In which I watch movies
Aug. 14th, 2011 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI have watched some fun movies lately! There doesn't seem to be any sort of unifying theme to them, though. Except that I liked them all.
Last weekend I watched Whip It, which I had been wanting to see since it came out, but when it came out it was aggressively under-marketed despite having all sorts of big names in it, so I could not find in a theater near me. Anyway, it is basically one of those sports team movies where the team is famously crappy at the beginning but then they cohese and get awesome, and there is bonding and funny stuff between the team members. It may be the best movie of this particular formula I've seen in a really long time, because instead of being about high school football or something, it's about women's roller derby. The main character, Bliss--played by Ellen Page--is a teenager, because this kind of story is always a coming of age story, but it is an adult team and she lies about her age to be on it. Bliss comes from a painfully fifties kinda nuclear household, in which her mother, and ex-beauty pageant queen type of person, makes Bliss also do beauty pageants, and her doofy dad is a pretty typical sitcom/cartoon Doofy Dad until right up at the end when he starts being involved and supportive, but only because roller derby is a sport, and being very stereotypical, he likes sports. The mom is more developed. Bliss also has a best friend, who is played by Maeby from Arrested Development. The best friend does not join the roller derby team, instead playing faithful sidekick until this role comes to bite her in the ass, at which point there is drama stuff about how it is actually kind of douchey to make your best friend be your faithful sidekick sometimes. There is an obligatory Awkward But Supposedly Adorable Dude In A Band Who Turns Out To Be A Douche After The Protagonist Sleeps With Him, and I am sad to report that this entire plotline is exactly what it always is and there wasn't really anything fun about it. Oh, well. The roller derby teams more than made up for it. They were loud and colorfully dressed and many of them had tattoos and the one played by Drew Barrymore was clearly a little messed up from too much contact-sport-playing, and they were also funny and expressive and had fun hanging out and helped each other and one of them had an adorable small child, and basically were a bunch of cool ladies being friends and playing roller derby. I think this is the sort of thing we should see more of in movies. Also one of them was played by Eve, a rapper I really liked back when I was in eighth grade and went through my gangsta rap phase for like six months before I discovered metal. I will probably never listen to rap again in my life if I can help it but I will always think Eve is awesome anyway.
I kind of feel like trying to talk about the plot here would be pointless cos it's kind of exactly what you'd expect, that just doesn't make it any less fun to watch. Bliss joins the worst roller derby team ever! She starts out badly because she is timid and roller derby is a contact sport! She gets better because she is small and speedy and becomes the bestSeeker jammer ever! They qualify for the championships, but something happens so that Bliss may not be able to go! (In this case, it is because she is outed as underage and then can't go without parental permission, but her mother wants her to do the beauty pageant that is that same night instead.) But then she is able to go to the championship, of course, and she has a cranky Nemesis on the other team, and the game is close and at the very very end the game is very very close and it is Her Versus Her Nemesis to end the game one way or the other. The ending is somewhat less formulaic than usual, so I won't tell you about it.
This was definitely one of those movies where the fun lies in the individual lines and funny side characters and charmingly awkward moment-to-moment stuff, rather than plotular suspense. But there is a lot of fun in those things! And you really get an appreciation for how totally awesome roller derby is. I retain my original impression that this would be a great sleepover movie.
This weekend I moved into very British period dramas, or what I am learning to think of as "Hat Movies" in that the characters tend to wear big awesome hats.
Sense and Sensibility is, obviously, pretty awesome, because it is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and it's hard to fuck those up entirely. This one also has a brilliant cast, with Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood (the practical one), Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood (the romantic one who would be the biggest Twilight fangirl ever if she were alive today), Hugh Grant as Edward (not a vampire), Alan Rickman asawesomeness Colonel Brandon, and some dude with hilarious sideburns as Willoughby. Everyone has really terrible hair, and I can't quite tell if this is a 90s thing or if it's actually a period thing that a lot of other adaptations have let up on a bit because it is so terrible. It looks kind of nineties to me, but I was not very fashion-conscious in 1995 (besides, y'know, slap bracelets) so I am basing that assumption entirely on vague memories of that one time my mom got a perm. Anyway, everyone has either super frizzy or super laquered tight tight spiral curls and it looks awful, is what I'm saying. Everything else is gorgeous.
For me, the most important part of any Austen adaptation is "Is it still funny?" because Austen is hilarious but I think sometimes people forget this and think that she is writing straight romance (with occasional jokes) instead of a social satire using a love story as a structural aid a la The Importance of Being Earnest. (See: this Hark, A Vagrant! strip) Luckily, this one was still funny! Particularly Hugh Grant, who was perfectly funny and awkward and sweet and British all at the same, which just made it extra funny. The moving bits were all very moving, but when the basis of your story is essentially to contrast silly people romance with awkward people romance, the stuff that's probably very serious drama to the characters still comes off as sad-larious more than anything else.
After this, I was like "I need more sad-larious awkward British people with big hats!" so I decided to watch The King's Speech. This one also has a cast of People Who Make Everything Better: in this case, Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Geoffrey Rush. HBC has the freaking fabulousest hats in this movie. If you are the one person left in the English-speaking world who has not heard of this movie, I will tell you what it is about: it is about George VI's (known as "Bertie") ascension to the throne at the beginning of World War II, and his quest to overcome his stammer so that he could engage in the public speaking required of a king now that this newfangled radio thing had been invented. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist, Lionel "I Am A Huge Nerd, You Have No Idea How Nerdy I Am" Logue. He is hysterical. He is definitely not a comic relief character, and the movie is definitely not a comedy (except to the degree that all Hat Movies are inherently comedies, because Hat Movies), but it is a very well-done and engaging and serious drama about a lot of very clever and witty people with excellent senses of humor. Except Bertie's brother; his sense of humor consists of making fun of Bertie's stammer and as such he is not as clever as he thinks he is.
This movie has pretty much everything I like in it--in addition to the aforementioned Britishness and hats, there is a lot of political crap, which I'm really big on lately, and of course, there is language nerdery, although since it is more focused on public speaking than linguistics it does not make me as flaily as, say, Pygmalion. There are lots of those dippy sort of "history, it is in the PAST, LOL" types of comments that I always think are more clever than they really are ("RADIO, it is so NEW AND TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED!" and "This Hitler fellow, how big of a problem is he?" and stuff). Did I mention big hats?
I could probably give serious review of this movie if I really tried, but every movie critic ever has already done so, so that's why I'm just squeeing.
Anyway, I give it five hats.
Last weekend I watched Whip It, which I had been wanting to see since it came out, but when it came out it was aggressively under-marketed despite having all sorts of big names in it, so I could not find in a theater near me. Anyway, it is basically one of those sports team movies where the team is famously crappy at the beginning but then they cohese and get awesome, and there is bonding and funny stuff between the team members. It may be the best movie of this particular formula I've seen in a really long time, because instead of being about high school football or something, it's about women's roller derby. The main character, Bliss--played by Ellen Page--is a teenager, because this kind of story is always a coming of age story, but it is an adult team and she lies about her age to be on it. Bliss comes from a painfully fifties kinda nuclear household, in which her mother, and ex-beauty pageant queen type of person, makes Bliss also do beauty pageants, and her doofy dad is a pretty typical sitcom/cartoon Doofy Dad until right up at the end when he starts being involved and supportive, but only because roller derby is a sport, and being very stereotypical, he likes sports. The mom is more developed. Bliss also has a best friend, who is played by Maeby from Arrested Development. The best friend does not join the roller derby team, instead playing faithful sidekick until this role comes to bite her in the ass, at which point there is drama stuff about how it is actually kind of douchey to make your best friend be your faithful sidekick sometimes. There is an obligatory Awkward But Supposedly Adorable Dude In A Band Who Turns Out To Be A Douche After The Protagonist Sleeps With Him, and I am sad to report that this entire plotline is exactly what it always is and there wasn't really anything fun about it. Oh, well. The roller derby teams more than made up for it. They were loud and colorfully dressed and many of them had tattoos and the one played by Drew Barrymore was clearly a little messed up from too much contact-sport-playing, and they were also funny and expressive and had fun hanging out and helped each other and one of them had an adorable small child, and basically were a bunch of cool ladies being friends and playing roller derby. I think this is the sort of thing we should see more of in movies. Also one of them was played by Eve, a rapper I really liked back when I was in eighth grade and went through my gangsta rap phase for like six months before I discovered metal. I will probably never listen to rap again in my life if I can help it but I will always think Eve is awesome anyway.
I kind of feel like trying to talk about the plot here would be pointless cos it's kind of exactly what you'd expect, that just doesn't make it any less fun to watch. Bliss joins the worst roller derby team ever! She starts out badly because she is timid and roller derby is a contact sport! She gets better because she is small and speedy and becomes the best
This was definitely one of those movies where the fun lies in the individual lines and funny side characters and charmingly awkward moment-to-moment stuff, rather than plotular suspense. But there is a lot of fun in those things! And you really get an appreciation for how totally awesome roller derby is. I retain my original impression that this would be a great sleepover movie.
This weekend I moved into very British period dramas, or what I am learning to think of as "Hat Movies" in that the characters tend to wear big awesome hats.
Sense and Sensibility is, obviously, pretty awesome, because it is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and it's hard to fuck those up entirely. This one also has a brilliant cast, with Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood (the practical one), Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood (the romantic one who would be the biggest Twilight fangirl ever if she were alive today), Hugh Grant as Edward (not a vampire), Alan Rickman as
For me, the most important part of any Austen adaptation is "Is it still funny?" because Austen is hilarious but I think sometimes people forget this and think that she is writing straight romance (with occasional jokes) instead of a social satire using a love story as a structural aid a la The Importance of Being Earnest. (See: this Hark, A Vagrant! strip) Luckily, this one was still funny! Particularly Hugh Grant, who was perfectly funny and awkward and sweet and British all at the same, which just made it extra funny. The moving bits were all very moving, but when the basis of your story is essentially to contrast silly people romance with awkward people romance, the stuff that's probably very serious drama to the characters still comes off as sad-larious more than anything else.
After this, I was like "I need more sad-larious awkward British people with big hats!" so I decided to watch The King's Speech. This one also has a cast of People Who Make Everything Better: in this case, Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Geoffrey Rush. HBC has the freaking fabulousest hats in this movie. If you are the one person left in the English-speaking world who has not heard of this movie, I will tell you what it is about: it is about George VI's (known as "Bertie") ascension to the throne at the beginning of World War II, and his quest to overcome his stammer so that he could engage in the public speaking required of a king now that this newfangled radio thing had been invented. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist, Lionel "I Am A Huge Nerd, You Have No Idea How Nerdy I Am" Logue. He is hysterical. He is definitely not a comic relief character, and the movie is definitely not a comedy (except to the degree that all Hat Movies are inherently comedies, because Hat Movies), but it is a very well-done and engaging and serious drama about a lot of very clever and witty people with excellent senses of humor. Except Bertie's brother; his sense of humor consists of making fun of Bertie's stammer and as such he is not as clever as he thinks he is.
This movie has pretty much everything I like in it--in addition to the aforementioned Britishness and hats, there is a lot of political crap, which I'm really big on lately, and of course, there is language nerdery, although since it is more focused on public speaking than linguistics it does not make me as flaily as, say, Pygmalion. There are lots of those dippy sort of "history, it is in the PAST, LOL" types of comments that I always think are more clever than they really are ("RADIO, it is so NEW AND TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED!" and "This Hitler fellow, how big of a problem is he?" and stuff). Did I mention big hats?
I could probably give serious review of this movie if I really tried, but every movie critic ever has already done so, so that's why I'm just squeeing.
Anyway, I give it five hats.
