March Filmfest

I had a great “Spring Break” week and a fantastic Easter weekend, but before I can even consider writing about them, I need to get the latest movie update done.  Even though the reviews are coming out five days into April, I did get the movies watched in March.  In fact, I did even better than usual this time around, seeing six movies instead of the usual five.  Not sure if that will continue, but in the meantime, here are the current six, from least favorite up to most.

6) The Last Picture Show (1971) – Allegedly a coming-of-age story set in small-town Texas, and starring a very young Jeff Bridges, I thought this one would be great.  Boy, was I wrong.  Turns out, life in small-town Texas is just really depressing, and everybody mopes around all the time, only interrupting their ennui to sleep around with almost literally everyone in town.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And even that might have been okay, if there was some semblance of a point to it all.  By the end of the movie, there has been no overarching message about human nature or interpersonal relationships: everyone started miserable, learned nothing and ended up miserable.  It was just majorly unappealing

5) A Place in the Sun (1951) – I usually love stories of moral ambiguity and conflict, but for some reason this one was kind of uninteresting.  It’s a story of a regular guy who finds himself “entangled with two women” as Wikipedia puts it – one the pretty, rich Elizabeth Taylor, and the other an average girl from his work.  Things start to get very complicated, leading up to a rather unusual ending.  But I didn’t like it much, for two reasons.  One, the viewer sees everything, even about the mystery aspect of the film, so there’s no intrigue at all.  And two, the protagonist comes off as such a lecherous creep that there’s no way you can identify with him at all or feel bad when things go wrong.  You just think, well, you did this to yourself, so be it.  For a similar style story, I much prefer The Postman Always Rings Twice.   

4) My Fair Lady (1964) – The first time we started this one, we got about half an hour in and were so put-off by Audrey Hepburn’s screechy cockney accent that we just couldn’t go any further.  The second run went better, as the movie developed some steam as it went, but it just wasn’t a favorite of mine.  You probably know the story: Henry Higgins bets he can turn an ordinary flower seller into a proper lady, and of course things all go exactly as planned…  There were lots of fairly cute parts, a few laughs and some catchy songs.  It was pretty neat to learn that a lot of the songs my Mom sang around the house when we were kids were from this movie.  I did think the pacing was a little off; at 171 minutes, I thought the story could have been told more concisely.  Oh, and the ending I totally thought should have gone the other way.  That was a bummer.

3) The French Connection (1971) – Sigh.  Yet again I find myself thwarted by idiots who use library DVDs as coasters.  I tried two separate libraries for this movie, and each one failed around the halfway point of the film.  So it gets middle-of-the-road marks, though the part I did see was pretty average so it might deserve lower.  It’s a typical gritty cop movie, a la Dirty Harry, this one centered around a big drug shipment and featuring two cops instead of one.  You’ve got stakeouts, roughing up of the informants, chases – all the usual ingredients.  Gene Hackman works well as the loose cannon partner, but I had a harder time seeing Roy Scheider as the brooding cop.  Apparently that was kinda his thing at the time, but I’m more used to later characters from Jaws and SeaQuest, so it was weird to see him acting like a tough guy.  On the whole, this movie was generic enough that I probably won’t seek it out to watch the end.

2) Goodfellas (1990) – I’m no huge fan of mafia movies, but this one is pretty enjoyable.  It was also one of the first “grown up” movies I got to watch as a kid/teen, so I’ll always be a bit fond of it.  Ray Liotta, in probably the performance of his career, plays an Irish-American quickly working his way up in the New York mob.  Naturally, there is a lot of violence and gore, but there are actually lots of funny bits centered around his interaction with Joe Pesci’s character.  However, I think the best part of the movie is the treatment of how things start to unravel as different toes get stepped on and loyalties are betrayed.  It seems Martin Scorsesi is good at showing a person’s rise to the top, as well as the fall from it, and this movie just about nails it.  It’s pretty long, but it’s a good ride.

1) The Apartment (1960) – Hands down, my favorite from the movie project so far.  Ostensibly a comedy, it’s about a lonely office worker who allows his married managers the use of his apartment for their affairs.  Not wanting to cause conflict, he juggles their schedules without complaint until their world starts to collide with his and the girl he pines after.  There are a lot of great moments, comedy-wise, but this movie does start to get heavier pretty quickly.  The lighthearted moments are balanced expertly with the crushingly gutting ones, all expressed brilliantly by Jack Lemmon.  Lemmon is remembered for comedy, but he emotes the highs and lows in this film as well as any reputed “serious” actor.  The movie is charmingly sweet and hopelessly romantic, with abundant witty lines and laugh-out-loud moments.  I love this movie.

Next month:

Sophie’s Choice (1982)

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Swing Time (1936)

Patton (1970)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

And maybe Easy Rider (1969)