Whiskers on kittens

I advertise that I am blogging about television and movies, but there has been a distinct lack of movie-talk here, so let me rectify the situation. The problem is twofold. One, I spend an awful lot of time on tv. Oh, and on my real job, too, of course. Two, I have almost given up watching movies in the theater, so what I have to say about them is almost always hopelessly out of date by the time I see them. Netflix is not good for real-time commenting.

However, over the last few weeks I have, in fact, seen some movies in the actual theaters, a result of my time off from teaching (ah, the winter holidays!). And what a mixed bag they have been!

As I mentioned before, I saw We Are Marshall with my parents in Utah. It was all one would expect: heartwarming, a tearjerker, funny at times, full of yelling and impassioned speeches at memorials and locker room scenes. However, it was nothing one might not expect, which would be my big critique of the film. There was nothing in the movie that surprised me at all, from the filming to the casting to the lighting to the narrative arc, nothing. Though I enjoyed the movie and certainly cried (a lot--they have the tearjerker thing down pat), I wouldn't rate it very highly or put on a list of all-time favorites, largely because it was so straightforward, too much so.

Then the husband and I went to see Eragon back in Charleston. By way of context, my family of birth and I have always been fantasy fanatics. My mother owns multiple editions of every Anne McCaffery book ever written; I periodically reread David (and Leigh) Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean just to cheer myself up when things get bleak; even my youngest brother, forever dubbed the non-reader by my uber-literate family, read and reread The Hobbit so many times in junior high and high school he virtually memorized it. And every year on Christmas day since my youngest sister started working at a movie theater in high school and we realized they were open on holidays, my family goes to see a movie together. For the past few years, we saw all of The Lord of the Rings trilogy religiously and dissected them for days afterwards. So I am a fan of the dragons, sorcerers, and rustic otherworlds. But this movie was one of the worst ones I have seen ever. What Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich are doing in this insipid, nonsensical, utterly un-fantastic drivel is beyond me. And Rachel Weisz as the voice of the dragon was just distractingly inappropriate.

Finally, last week I went to see Children of Men, for which I had high hopes because of critical buzz. Sadly, however, this post-apocalyptic, dystopic fable was disappointing, largely because the writers seem to have decided the way to be thought provoking lies in withholding and then never revealing key information, which tactic results not in provocation but only aggravation. Brief, much appreciated moments of humor did emerge, intermixed with unending violence and constant confusion, which I am absolutely positive was not meant to be performative (of the situations or the characters) for the audience. It was simply confusion. Character development was sacrificed, wrongly, in favor of hippy-trippy futuristic allusions. In short, read the book.