From 2001, this is a small English movie that mainly comes across as an author’s attempt to disgorge the emotional aftermath of a childhood friendship that spoiled. Me Without You was written and directed by Sandra Goldbacher (following up her Minnie Driver debut feature, The Governess), though I could be reading more into this than really ought to be. Mark it down as a character study rather than a story film.

Michelle Williams (yes, the blonde from Dawson’s Creek) does her best English accent, adds a few pounds and darkens her hair for most of the movie, playing Holly, the slightly mousy next-door neighbor and best friend to Anna Friel, taking the part of the gregarious, daring and not 100% connected to reality Marina. The only other names are Trudy Styler, Mrs. Sting, as Friel’s loopy, slutty mother and Kyle MacLachlan as a college literary theory lecturer who beds both of his students. The film is composed of sequences in five different years–1973, 1978, 1982, 1989 and 2001–showing the growth of the girls and their friendship.

Not really recommended unless you want to relive your English ’70s and ’80s upbringing as a female

From 2001, Y tu mama tambien is a critically acclaimed movie made in Mexico by Alfonso Cuaron (who is directing the next Harry Potter film) about two teenage boys and a slightly older woman who learn about life, love and themselves in the course of a trip to an isolated beach. Very tittilating movie mining wellworn territory.

Frankly I don’t understand why this film was so well received (such as an Oscar nomination for Best Writing that Cuaron shared with his brother) but perhaps it was the pseudo-innocent sexuality swirled with mixed-high left wing politics. The film opens with one of the boys and his girlfriend, naked and tossing together in bed, followed by the other boy sneaking in some last-minute sex with his own chickie before the two girls fly off for a Summer holiday in Italy. And the Cuaron brothers throw in more physicality about any chance they get. Meanwhile, there is talk of political corruption, protests and economic disparity combined with classism around every bend.

Not recommended

Based on a novel by comic caper genius Donald Westlake, 1972’s The Hot Rock was directed by Peter Yates, had a script by William Goldman and starred Robert Redford. Sadly, even with all the talent involved, the film just doesn’t measure up to the book. Mainly, I just felt that the cast and director walked through the picture and never approached the nervous energy called for, with the possible exception of George Segal.

Redford’s sister is married to Segal, who picks The Blonde One up after his latest stint in jail as we begin. Segal, clearly a criminal wannabe, has a job for them: stealing the Sahara Stone, treasured by several African nations and currently on display in Manhattan, for the UN Ambassador (Moses Gunn) of one of the interested nations. Reluctantly, Redford agrees to the job and Segal rounds out the crew with Paul Sand and Ron Leibman. The heist goes reasonably well but Sand, who has the gem, is caught by the cops. The crew spins around a batch of bad luck ever more tightly; Sand’s father (Zero Mostel) even tries to rip them off.

Not recommended

Had an amazing time last night with LordB and LadyA plus TS1, featuring my brisket and LadyA’s low carb cheesecake. Then we were off to see the Wizard (Gandalf, of course) and 220 minutes of terrific film. However, I’m planning on a second viewing next week and will hold off any real write up until after that. Word of warning: Watch what you drink before and during the movie, or else. Still, run, don’t walk, to see this film!

Bret Easton Ellis writes novels that focus on the charismatic sociopath searching for an emotional connection. His first book, Less Than Zero, was a blast when I read it, like a much more real version of the movie crap Hollywood was putting out in the mid-’80s. But his stories work much better on the page than on the screen and The Rules of Attraction is no exception.

Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) writes and directs, trying to make something artful and eclectic out of something that doesn’t really have a plot; in fact, he’s going to have an even more difficult time with Ellis’ recent novel Glamorama, which he’s making now. Avary tries to use non-traditional techniques like running film backwards to connect the three main characters to each other, as well as quite a bit of voiceover, and wrapping the film in a flashback without letting the audience know what they’ve seen is the denoument. So I watched the whole film thinking that the first few minutes were actually the story’s beginning.

James Van Der Beek plays the semi-lead character, Sean, who tells us at the beginning that he’s an emotional vampire. Shannyn Sossamon is a fellow student, Lauren, who’s caught Sean’s eye but is only interested in the missing Victor. Ian Somerhalder plays a student named Paul just coming into his own homosexuality who also wants Sean in his bed. Sean thinks Lauren has been sending him unsigned love letters–though she hasn’t, the letters come from another–and Sean somehow sees her as an innocent, uncorrupted spirit, something he’s apparently never been. The truth, as with the letters, is quite different as we see Lauren submit to drunken sex, smoke pot and go down on a TA to help her grade and snort coke with her roommate.

In fact, in place of a plot Avary mainly shows us scenes of drug and alcohol consumption, foreplay and sex (though nothing more explicit than bare breasts get onscreen) and a bit of rudeness and violence. The result is a pretty but empty mishmash.

Sadly, not recommended

What a great way to spend a Saturday! The extra scenes were like gems except for Faramir’s flashback to the day his father sent Boromir off to Elrond’s council. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition was a bargain at $9.50 compared to so many other films that come out these days. Peter Jackson just has the magic touch and might even convince me to see King Kong.

Can I wait for Thursday when we see Return of the King? Barely! I have a feeling it’ll put the battle scenes from Gladiator and Braveheart to shame.

Absolutely recommended

Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. Romantic Comedy. Above average script, some good laughs and sweetness. 2002’s Two Weeks Notice. Marc Lawrence seems to be Bullock’s personal writer these days and gets his first directorial opportunity here too. A little incongruity the way Bullock’s activist lawyer just agrees to be chief counsel to Grant’s real estate developer or that he’d hire her even with a Harvard Law School degree but otherwise fine.

Recommended

One of the later World War II movies, I suppose, Captain Newman, M.D. was made in 1963 and reflects then-current sensibilities. Gregory Peck (who died earlier this year) plays a psychiatrist towards the end of the war, running a mental ward on an Arizona Air Corps hospital base where soldiers are shipped for up to six weeks of diagnosis and treatment before being sent back to action, discharged or sent for longer term care. His base commander, played by Barney Miller’s James Gregory, barely acknowledges the head shrinker as a fellow physician and his finagler/orderly Tony Curtis believes he can pick up the necessary skills by reading Freud and a few other books.

This film, essentially a series of sketches, sadly marked the beginning of the end for Peck as an actor, or so it seems to me from a perusal of his IMDB page. He was coming off a string of great movies–he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the film he made just prior to Newman–but afterwards came mosty dreck. And Peck did no one any favors this outing by playing the M.D. with his laconic, nearly invisible emotional style.

Most of the roles are fairly cardboard, the writers seemingly attempting to show that war has more horrors than just death and splintered limbs by putting a variety of neuroses on display; when that wasn’t enough to fill their film budget, a squad of Italian POWs were tossed in for a bit more comic relief. Eddie Albert is a respected mission planner who can’t accept that he’s sent many young men off to their deaths. Robert Duvall is a WASPy husband ashamed into muteness by his fear. Angie Dickinson is the (gorgeous) young nurse who’s behind the great doctor, in contrast to Jane Withers (just saw her on an episode of M*A*S*H too) portraying the ‘plain’, put-upon nurse. We even get Larry Storch, Dick Sargent and Bobby Darin in supporting roles; Darin shows he could really act, or at least as much as anyone in this melodrama, getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Not recommended

This was the sixth or seventh time I’ve seen Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring though only the second time for the Extended Edition. The previous EE viewing suffered from a severe case of pause, rewind and review at the hands of my host (who will go unnamed but let’s just say drives a real fancy sports car), while this one benefitted from being a lovely new print on a big screen at the Sony Metreon up in San Francisco.

We’ll be up there again next Saturday for the Extended Edition of The Two Towers. This version of FotR is about 30 minutes longer than the original and, if your butt can stand the length, works better for me; not having seen TTTee yet, I’m definitely looking forward to finding out if that has the same quality with its extra 43 minutes. These are complex stories and characters JRR Tolkien gave us and, butt be damned, the extra time allows for more of that to come through.

What I’m really looking forward to is seeing Return of the King in 13 days, if not sooner, and then late next year getting a complete, deluxe, Extended Edition DVD set.

It was day like many other days, and then I popped Household Saints on from the TiVo playlist. Nancy Savoca starts from a novel by Francine Prose but falls into the “throw strange characters into a bowl” fallacy early on, and from there even decent acting jobs by Tracy Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio and Lilli Taylor can’t really pull it back over the hedge.

We follow Ullman and D’Onofrio through about 20 years of their lives, about 1949-1970ish, from when they came together because he won her (from her Dad) in a game of Pinochle, their early marriage living with his wacky old country Italian Mom and a stillborn baby, through the desperate childhood and strange death of a second, Jesus-obsessed daughter (Taylor). Though the novel probably spends the necessary verbiage establishing these characters and their reasons, the film never has the time and so I never did understand. D’Onofrio “just loves” Ullman, for instance, and can do no better when his mother asks for such help. Minor props to The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli for an amusing portrait of an ambitious young lawyer.

Barely recommended