Casablanca

I'm not going to go into the storyline of this film, nor do I really care to regurgitate what other critics and the director's commentary on the DVD say- I figure, if you want to hear what other people say, you can check it out for yourself.

Casablanca is classic cinema at it's best. Even those who haven't seen it say how ashamed they are for never having seen it. It has a reputation; it has set the bar for great movies. It is the #2 movie of all time on the AFI Top 100 list, being beat only by Citizen Kane (which I still haven't seen all of because the DVD I rented from Blockbuster had a skip in it in chapter 15...)

I'm no expert on classic films; in fact, I don't think that I've seen another Bogey movie in my life. But this film is phenomenal. It's funny; it's romantic... and it's not long. It's everything that a good film should be. It has a song which you cannot hear without thinking of the film (unless, that is, you haven't seen it and can only associate it with When Harry Met Sally- another favorite of mine). It has a wonderful leading lady who is so beautiful even angels are envious of the attention she gets.

Mostly, it has the ability to sustain time. The lesson of forsaking the feelings of your heart to best suit the well-being of the one who holds it is timeless. If you haven't seen this movie, see it. If you have, see it again.

It makes me nostalgic for the way movies used to be before CGI was invented.

Elizabeth

Okay, now that I've admitted to owning and liking 2 movies which I am sure to never live down... I will admit that in the past 24 hours I have watched 2 cinematic masterpieces as well. This was one of them.

If nothing came out of this movie, I believe that taking a woman as beautiful as Cate Blanchette and making her into the queen with the most sour puss in the world is noteworthy in and of itself.

Unfortunately, the same year that Elizabeth was released, another period piece swept the box office, taking away some of the accolades that should have gone to it. (That film was Shakespere in Love- it was a very busy year for Geoffrey Rush and Joseph Fiennes.) Cate delives a stellar performance, and should have taken the Oscar from Gwyneth, but I regress- all was right with the world after this year's ceremony.

I remember seeing this film in the theater, and learning about what a great queen she was, but I don't remember it in this much detail. I certainly don't remember Fanny Ardant and her wonderful portrayal of Marie de Guise. But the movie meant a lot to me when I saw it- after all, my middle name is Elizabeth, named for my grandmother Mary Elizabeth, named after Queen Mary and her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth. (My maternal grandparents were Welsh.) So often, people are named for someone they know so little about. This was my path to knowledge- a way for me to learn about who I was named for- because Lord knows my mother never knew.

Shekhar Kapur should consider it his crowning achievement. (Then again, I didn't see The Four Feathers- but it has Kate Hudson and Djimon Honsu, so it's definitely on my list...)

Anyone who wants to know about the life of Elizabeth should see this film. Especially with the sequel coming... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414055/

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka

One of the great things about this movie is when they show it on television. Granted, they edit out all of the raunchy parts and everything... but during the commercial interruptions the announcer says "We'll be right back with I'm Going To Get You Sucker after these messages" and they sound about as full of soul as I do when I'm saying "OOH! Check out the bling bling!"

Now the Wayans are nothing compared to F Gary Gray, but they're still funny. I wasn't too crazy about their Scary Movies- a little too over the top for me, but this movie was pretty funny because they didn't take all kinds of popular movies and make fun of them like they did with the Scary Movies. (They were like Naked Gun movies, which I think are incredibly stupid.)

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka was funny in itself because of the original jokes and the way they made fun of "black-sploitation" movies. Some funny parts:
*I left your room just the way you left it 10 years ago. (He walks in with flies buzzing around, and plugs his nose...)
*The little white boy (whose mother is Jan Brady/Eve Plumb) is giving his report on Abe Lincoln Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Illinois. This poor white trash went on to become the president of the United States. Once in office this white capitalist swine manipulated the freedom of the black man for his own political career. 'Til another piece of poor white trash shot him in the head. The End" while the Brady Bunch theme is playing in the background....
*Ma bitch better have ma money! Thru rain sleet or snow. Ma ho better have ma money. Not half... not some... but ALL ma cash. Because if she don't, I'm gonna put ma foot in her ass!!!
*The youth gang competition where they set a new record on how long it takes to strip a car.
*Kim Wayans singing in the pub.
*You ain't selling No-Way products, are you?
*Two words: CHRIS ROCK!!!!! "How much for a order'a ribs???"

A funny movie. Not the best- but funny nonetheless.

Friday

People always make fun of me because I love this movie. But I'll let you all in on a little secret. The first time I saw it, I hated it. However, after working in "the 'hood" for 4 years as a manager, I realized how true to life this movie is, and the more I watched it, the more I enjoyed it.

Besides the absolutely fantastic quotable quotes, ("I wish you were 'sleep right now. I'd wake yo ass up wit a left hook, make you get up and TAKE OUT THAT DAMN TRASH!") the more I watch this movie the more I have to laugh at. Example: When Paula Jai Parker calls up Ice Cube in the beginning of the movie and starts to yell at him, "Who da fuck you go to da show wit last night? My sister in law baby cousin Tracy said she saw you at the show all hugged up wit some tramp! Now tellll me whooo she waaaassss....." There's some guy asleep in her bed next to her. hahahahahah!!

It's far from what most people would call cinema. But it's really one of the few 'hood movies I can tolerate. Some key points:
*Chris Tucker and Ice Cube sit on the front porch complaining about how hot it is outside and they're wearing flannel shirts.
*Smokey and Debo break into Stanley's house, and you hear all kinds of glass breaking, and when he comes home, all he can do is yell about his "frigging grass".
*Smokey's pimped out pinto that won't shut off.
*Red's Escort with the alarm system that's worth double what he paid for the car.
*Smokey acting like a pigeon!!!!
*Tony Cox calling Bernie Mac the devil.

"Bitch talkin about she look like Janet Jackson. She got out of the car lookin more like Freddy Jackson!"
"You KNEW she was bald-headed... you KNEW she didn't have no damn hair!"
"Oh, no, my mom don't like a lot of people coming with me when I go to pick her up."
"DAMN! Y'all ain't NEVER got two things that match! Either you got Kool-Aid/ no sugar; peanut butter/ no jelly; ham/ no burger... DAMN!"
"Don't nobody go in the bathroom for about 35, 45 minutes... Open up all the windows, Damn. It stinks in here."

The sequels were both absolute crap. But the original is a true classic. "And you know this... MAN!!"

Well...

School's almost out. I have 2 finals left (One's a take-home, and the other is open-book) and I feel pretty good about them. So now... I can get back to doing what I love- watching more movies!!

Since I've been doing this for 6 months now, it takes a bit to scroll down to my list of movies that I own. Also, since having decided to sell my VHS tapes, it has diminished considerably. So I thought I would once again post what movies I own, and go from there.

DVD:

About Schmidt
Alfred Hitchcock Murder & Sabotage
Almost Famous
American Beauty
American Splendor
Angels in America - Complete Miniseries
Animal House
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
Arlington Road
Arrested Development Season 1
Badder Santa
Before Sunset
Big
Big Fish
The Big Kahuna
The Big Lebowski
Boogie Nights
The Breakfast Club
Bridget Jones's Diary
Bubba Ho-Tep
A Bug's Life
Caddyshack
Carrie
Casablanca
Castaway
Catch Me If You Can
Chasing Amy
Christmas Vacation
Clerks
A Clockwork Orange
Collateral
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Curse of the Jade Scorpion
Deliverance
Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo
Donnie Darko
Ed TV
Edward Scissorhands
Elf
Elizabeth
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fargo
Fatal Attraction
Fight Club
Finding Nemo
The Following
Forrest Gump
Frailty
Friday
Friday Night Lights
Garden State
Girl, Interrupted
The Godfather
Goodfellas
The Good Girl
The Graduate
Half Baked
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban
High Fidelity
Hollywood Ending
Honeymoon In Vegas
I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka
The Incredibles
Jackie Brown Collector's Edition
Jerry Maguire
Kill Bill Volume 1
Kill Bill Volume 2
Kingdom of the Spiders
LA Story
The Life of David Gale
The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King
Lost In Translation
Love Actually
Love Stinks
Made
Magnolia
The Mask- Cher
Meet the Parents
A Mighty Wind
Misery
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Monty Python's Meaning of Life
Mr. Mom
Mulholland Drive
Napoleon Dynamite
The Negotiator
Never Been Kissed
Night of the Living Dead
The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Notebook
Office Space
One Hour Photo
Ordinary Decent Criminal
The Others
Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
The Philadelphia Story
Pleasantville
The Princess Bride
Private Parts
Pulp Fiction
Pump Up The Volume
Punch Drunk Love
Ray
The Ref
Reservior Dogs
The Ring
Rocky
The Royal Tennenbaums
Running on Empty
Saturday Night Fever
Scotland, PA
Se7en
Sex and the City- Season 1
The Shawshank Redemption
The Shining
Shrek
The Silence of the Lambs
Singles
The Sixth Sense
Sleeper
Some Like It Hot
Something's Gotta Give
Swingers
Taxi Driver
The Terminal
This is Spinal Tap
Traffic
True Romance
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
Twin Peaks Season 1
Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me
Two Girls and a Guy
The Usual Suspects
Vanilla Sky
Very Bad Things
The Way of the Gun
The Wedding Singer
West Side Story
What About Bob?
What the %#*$ Do We Know?
When Harry Met Sally...
When We Were Kings
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Young Frankenstein

and what I have left on VHS from the 600+ I used to own... a mere 105.
The AFI Top 100 and 5 screeners (that I just don't feel comfortable selling- you know- for legal reasons and everything...)
She's All That
Being John Malkovich
Waking Ned Devine
Species II
Dirty Work

And the AFI Top 100:
Click http://www.geocities.com/seriousmissus/AFI_Top100.html

Yes- few people know that I have a geocities site. http://www.geocities.com/seriousmissus
I haven't worked on it in a while.

So... I'll be doing more reviews on movies I own and a few on rented movies. Depending on when I get to the theaters, I'll try my best to review ASAP.

And, as always, if there's a film you want me to rent and review (like I'm so important that you need my accolades) feel free to let me know what ones to watch.

'Til then...

Sin City

Last night we went to see this movie and all that I can say is I want to see it again and again.

Ever the cinematic pessimist, especially when it comes to comic-book movies, I have been convinced that only when Tarantino has a hand in the production of a comic book movie does the idea turn to cinematic gold.

Take for example: Spiderman. As many people know, I was not the least bit impressed by this CGI riddled piece of crap. I didn't bother seeing XMen or Hellboy... they just hold no allure for me at all.

Then in walks good ol' Quentin with his movies about The Bride. All of a sudden, I'm sucked in. Kill Bill (both Vol 1 and 2) are excellent films, and as soon as I saw them, my faith that comic book movies don't need to be cheesy OR campy was born. Frank Miller's Sin City has lived up to (and quite possibly exceeded) this expectation.

This star studded cast includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Nick Stahl, Jaime King, Benicio DelToro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Carla Gugino, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett (whose part I didn't get to see, because we were 5 minutes late), Michael Madsen, and a small but quite comical role by former Boston Public alumni Nicky Katt.

A few notes about the actors:
*I have never seen Mickey Rourke in such a funny crazy role. He did an absolutely superb job and I was very very impressed. Prior to seeing this film, the best film I had ever seen him in was Spun, which was not a fantastic film, but his part was very well done. He was fantastic as Marv in this film.
*Jaime King- Isn't her name really James King? I thought I remember seeing that in that piece of crap Pearl Harbor...
*Nick Stahl- He disgusted me with every fiber of his character. Rightly so, also. It was meant to be that way.
*Elijah Wood- He doesn't have a single line in this movie. Still, his character freaked me out beyond belief.

See some VERY interesting Sin City Trivia here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/trivia
Including the fact that Sin City Director Robert Rodriguez scored Tarantino's Kill Bill for the whopping price of $1.00. To return the favor to Rodriguez, Tarantino directed the scene where Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro fight outside the car for the same price.

This movie has a lot of violence and blood- but every ounce of violence in it is 100% worth it.

GO AND SEE THIS MOVIE!

Angels In America

HBO has given us a 6 hour mini-series by Mike Nichols about living with AIDS in the late 1980's, and the names are very promising: Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, and Mary Louise Parker to name a few. However, I daresay it was not their best work.

I don't understand why the Academy (Emmy) was all over this thing. All that I can say is "meh..."

Supposedly, in the story, God has abandoned heaven, an angel appears to a young man named Prior who is dying of AIDS, and she claims that he is the prophet who will bring God back. There's just one catch- he must die. He doesn't want this responsibility because he is burdened with disease and losing his lover who cannot handle illness. By chance, he meets a mormon woman who tells him how to shake the spirit, refuse his duty as a prophet, and convince the Angels in Heaven that he deserves to have more time on earth. The scene in which he does this is all very campy and cheesy and the mini-series itself is little more than a glorified soap opera.

As far as the acting goes, Al Pacino is great in whatever he does, from Serpico to Scent of a Woman, or from something as awful as Insomnia to something as brilliant as Heat. Even the worst movie has promise because Pacino is in the cast. He makes an otherwise horrible film bearable. In Angels in America, he plays the conservative District Attorney, full of power and prestige, supposedly having access to the confidential information regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, with connections that make him able to obtain a small refrigerator full of AZT before it even hits the market. Not wanting people to know that he is gay and has been diagnosed with AIDS, he convinces his doctor to tell everyone that he has liver cancer. Lucky for him, his nurse is a gay man whose friend is the prophet (who is also dying of AIDS) and when the nurse recognizes the symptoms, he gives him some medical advice that prolongs his life by a few months.

Streep plays 3 parts, as does Thompson. As the angel, Thompson is unimpressive; as the nurse, she is very basic. Streep's best part is actually the Rabbi, and Thompson's best is the homeless woman. Strange how the role in which both do the best is the smallest role that they have and the one where they wear the most makeup.

Parker plays a crazy woman who takes imaginary journeys with an imaginary travel agent. Her husband is gay, Republican, Mormon, and works for the conservative District Attorney. Everyone in the story is related in one way or another, and they all show up as angels in the scene where Prior the would-be Prophet tells the Angels he doesn't want the responsibility and that they should forget about God because he is never coming back.

Personally, I was unimpressed by the whole thing, and rather disappointed that I had wasted 6 hours on it. What confused me most was that no distinction was made between having HIV and having AIDS. The sick characters were shown to have AIDS and not HIV at all. Granted, 20 years ago we didn't know as much as we do now, but I would think that something would at least have been mentioned about it.

I have said it before... people hear that the critics are crazy about something and they have a terrible time disagreeing. Shame... it seems that the rarest commodity in the world these days is an individual opinon.

The Office

Sorry about the delay in postings, folks. It's been a while since I've been to the movies, and I've been busy.

Rather than critique a movie today, I'm going to post my critique on the new American comedy "The Office", based on the British comedy of the same name.

I watched the US version of it last week and will definitely be tuning in this week to see it. I love that it's on after one of the funniest shows on television (Scrubs), and that both shows are satirical with no laugh tracks.

Very funny- and very very much like the British version. The receptionist with a fiancee and the guy who likes her, the suck-up, the obnoxious boss of course....

Last week's episode was "Diversity Training" where a diversity trainer (a Black guy named Mr Brown) shows up to give a mandatory class because the boss did an imitation of Chris Rock's famed "There's blacks and there's niggers...." routine at the last company meeting. (The boss actually DOES this imitation during the show- Mr Brown asks an employee to reenact the episode and the employee gets up and says the words with no attitude or enthusiasm. The boss says "You're RUINING it!! It's like THIS!! E'rey tyme black folks wanna have a pahr-ty, iggnint ass ni*bleep!*ers f*bleep!* it up! Ya wanna cookie??")

Mr Brown gives a one hour class and makes everyone sign a paper saying that they learned something. The boss refuses to, and Mr Brown lets it slip that he was called in specifically because of the boss, so the boss signs it and Mr Brown leaves. Later we find out that he signed it "Daffy Duck."

Did I forget to mention that the boss doesn't believe that Mr Brown is his name? He thinks he made it up for diversity purposes.

The boss decides to do his own diversity training because he is unhappy with the outcome, so he starts it out asking "Let's go around the room and name 2 nationalities that we are sexually attracted to." The nerd in the group, Dwight, who is sitting between an Indian girl and an Asian girl, shouts out "OOH!! Indian and Asian!!"

Then the boss writes different nationalities on 3x5 cards and makes the employees take them, not look at them, tape them to their heads, and go around trying to figure out which nationality they picked. The one black guy in the office gets the card that says "BLACK"; some little blonde gets the card that says "JAMAICAN" and people walk around saying "Ja Mon" and asking her if she wants to get high. Her only response is to get angry and tell them to stop. And the boss's nationality is "Martin Luther King Jr." One of the guys is Asian and he's trying to figure it out, so the receptionist says "You would not be a good driver" and he says, disappointedly, "Oh MAN!! Am I a woman?????!"

The best part- the boss says he should have brought food and the big guy in the back says "Maybe some spaghetti!!" and the boss says "Okay, you can take that off now." It cuts to the big guy who is the only one with his 3x5 card still on his forehead. It says "Italian." Then he starts talking about ethnic food and mentions "Colored" greens. The black guy says "It's COLLARD greens" and the boss says "No, it's not. You don't call them COLLARD people... that's just rude."

It was GREAT!!