This is a thing I am trying. Movies I’ve seen this week:

  1. Fame: I watched this because I like the TV show and I wanted to see what the actual movie was like. The answer? Way, way, unbelievably better. It’s got that late-70s early-80s soft grey lighting and really still camera set-ups. It is frankly much more convincing that there is at least one student at the School of Performing Arts who is gay — it’s too bad they couldn’t give him a boyfriend and just made him hang out with the heterosexual couple, but, for 1980, having him there. They retained his character for the TV show, but of course they couldn’t talk about his sexuality, because it was TV in the early 80s; now I’m wondering if the audience (familiar with the movie) would have known he was supposed to be gay and read his character that way? Anyway, I liked the movie, the way it left things unfinished; I didn’t like the way overweight black characters were constantly used as visual jokes.
  2. This Film Is Not Yet Rated: I cannot say enough good things about this documentary about the MPAA ratings board. In the US, film ratings are controlled not by a government board, but by the MPAA, which is a studio-funded association that was created to protect the studios’ business interests. Getting an NC-17 on a film makes it much, much harder to sell — newspapers won’t run ads, Blockbuster and Wal-Mart won’t sell it, some theatre chains won’t run it, etc. Also, images of (especially) female pleasure and homosexual sex were more heavily regulated than other kinds of sexuality. None of this really comes as a surprise, but it’s presented in an interesting way, and the directors that they talk to give us a good sense of the process and how secretive it all is. There are no published ratings standards, they won’t tell directors what to fix, the identities of the actual people on the board (and the appeals committee) are kept secret, they have members of the clergy present (who may or may not vote) at appeals, et cetera. They hire a private investigator to find out who’s on the ratings board; this is an awesome idea, it’s too bad that a lot of what private investigators do is sit around and wait for stuff to happen, boringly. I wish they’d trimmed some of that and used their interview with the Love and Basketball lady that was in the deleted scenes. One of the most compelling things for me was Trey Parker’s story about the different experiences he had in getting Orgazmo rated vs. Team America: they made Orgazmo independently, it got the NC-17 and they were given no information about what scenes got it the rating and why; they made Team America for a big studio, and they were given literal notes about what scenes needed to be trimmed. That is crazy. Seriously, if you are interested in the movie business at all, I recommend this film; also, watch the extras, to hear Trey Parker tell the story of how the ratings board made them change the subtitle of the South Park movie from “All Hell Breaks Loose,” so they went with “Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.”
  3. Crash (the Cronenberg one, not the Haggis): I actually liked it way more than I thought I would. I love how there is just so much sex of every kind that it stops being titillating. I wouldn’t really recommend it in an “If you loved Secretary…” way, but I think it has its rewards.
  4. Le Samourai: I love this movie so; I was really worried that a grey, slow movie with no dialogue wouldn’t appeal to intro students, but most of them were really feeling it.
  5. Sisters: So Brian De Palma basically just “homages” Hitchcock for the first hour and a half or so, but then the crazy hypnotism/black-and-white movie sequence at the end almost makes up for it.
  6. Boyz N The Hood: I liked this more than I thought I would; the more I think about it, the more the portrayal of women bugs me, but Angela Bassett’s speech about “you just did what mothers have been doing forever” almost made up for it.
  7. Fitzcarraldo: What a crazy movie. I totally want to write a paper comparing this and Apocalypse Now. Someone probably already has though.
  8. A History of Violence: Loved! I sort of missed seeing this even though everyone liked it and it’s Cronenberg and whatver. I kind of wish I had seen it before the academics got to it; I went in knowing the end, so it made the first half of the movie much less tense. I love me some modern twists on old stories, with Viggo Mortensen.
  9. 8 Mile: It was for school, I swear. It…is not a very good movie. I don’t know what to tell you. Apparently Eminem is good at stuff. And stuff. Don’t make him mad or he will hit you.

That seems like a lot of movies; I think this was at least eight days though.