osprey_archer | Recent Movie Round-up

Because I’ve watched a lot of movies this summer and I don’t have enough to say about these for full-fledged reviews of each, yet I can't let them go without comment--mini-reviews!

Did anyone else see 10 Things I Hate about You? There are two male leads: Heath Ledger, and the greatly overshadowed Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a geeky cute boy who gives a serviceable performance.

That same Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the lead in Brick, and I have to say he was miscast in 10 Things I Hate about You. Give him good material instead of fluff, and Gordon-Levitt knocks it out of the park. His character, Brendan, rarely shares his thoughts or expresses any emotion other than anger overtly, but he dominates every scene he’s in—both as an actor and as a character.

Brendan is a mensch in a world populated by manipulative two-faced bastards. Brick is a gritty movie, from a plot littered with corruption and death to a wash-out color scheme and dirty, cluttered sets. Even the dialogue is tough: dense and slang-littered. It’s a testament to the excellent film-making that I enjoyed it nonetheless.

There’s an excellent review here, which I mostly agree with, although I think she’s too hard on Brick’s female characters. The femme fatale, at least, has a discernable motivation: she wants power, just like all the male characters in the movie.

I LOVE THIS MOVIE.

Ahem. More articulately: Gaslight is a 1944 psychological thriller, black and white, set in Victorian London (four of my favorite things already!), about a man who is slowly driving his wife insane by insisting that she forgets things—loses things—moves things around the house without noticing it—and slowly isolating her from the world so there’s no one to tell her this is not so.

Ingrid Bergman, who plays the wife, does an excellent job slowly disintegrating (and she looks smashing, too). There’s this wonderful horrible scene at a musical party—it’s the first time she’s been out in months—where she just cracks, and it’s believable and embarrassing and brilliant.

Plus the movie has Joseph Cotten, who ought to be so much more famous than he is. And Angela Lansbury, as a very un-Angela Lansbury saucy Cockney maid.

Also, the ending is awesome.

This is actually astonishing faithful to the book. A few characters are omitted and the plot is simplified somewhat to neaten things up, but there isn’t anything important lost. My only quibble is that Rose’s beautiful pink dress isn’t as becoming as it’s supposed to be.

Some minor spoilers for both movie and book—I liked it when Cassandra lost her temper at her father in the movie. In the book the whole family seemed impossibly forbearing—yes, Thomas and Cassandra did lock their father in the tower in the book, but there’s very little sense of anger or disappointment in him for plunging the family into poverty.

Aside from that I think the book is better (certainly more subtle), but the movie is well worth seeing.

This movie must have gone through the studio with OSCAR BAIT written on it in neon. Otherwise someone would have noticed that the characters are flat, the suspense is non-existent, and the Serious Moral Issues don’t gain much more complexity than “The Nazis were pretty bad,” which is hardly enough to carry a three-hour-long film.

I think that two of the main characters—Haywood, who is judging the case, and Janning, the ex-Nazi judge on trial—are supposed to be dark mirrors of each other. From the dialogue, it’s clear that Janning feels some connection to Haywood, but there’s very little suggestion that Haywood reciprocates the feeling, so there’s no sense of kinship or exploration of how Janning became a bad judge. Instead, Janning appears to have an odd variation of Stockholm syndrome, and he’s pathetic instead of tragic.

The only amusing part of the movie is the appearance of William Shatner as Haywood’s aid, and that’s amusing only because—“Is that Captain Kirk? It is!”

Anybody else seen any good movies lately?