The Man in the Moon (1991)

From the 'movies my sister wanted me to see while I'm stuck here recovering file' comes The Man in the Moon, a drama set in the rural Louisiana of the 1950's and featuring Sam Waterston and a young Reese Witherspoon. The movie is produced by Mark Rydell but directed by Robert Mulligan, the talented director of To Kill a Mockingbird among others, but here it seems like Mulligan's trying to make a Mark Rydell movie. The pacing, the lighting, the music, the emphasis on the land, all classic Rydell, though the period setting is arguably more consistent with Mulligan. A coming of age story centred around a 14 year old girl I did not anticipate liking this movie (no hook), and the slow Rydellian pacing means there's not a lot that jumps out at you. However the acting, writing, direction, and cinematography are all good if not always exceptional, and there's a twist late in the film that I did not see coming, and which deviated enough from expected form to make this movie worth considering. A somewhat surprised recommendation.

New in Town (2009)

Romantic comedy has Miami-based business executive Renee Zellweger move to a small Minnesota town to conduct a downsizing, only to fall for local union rep Harry Connick Jr. Ha, she's from Miami where its hot and going to Minnesota where its cold, and she's all cooperate and he's all blue collar, that alone should make you laugh this movie seemed to say. But as I watched it, I reluctantly grew to kind of like it. It's not a great film by any means, but the likable leads, and unambitious plot propel the film forward. After a while I started to think of it like an old b-picture romance, or a George Stevens comedy, only he would have cast Jean Arthur and Cary Grant in the lead parts. I also think a reason I liked this movie is that I see so few films like this, thinking that I'll hate them, which I suspect in most cases I would (no desire to see The Proposal). If I had to see all of these films like most movie critics I don't know if I'd have liked this one, but I don't so I did. A mild recommendation.

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004)

Gene Hackman narrates this documentary on Hollywood depictions of the Holocaust and Nazism from the 1930's to the 21st Century. Thorough, interesting, you see how depictions changed over time owing to the political situation, national mood, and the 20-30 years it took for what happened to sink into the national consciousness. Particularly interesting was the role that the network mini-series such as Holocaust and War and Remembrance played in preparing a mass audience for the actual tales of Holocaust survivors and even the statute of limitations for war crimes in West Germany. Also this movie makes me really want to see The Pawnbroker. Recommended.

God's Cartoonist (2008)

Documentary on the life and work of fundamentalist evangelizing tract cartoonist Jack T. Chick. I used to encounter his work all the time while on my LDS mission to Tennessee. Chick's work is generally short comic style works in which a character either gets saved in time for his untimely death and goes to heaven, or goes to hell for eternity because he did not get saved, though such characters are often more decent folks in Chick's work then the ones who get saved. The reason for this is the theology that Chick embraces, we're all sinners of varying degrees, none of us really deserves to go to heaven, but if we meet Gods seemingly arbitrary requirement of just receiving Jesus as our Savior, (not really doing anything, just existentially agreeing that Jesus is our savior) then we get go to heaven. Chick's tracts are understandably controversial, their absolutist, often seem mean spirited, veraciously anti-Catholic (or anyone whose not a fundamentalist Christian for that matter), conspiracy theory oriented, and designed to scare the reader into salvation. Chick even once did a tract where the target audience he was trying to save was pedophiles. Non the less I believe Chick an uncommonly sincere man, despite how offensive some of his beliefs may be, and found it interesting to learn more about his life in that he is a notoriously private person who does not give interviews (not even in this documentary). Learn more about Jack T. Chick through his wiki entry. A really interesting subject matter for a documentary. Recommended. Jack's own website.

This American Life: Season 1 (2007)

Television verison of the public radio series hosted by Ira Glass. The show basically consists of short documentary segments that wouldn't be interesting as feature length documentaries, but work because there short. Likable series, I watched this while in the hospital, I'd seen a couple of the episodes before but it was good to see the whole thing. Notable subject matters include a man who has his late beloved pet bull cloned, only to find him kind of bad tempered, A Mormon who hires homeless people to play apostles in pictures he takes re-creating the life of Christ, and a collage student who tries to make a documentary on how his former pop star step father ruined his mothers life, only to find that she was largely responsible for her failings. Recommended.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Basically at this point I love everything Ingmar Bergman has done. Now it wasn't always this way, I admit his many films set in medieval Sweden can be hard to take for the novice, and I much prefer his work with a more contemporary setting, such is Wild Strawberries (named for a delicacy of a many a Swedish childhood summer). This is of course a contemplative film, set around the trip of a septuagenarian retired medical professor to accept an honorary degree at his alma mater. On that trip the professor played wonderfully by one time silent film actor Victor Sjostrom, stops at various places important to his past, and has flash backs about the childhood love who got away (and married his older brother), his late wife who cheated on him, various dream sequences where he's put on on trial for incompetence and pops a balloon version of himself. It' just wonderfully well put together, excellent acting, the tones right, in short it just works for me. Excellent stuff, recommended, the only Bergman film I think I like more is Winter Light.

Shutter Island (2010)

This is not so much a bad movie as it is a bad Martin Scorsese movie. Your ability to enjoy this film depends largely on your ability to buy its central conceits, which for me was not great. I might have been willing to take a lot of this from a lesser director, but not Scorsese, he should know better,not to meniton that the presence of
DiCaprio only severs to remind one of the directores three most recent , all
much better films, and how you'd much rather be watching any of them right now. There were some things I liked about the film, and given that the source material is Dennis Lehane, I'm sure that wasn't the problem. Sometimes a movie just dosen't work and you can't quite say
why. A rare misfire from Martin Scorsese.

A recent car accident I was in may mark this as the begining of the end for my almost religious devotion to reviewing every movie I see for the first time. For now however I'll try to keep the reviews up, assuming I can remeber everything I've seen recently, and do to the fact that I'll probably have a lot more time to watch movies in the near future anyway.