is, but know we just have to keep running.
BONUS: Rejected (Don Hertzfeldt) I love this deranged, bizarre little short SO MUCH. It's less than 10 minutes and so stupid it's genius. Just watch it.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
I LOVE the theme for this week: Once Was Enough (Movies You Don't Want to Watch Again). I thought of a bunch of great movies that I don't ever want to watch again, so many good ones that it was actually a bit hard to pare it down. At any rate, I highly recommend these movies, but after watching them, you may also decide that you never want to see them again.
Saw (James Wan, 2004) It's not that it's too scary, it's that it's too gross. And I'm not just talking about the mise-en-scène. Nor am I just talking about the sickly green color palette they've chosen to wash all the cinematography in. I'm mostly talking about the film's main thesis statement, which got even more problematic when a fandom sprung up around the character of Jigsaw, a serial killer who designs elaborate death traps for people that are really morality tests, or something, revering him as a character who speaks truth and someone who is somehow morally complex and might actually have a point after all... and made a whole goddamn series of ever-more confounding sequels. The morass of murky (a)morality makes me so sick for humanity that I not only can't bring myself to watch this again, but have been actively rooting for every subsequent Saw film's failure. And I NEVER want to actively root for a film to fail.
Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) If this movie was shown to every high schooler in America, we would have a lot less teenage drug addicts, I guarantee it. Aronofsky's film is so bruising, depressing, and disturbing that I can't watch it again. Part of the brilliance is how he uses lenses, music, film speed, and editing to put us completely in the heads of these characters, played with go-for-broke brilliance by Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and the Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn.
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Yes, I have sat through all nine and a half hours of this brutal documentary about the Holocaust. Yes, it is beyond brilliant how Lanzmann paints a full picture of the Holocaust, its build-up, and its aftermath without using a single frame of archival footage. Yes, it is beyond devastating. Yes, I'm glad I watched it. No, I do not ever need to watch it again.
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.
