1. Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007): I loved this; it had all the pared-down tension of a Solaris (but I’ve only seen the Soderbergh version) or a 2001, but with a lot less of the flaky faux-mystical stuff. I mean, that stuff’s still there, but on such an abstract level that you could happily just call it symbolism, because there’s so much awesome to talk about in this thing. Boyle created this scary, claustrophobic, almost nauseatingly tense atmosphere — like, I was gripping my armrests and kind of wishing I hadn’t gone to see it by myself — but the film is still gorgeous to look at. The cinematography is fantastic and crisp, the design of the spaceship they’re on is dazzling, and the way they dealt with the sunlight was again, stunning. Most space movies are about fear of and fascination with the dark and the things in it, but in this movie, things get progressively bright. (Also, it was nice to see my girl Michelle Yeoh getting some English-language work that doesn’t involve selling anyone’s virginity!)
  2. Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007): Okay, so I loved this. I think it was maybe funnier than Knocked Up. Michael Cera is a comedy genius, I love that guy so much. This was surprisingly authentic to high school. (Not surprising, given how young Seth Rogen is, he was born in 1982, like Alex. That is weird.) Apatow and friends get a lot of flack for the weight their films place on the homosocial bond and the attendant sexism that these things entail, but this wore its guy love so much on its sleeve, it’s hard to stay mad, and it’s really hard to make the criticism stick. Like, they’re not hiding the fact that the movie is about these two guys love each other and that they have to give up their intense bond in order to enter the world of adult heterosexual romance; the girls aren’t very well-drawn as characters because it’s mostly from the perspective of guys who really really really don’t understand women. There’s no reason that the female characters couldn’t be better-developed, but they do appear to have desires and feelings of their own, they just remain mostly unstated because the whole thing is about girls, the final frontier. The whole thing is, Michael Cera’s trying to trick this girl into liking him, but it’s clear that she already does. I do wish someone would make an accurate movie about nerdy girls to balance it out. Liz Lemon and Willow Rosenberg excepted, female dorks are pretty thin on the ground, pop culture wise. I’m not trying to make excuses for the lack of funny ladies in their movies — though I thought Becka’s big striptease scene was pretty funny — but I’m more saying, these guys are making movies about themselves, basically. It’s not their fault that there’s no room for women or minorities to make movies about themselves.
  3. Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941): Dang, depression-era populism gets me every time. (This movie was obviously made pre-Pearl Harbor, when America was still worried about the Depression, not about, you know, Hitler). Anyway, it’s about a director who makes happy, escapist, typical 1930s Hollywood fare — slapstick comedies and musicals. He wants to make a big important movie, about the horrible problems of the world called O Brother, Where Art Thou?* But he doesn’t actually know anything about trouble, so he decides to dress as a hobo and go out on the road to see what trouble is really like. His butler basically calls him a dick, because poverty sucks hard.
You see, sir, rich people and theorists – who are usually rich people – think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.

of course, the director still goes anyway and sees how crappy things are, but he doesn’t really suffer that hard, because he can always go back to his giant house and servants and car and studio and so on. Until he gets robbed and loses his memory and then learns what it’s really like to fall on hard times. There’s a famous scene where the men from his prison camp all go to watch movies in a church (led by a generous, articulate African-American preacher, which in a 1940s Hollywood movie is practically a miracle unto itself) that will totally make you cry your eyes out as it affirms the value of entertainment. It’s kind of a weird movie that gets a little to message-y at the end, but Sturges does this amazing thing where he vaunts the movies for the joy they bring into the humdrum lives of the poor, but manages to do it in a pretty non-condescending way. But it occurs to me now that most of the poor people that we come across are these silent sufferers who don’t get speaking parts or anything — I guess Sturges was “not intruding on their privacy” and also calling “important” movies on their shit. Which I’m always down with.

That’s my week in movies; it’s a pretty long post for only three thigns, but I didn’t have much to do without Alex around tonight. Or until August 30th. Woe! Also, I have three TV-related notes. The first is, I love Mad Men. It doesn’t work so hard at establishing the period now that it’s sort of established its tone of reverence/historical distance, and it’s still freaking gorgeous. Hurray melodrama! The second is, I didn’t realize it until I read it in the TWOP recap, but Rita, the sweet, cautious girlfriend on Dexter is Darla from Buffy! Seriously, she is so different in those two roles, it is insane. Third, MuchMusic is rerunning The OC: I had forgotten how charming and totally watchable the first season of the show was. Even though I own it on DVD. It was hilarious and ridiculous but also fiercely sweet. I miss you, Cohens!

*The source of the title of my favourite Coen Bros. movie!