Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Movies


Twas a big weekend for movies here at jwbblog. I’ll comment on Saturday night’s activities in a separate post—though they were big, and I mean really BIG.

On Friday night, we watched The Black Dahlia. I’ve commented on this movie elsewhere several times. If you recall those earlier posts, you won’t be surprised that I was expecting it to be horrendous. Well, while I wouldn’t say it was a truly good movie, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. If memory serves, the major reviewers slammed Hartnett. However, I thought he was pretty good and put in easily the best performance among the three leads—Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarjo. I’ve really liked Scarjo in some other movies—Lost in Translation and Match Point among them—but she was awful. Perhaps having seen her so much on the gossip blogs, I didn't buy her in a non-contemporary role. More generally, she just seemed way out of her depth. (She also had absolutely no chemistry with Hartnett, which seems odd since I gather that they’re shagging in real life.) I also like Eckhart—he’s great in Thank You for Smoking—but he wasn’t convincing as Lee Blanchard. Blanchard’s most distinctive trait is what we might call an anger management problem; and I can see why Eckhart might have looked good on paper. But I chuckled more than once when Eckhart was stomping around. He just didn’t do it for me. Hillary Swank is good as Madeline. So I’d give it a thumb slightly up. Not exactly good but worth renting.

(A brief word about Ellroy: If I didn’t know better, I’d think that he would be very disappointed. However, having seen him talk about his work several times, I know that he thinks Hollywood is a cesspool and the fact that one brilliant interpretation of his work—that would be Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential—managed to survive the system is more than most writers can hope for.)

On Monday night, we watched The Devil Wears Prada and it’s great—hilariously funny in parts. Go rent it now. Meryl Streep is brilliant—dry as dust as a lightly fictionalized version of Anna Wintour of Vogue. She deserves an Oscar nomination, if not an Oscar. Anne Hathaway is also really good in the lead. Two thumbs up.

While I’m on the topic, I bought Jenn a copy of Talladega Nights to celebrate the war on Christmas—she loves Will Ferrell (as do I). To be honest, I was kind of disappointed. It had some funny moments but my overall response was, “Eh.” It was also surprisingly dark in spots. I didn’t find the storyline about the relationship with his father funny at all—though I was raised by wolves, so perhaps I’m a little sensitive about these things.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Any movie suggestions, dear readers?

Posted by jwb at 5:00 PM   

1 Comments:

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