At the Movie Theatre on this New Year’s Eve, 2009 Gregorian…
© A.J. Malouin 2009
The best film to see in The Great Lakes Basin this New Year’s Eve is, by all accounts of our friends who have seen it, “Me and Orson Welles.”
This film tells the story of Orson Welles’ mounting of “Julius Caesar” at the Mercury Theater, in 1937. A young Orson Welles and an even younger Richard Samuels meet and collaborate, then clash over a girl, as both of them stumble and stutter through their early experiences with The Theatre. Both of them know what they want, and the differences make for riveting, entertaining drama. The Film Snob rates “Me and Orson Welles” a 6 — and everyone he knows has rated it even higher. (See our side-bar page “How We Rate Movies” for information on our Rating System.)
The best film The Film Snob has seen in-theatre in some time is “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans.”
In it, Nicholas Gage plays a police Lieutenant who has gone over the edge and around the bend on drugs he scores from Police Property Rooms and on-the-street drug busts. The Lieutenant has become hallucinatory and we-the-audience are fed the hallucinogens just as the Lieutenant feed them to himself. In the end, we are left to wonder what Reality is, exactly. This in a film that puts you squarely in post-Katrina N’orleans, and puts you haphazardly in the space between light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil, drug-dreams and Sound Police Work. Werner Heroz!!! The Film Snob rates “…Port of Call…” a 2, and will go see it again.
Two films which are getting faint praise indeed from civilians who have actually seen them are “Sherlock Holmes” and “Nine.”
It’s only fair for professional reviewers to hype the molasses out of alllll the Holiday in-theatre fare. Then we-the-audience go to see it, and have the breath knocked out of us by the preponderance of it all.
In the case of “Sherlock Holmes,” there is just nothing to rivet our attention to story. It is very well-made, star-studded, and larger than life. In the end (and loooooong before the end,) however, we just don’t care. The Film Snob rated “Sherlock Holmes” and Patsy rated it an 8. Several of Caryl’s friends saw it, and did not care for it at all.
Likewise? Patsy reports that there is no story at all in “Nine.” It’s just a series, she writes (and you can read her review on this blog!) of musical numbers strung together with chewing-gum dialogue and story. Patsy vastly preferred “Chicago,” and rated “Nine” a 15.
That’s all for now. Your Correspondent is headed out to see the 5:20 screening of “La Nana” [“The Maid”,] the last film he’ll see in Gregorian 2009, unless he stumbles Home to view the commentary on “Medicine for Melancholy,” Truffaut’s “La mariee etait en noir” [“The Bride Wore Black”] or the commentary on “Amelie” as the clocks strikes down the last hours of this Gregorian.
See you in the movies!!!