1. Paris When It Sizzles: I was watching this to distract myself while working on my resume, and it was pretty meh. Audrey Hepburn and William Holden were really charming and lovable, but the movie itself wasn’t any great shakes. It’s about a screenwriter on a deadline and the typist he hires to dictate his script to; then they, predictably, fall in love. (This is also the plot of Alex and Emma, which replaces the screen legends with Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson, and introduces an awkward “he gets over his girlfriend by writing a novel” element to the whole thing, and is generally less fun.) The best bits are the metajokes — like they’re writing a movie and one of them will say “the theme song, sung by someone like Frank Sinatra” and then you hear Sinatra actually singing a Sinatraian theme song to the fake movie they’re writing, or “no, he looks more like Tony Curtis,” and then the character is played by, obviously, Tony Curtis. But you know, goofy injokes does not a whole movie make.
  2. Inland Empire: I can’t really explain what happened in this movie, because if I did, then it would not be very much fun for anyone who reads this if they choose to see it. I don’t know if I would recommend this to someone who wasn’t already a David Lynch fan; I really liked it, but it’s way less accessible than, say, Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive. It was shot on DV and often lit just with flashlights, so it doesn’t really have the sumptuousness of Blue Velvet; but it’s just as surreal and disturbing, and the plot makes even less linear sense! Plus [SPOILER ALERT]: dancing hookers.
  3. M: I have somehow made it through several years of higher education in the studies of film without having seen this, so I thought I should. It’s pretty Weimar-tastic: lots of extreme angles, no one is likable, everyone distrusts everyone else, everyone likes absolutes, etc. etc. It’s really tense and well-paced, despite not even having anything resembling a protagonist.

That’s it for this week. I’ve been decompressing, but I have lots of spare time, a great video store down the street and ambitious summer film plans, so hopefully my weekly movies lists will soon return to their former glories. Or I will wind up just rewatching entire seasons of Buffy and mourning the ends of Gilmore Girls (confirmed, and I am okay with it because having the show end with Rory’s grad seems graceful, and it has been getting good again, so it will hopefully end on a high note) and Veronica Mars (likely, and I am not totally okay with it because even though the last episode was pretty bad and I am pretty dubious about this whole standalone episode thing, I feel like there’s still some good show in there). Wait, this was supposed to be about movies. Did I tell you about my new gloriously vanity-sized skinny jeans? I thought that they would look bad, but they don’t, they look cute. You win, fashion industry!