Movies Watched -- The Child (2005)

In French. 96 minute running time. This was completely absurd. Bruno is a 20-year-old Belgian kid with blue eyes and blonde hair who looks like a surfer dude and spends his time stealing and lying … he has an improbably beautiful girlfriend with amazing bones who has just had his boy child (L’enfant), but Bruno, who is also an enfant, has the bright idea to sell the baby for quick cash, this is the kind of a guy he is … it’s just so silly. This got the Palme D’Or, but only because they give it solely to French language movies, and there was nothing else made in 2005 in French.

John Farr is to blame for this bum reco: “we realize these kids have no positive examples to draw on in making decisions, and that by circumstance, adulthood has been thrust on them well before they're ready for it” … oh spare me, John.

Je m'appelle Jimmy

Movies Watched -- The Hustler (1961)

135 minute running time so at least 35 minutes too long … not a feel-good picture … gambling (pool sharks), alcoholism, love and desperate women (what would now be called a “co-dependent” relationship) … stars Paul Newman when he was peak handsome (age 35, looked younger) and George C. Scott (pre-Buck Turgidson) … way too long and a major downer, I can’t recommend this one, just read the script instead (which is good).

Yeah, percentage players die broke too, don't they, Bert?

Ruby Ridge Roadblock

Jon Ronson on Booknotes:

“… it [was] at that roadblock that the militia movement really began in the United States. This became the touchstone. Timothy McVeigh visited Randy Weaver's cabin a couple of years later. And -- because the government had become just what the conspiracy theorists have always said the government was, out of control, determined to destroy the lives of simple people who wanted to live free. The government had fitted into that stereotype. They became the monsters that the extremists always said that they were.”

Ain't No Consolation Prize

Lucie Silvas with “Black Jeans” … I dig it:

No One To Call Mine

Dominique Fils-Aimé with “You Left Me” … again using the pop sound to mask the dark lyrics, I dig it:

Movies Watched -- Tetro (2008)

127 minute running time so at least 30 to 40 minutes too long … this was terrible, I hated it… a Francis Ford Coppola self-funded vanity piece … I like Vinnie Gallo’s movies so someone recommended I watch this one where he’s an actor instead of the writer director producer, etc., but that was an awful idea.

Peter Rainer correctly wrote that it is “an inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy … whenever Coppola goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.”

Kyle Smith correctly calls the movie a “frazzled, fractured monster” and writes, “Having passed through the phases of Interesting Apprentice, Mad Genius, Chastened Bankrupt and Shameless Wage Slave, Coppola at 70 may be the world’s oldest student filmmaker.”

Marjorie Baumgarten correctly writes, “… judging by the narrative flabbiness of [the] film, it might be possible to conclude that the Sturm and Drang of answering to one’s backers is not necessarily a bad thing for the overall artistic process.”

Peter Bradshaw wrote the best review of all: “a self-indulgent mess … it is laboured, massively implausible, excruciatingly self-important and really quite staggeringly boring in the way only a deeply personal film from a deeply important film-maker can be.”

She is 18 years old, like you

Perhaps That Was A Mistake

I love the typically British understatement:

MacDONALD: I was very surprised to hear General Westmoreland tell me that he had not studied the Indochina War, because he ...

LAMB: He never did?

MacDONALD: Apparently not. And I liked him; I admired him. You know, I don't want to say anything just hurtful to him, but it did surprise me that he had not studied this, because after all, he was fighting the same people and the same general, and they had fought the French for nine years. So I asked him, actually, if they had studied it at Ft. Leavenworth or at the war college and they hadn't. And so I think perhaps that was a mistake.

Straight Line To Normalcy

Haley Blais with “Seventeen” … she’s my kind of dork, I dig it:

Movies Watched -- Frozen River (2008)

97 minute running time … this was slit-your-wrists depressing, a low-budget movie about a poor single white mother living in the northern border town of Massena, NY who gets involved with a young Mohawk woman who is a smuggler of illegals (mostly Chinese) across the frozen St. Lawrence river from Canada… (the beautiful blonde upper-middle class white woman who wrote this script and directed the movie went to Sarah Lawrence, which shouldn’t be confused with St. Lawrence county) … anyway, damn, I had to fast forward through most of this because the sadsack people and muddy, down and out places were just too awful to watch at normal speed… I think the star was a good actress, she looked like a version of Bonnie Raitt if Bonnie had grown up in an upstate New York trailer park instead of Beverly Hills.

That sicko John Farr is to blame for this reco. You can give it a miss.

I just want my double.

Being The Change

Dominique Fils-Aimé with “While We Wait” … pretty cleverly done, I love the transition … beautiful voice and smart songwriting; I dig it: