MOVIES
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This will be a shorter section, actually -- I'm the lamest person on the face of the earth when it comes to keeping up with movies. I hate paying that kind of money to sit and watch something I know in my heart, before I even enter the theater, isn't going to fulfill my expectations. And I'm too antsy to sit still for anything more than about two hours. Which means NO, I NEVER SAW TITANIC, NOR DO I EVER INTEND TO.

I do have a small handful of favorite movies. Here goes.

Better Off Dead -- an early Savage Steve Holland opus starring John Cusack. Kind of like John Hughes on peyote, Holland takes the high school experience and makes it not only funny but, at least in this one, utterly surreal. Though it was never a killer in the theaters, this sleeper/cult favorite became, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a sort of slacker-era one-liner cult heaven. By all means rent it, if you don't live in a neighborhood full of thirtysomething computer geeks. If you do, you'll be lucky to find a video store that has a copy on the weekends. Rather than turning this into a paean of scene descriptions -- which I've read on other people's sites, and which I find boring and not at all funny -- I'll just encourage you to rent it. Also Tape Heads, another Cusack movie from the mid-eighties, which also starred Tim Robbins.

The Philadelphia Story -- a beautiful, light and witty comedy from the forties starring Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. I've seen it several times and still find it surprising that audiences were so hip and quick they could follow the dialogue -- it goes like sixty from the opening to the closing, and never takes a cheap out on a joke. Teeters, sometimes, at the brink of going for the cheaper laugh, but never quite falls over the line. Hepburn, Grant and Stewart at their best, comedy-wise, at least in my opinion. And as social commentary and comedy of manners, it ain't half bad, either. It ran in the repertory theaters a couple of summers ago -- if you can see it on the big screen, by all means go; otherwise, just rent it.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in a theatrical adaptation of a sixties stage production. The premise -- the ongoing lives of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, during times they don't appear in the play -- is absurd enough. The physical humor and dialogue in the movie are beautiful. Not a film to watch while drinking heavily -- you'd miss half the stuff. Not that there's a great deal of plot, mind you. If you've ever read or seen Hamlet, you already know how it ends...

Monty Python and The Holy Grail -- Not (necessarily) to set it above the other Python movies other than the fact that, for me, it was a turning point on my road to appreciating both movies and humor. The ultimate plot-free, physical comedy, the ultimate showcase for absurdity, both in dialogue and visual exposition. A very silly movie, and I mean that in the best way.

Clerks -- About Dante (mostly) and Randal and what it's like to work for minimum wage. Dante, who's a clerk at a convenience store, is conscientious about his job and haphazard about everything else. Randal sits the counter at a video rental store and is conscientious about nothing. It's really just a movie about Dante and Randal working at their respective stores, or failing to do so, and what life is like for young adults working for minimum wage during the last major recession we were forced to endure (maybe it'll become a nostalgia flick for kids in the opening years of the 21st Century, if the economy keeps sliding, Chimpy). The filmmaker, Kevin Smith, used his credit cards to finance the prouction. This movie sits in the middle of the even lower-budget Mallrats and the more mainstream Chasing Amy, but it's the only one of Smith's movies I've seen so far (see what I mean about me being lame?), so it's the only one I can say with any confidence is truly worth watching.

Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show -- Sir Christopher Guest of whatever the hell he's the Sir of is cold genius walking around on legs.  The guy is the master of the offhand, ad-libbed movie.  Yeah, I know -- This Is Spinal Tap was the first of the magnum opi, but he seems to do pretty well with or without Rob Reiner.  Guffman was just Guest and the cast, and it was as funny as the others.  In fact, Best In Show was kind of a quiet, humorous li'l flick compared to the rest.  That's saying something, when that one was the low point.  I'll probably update this after we see A Mighty Wind, we don't see that many movies as first runs, but that one seems likely to be worth the fee.

Wanna read some bizarre, occasionally inspired movie reviews?  Go over and visit Alex.  He spends more time at the movies than I do.
 

At this point, I don't feel inspired to discuss any other movies. There are so few worth watching, either because of the casting or the writing (or the fact that the movie industry, like the music industry, aims everything at junior high boys) and fewer yet worth discussing. Let's talk about actors briefly, only because I do have a few I feel compelled to mention:

John Cusack. Here's a guy who just barely misses being the romantic lead in serious dramatic movies. He's a great Jimmy Stewart-type, hapless but well-meaning guy. Even in Grosse Pointe Blank, wherein he plays a professional assassin, he plays a hapless but well-meaning assassin. The only dramas I've seen him in were Eight Men Out and The Grifters, the rest have been comedies. I have only the vaguest memories of The Grifters, but I know I liked him as Shoeless Joe Jackson (the one player in the whole Black Sox scandal who actually was telling the truth and didn't take money to throw a game) in Eight Men Out. But, again, he played a sort of hapless, well-meaning baseball player.

Helen Mirren. She played the title character in the movie Teaching Mrs. Tingle. I never saw it because the promos made it clear it was primarily a bouncy-tit high-school girl vehicle for some seventeen year old actress whose name I've already forgotten. This is a woman who will be beautiful when she's eighty years old, both because she's one of the most talented over-forty actresses in the English-speaking world, and because she's got a great face. She did several (at least half a dozen) miniseries for BBC under the Prime Suspect imprimatur, as a police detective/superintendent (the character, a strong female, suffered occasional reversals of fortune) on a homicide squad. At least some of these are available for rental at video stores, but don't take my word for it -- ask at your store. Also, keep an eye on PBS, since they're the ones who run the series here in the States. Also, if you have a strong stomach and aren't too delicate about adult subject matter, there's always The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, a movie about which I could tell you pretty much nothing without utterly spoiling the experience. Not for the faint at heart, that's all I'll say.

Johnny Depp. Okay, I admit when I first saw him, on 21 Jump Street, I thought he was another pouty little cutie-pie who'd be ground up by the entertainment industry and stuffed into a sausage casing before he hit thirty. Happily, I was wrong -- he's taken on such a wonderfully strange selection of movies. Edward Scissorhands, John Waters's Crybaby, Ed Wood, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He could have just taken pretty boy lead roles, with his face. Instead, he's taken the most adventurous, wild roles people would hand him, apparently whether he thought they'd make him piles of money or not. Here's a guy I can respect.

Minnie Driver. Before she became "flavor of the month", Minnie Driver did some really great work. And she's probably still good in the mediocre and successful ones she's still doing. Haven't seen anything she's done since Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting, both of which I liked. She was also good in Big Night. There's a great exuberance and presence that seems missing even from young American actresses who are considered good.

Well, that's really it. For the most part, I don't see many movies. So many are so poorly realized, executed, and most importantly, written, it's just not worth my time and effort, let alone money.