No changes this week...
Movies Watched -- Still Alice
99 minutes long, so not a bad length, but I still fast forwarded from 20 minutes in, not because it was terrible, but because movies about progressive illnesses are hard to take. Julianne Moore is 50 years old, and a full professor at Columbia, when she gets diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. She played a similar sick lady role in Todd Haynes' disturbing movie, Safe, which I saw 20 years ago.
Alec Baldwin plays her husband, and he's pretty "supportive," at least at first, before a job at the Mayo Clinic calls. One of her children is Kristen Stewart, who continues to chew her lip in every scene of every movie I've ever seen her in. No idea why she gets as much work as she does. Must appeal to messy-haired Millennials?
Moore is probably good, I like her, she's beautiful and I think she's talented. The emotions were strictly white middle class here (Ben Sachs says "middlebrow"), she balled a little bit, but husband and kids seemed pretty calm about the collapse of their wife / mother, kind of cold. I'd give it a yellow (consider) rating if you're not disturbed by movies in which the main character is descending into dementia.
(Andrew O'Hehir makes the good point that "this person would be supremely annoying were she a real person and not Julianne Moore," and "You have to have a beach house in the first place, let us note, before you can get lost in it." And I agree completely with Wesley Morris who writes, "these disease movies [make you worry] that medical misfortune befalls only bourgeoisie. It’s far too fond of Moore to be less than flattering to her. So, instead, it cheats life, death, and us.")
Clearly demented