Aladdin (1992)

Guys & Dolls (1955)

10 Things I Hate About You

The Sweetest Thing

Walking Tall (2004)

Taking Lives

Sex and the City Season 6 Part 1 Episodes 5-12

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
This movie was a disappointment to me. Despite a fabulous cast, I had a hard time buying into the story line and the characters enough to have any personal stake in the outcomes of the movie. However, the representation of the mother figure, Meryl Streep's character, which I understand from the extra features was ramped up from the original version, intrigued me, as did the evidently Oedipal relationship that she had with her son. That, in turn, inspired my choice of a topic for my independent study this summer, so I'll probably be watching and writing about this movie again.

Before Sunset

Vanity Fair (2004)
This movie was one of my favorites of all that I watched this year. I loved that the director utilized her personal knowledge of Indian culture to simultaneously make the scenes more vibrant and colorful and imbue the movie with more honesty about the impacts of the British colonization of India. I also always enjoy reminders that there have been strong, independent-minded women in many times and cultures throughout the history of the world. As Americans, we especially need such reminders. And realistic depictions in which many things go wrong but the hero or heroine manages to go on and achieve some happiness and satisfaction in his or her life are far more compelling to me than the kind of ending that ties up all of the loose ends into a perfect little bow....

Brother Bear
Like all Disney movies, this one, which didn't even have any White or Black human characters in it, still managed to be racist with its dumb Canadian-accented moose and its urban-speaking, thick-lipped black bears. Still, unlike many others, it seems, I did enjoy the story line, despite the unrealistically ideal ending. It is a Disney movie. I suppose that one should not expect anything else from it.

The Bourne Identity

L.A. Story

Super Troopers

Hitch

Genghis Blues
Ever since I first heard of it, several years ago, I'd wanted to see this documentary about a blind American blues musician who taught himself Tuvan throat-singing and then travelled to Tuva, just north of Mongolia, to compete in a throat-singing contest. I saw a group of Tuvan throat-singers called Yat-Kha perform in Ann Arbor in 1999, and, like so many other events that I attended in Ann Arbor, I really enjoyed it. I was surprised to see a couple of my high school science teachers there, though, but it all became clear when I watched this film and discovered the late physicist Richard Feynman's connection to Tuva. I've always enjoyed his work as well. Beyond that, however, I was a little surprised by the documentary's focus on its American main character, Paul Pena, but I shouldn't have been. At any rate, if you're interested in people and learning about other cultures, this movie is for you.

The Price of Milk
I wasn't quite prepared for the slightly mystical elements of this New Zealand-set movie about a woman whose attempts to keep the flames of her already-healthy relationship with her dairy-farmer fiance burning high get them into all sorts of trouble, and I didn't know what to make of the seemingly happy ending that, yet, ignored several of the problems raised during the movie; still, once I'd taken the time to reflect on it, I had to admit that it made me smile - the humor was for the most part simultaneously clever and silly - and the mere difference of it was refreshing, both as a movie and as a perspective on life. The interactions of the aborigines, the Hindus, and the Whites was also thought-provoking....

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

A Clockwork Orange
I liked it! Of course, I'd been warned that it was weird (although really, I didn't find it THAT weird), so I went into it with the proper wait-and-see attitude. I really liked the language and how, once I got myself to stop listening closely and thinking about it, I understood EXACTLY what was being said. The scene that's actually stayed with me the most was that quick one in which they were looking at all of the things in Alex's cell while the prisoners were out for a walk. Lots of religious stuff, pictures ... but that bust of Beethoven jumped out at me RIGHT AWAY and in a simultaneously chilling and satisfying way reminded me for the rest of the movie that this guy couldn't possibly really change. Plus the rest of his personality never really seemed to change. But anyway, I also liked the fact that it was B's music that was associated with hate and violence. It worked for me with my awareness of B's actual personality and relationship to his contemporary society, which is subsumed to his canonicity in the minds of the general public today, I think. I actually liked the ending too, which is really the biggest problem that I have with most movies.

X-Men

National Lampoon's Las Vegas Vacation

Shall We Dance? (2004)

Monster
Some have the idea that this movie is gruesome or difficult for men in particular to stomach or something, but I couldn't see that when I watched it. All that I saw was a woman whom society had wronged before and maybe even as much as she wronged it, from her perspective anyway. The acting, as we all know, was excellent, but the writing was excellent too. None of the characters was all good or all bad. Unquestionably at least one of the best movies that I've seen this year.

Unspeakable
A rather unexpected combination of gory action and an intellectual appreciation of the sad irony of the different types of criminals - that is, the ones that we electrocute and the ones that we elect to sign the orders - and the possibilities of the human mind. A great turn as the cruel and evangelical Texas Death Row warden by Dennis Hopper too. Between this movie and the former, though, you'll never pick up a female hitchhiker again, no matter how much it appears that she needs your help ... if you ever would in the first place, I suppose....

Triggermen
A well-acted, quirky movie whose plot nevertheless depends upon a ridiculous series of coincidences and some truly cliched writing and then wraps up all too quickly and happily for my taste. Still, I probably expected too much. Great soundtrack anyway.

Pride and Prejudice (1996)

Hamlet (2000)
This modern adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy stars Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, and a number of other very competent actors, including the somewhat surprising choice of Bill Murray, who nevertheless gives a wonderful performance as Polonius that is really one of the highlights of the flick. The interpretation is interesting, to say the least, encompassing modern technology including guns, photographic and videographic equipment, television, computers, telephones, and FAX machines. The latter's replacement of messengers is ingenious, my movie-watching partner and I agreed, but the rest does not succeed as well. For instance, replacing countries with corporations is hard to swallow, as it and other staging devices leave certain lines or phrases conspicuously ill-fitted for the particularities of the scenes and certain moments seeming highly contrived ... yet some words are omitted, such as the wonderful Yorick passage, so it escapes me as to why the truly inconvenient words could not be left out as well. Still, the acting was excellent, and it's always enjoyable to see different interpretations of Shakespeare. Will we ever happen upon another writer whose work is so fabulously timeless (uh, not that that characteristic of it was well-reflected here)?

Grease

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Admittedly, it was not as successful a movie as its predecessor, but for me, who so enjoys the characters in the first Bridget Jones movie and loves all of the actors in this series as well, it couldn't be anything but a pleasure to see this sequel. The most difficult part of this one to take for me was the fact that certain moments struck me as rather serious in nature, but I had neither expected as much nor am even certain that the movie intended them to come off that way, in which case it could justly be accused of trivializing (and being trivial itself). That is Bridget Jones, though.

Sixteen Candles

Alexander the Great (1956)
The scale of this movie was positively breathtaking, especially for its time. I got it to learn the story behind my son's namesake, although after seeing it I don't think that my choice reflects well on me, as Alexander's mother is another one of those possibly celibate movie women consumed with achieving power through their sons. I suspect that this trope comes from women's historical inability to achieve power any other way - and it is arguably NOT just historical, since, as evidenced by the new version of "The Manchurian Candidate" described above, such roles still seem believable. The negative depiction of such women, then, probably comes from the challenge that any kind of women's power seems to present to ideas of manhood/traditional masculinity, which may be why powerful women take on masculine attributes in our perceptions/characterizations: It diffuses that challenge ... but I digress. (I am writing on this subject for my independent study this summer.) Anyway, even though Alexander's character was presented as nearly flawless, I would not want my son Alexander to meet with a like fate to the Greek Alexander either.

X2: X-Men United

Being Julia
A truly excellent movie. One of my top three this year. Three strong, dramatic women: We see what I like. This one was intriguing, though, for its conflation of acting and reality, especially as relates to the social and psychological survival of an aging woman. I also liked that the most dependable and understanding relationship in Julia's life is that with another woman, Evie, as opposed to with a man (even though that relationship IS founded on a mistress-servant dynamic). And her relationship with her son Roger is a breath of fresh air in comparison to everything else that I've seen this year. Granted, it is one in which she still seems to have to do as HE wishes in the rest of her life in order to gain his approval in THEIR relationship, but a couple of scenes insinuate that he looks to her for approval of HIM in the rest of HIS life as well, both of which are actually pretty realistic for any interpersonal relationship. There is also no sign of Oedipal attraction between them. Sigmund Freud writes that psychologically abnormal young men fantasize about older women like their mothers engaging in sexual activity with younger men like themselves because it helps to satisfy their fixation on the mother-infant relationship ("A Special Type of Object Choice Made By Men" (1910) in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Philip Rieff, editor. New York: Collier Books, 1963: 49-58 - yes, I am writing on this subject), but Roger disapproves of such a relationship between his mother and another young man, Tom. Roger doesn't even lower his estimation of his mother to that of a promiscuous woman, which Freud indicates is another approach that fixated men take to enable thinking of their mothers as sexually available to them. Society tends to blame mothers for deficiencies in their children, and the entertainment media tends to portray deficient children as extremely prevalent, as the prevalence of sexual activity between mothers and sons in movies indicates. The fact that Roger is clearly not one of those deficient children speaks well for Julia's mothering, despite the life and career of her own - the latter on the stage, no less - that would usually lead to condemnation of her as a mother. There is also no sign of an inappropriate degree of control or power-hungriness exerted toward/through Roger on Julia's part, as in so many other movies with mother-son relationships as well. After all, she HAS achieved success in her own right, even though the movie does portray that as being mostly due to the sage advice of the ghost of Jimmy Langton, a late theater owner who mentored her in life and appears to continue to do so in her mind after death. Nevertheless, Julia and Roger's healthy relationship, which I claim results from the fact that she doesn't need to get anything from him in order to feel successful herself, is a testament to the benefit that accrues to both sexes and to society as a whole from the tenets of feminism that make this kind of a scenario more of a possibility. As for the "open" relationship between Julia Lambert and her husband Michael ... well, I'm still not sure what I think of that.

City of God
A mesmerizing film, set in the slums outside Rio de Janeiro and based on the true story, told in Portuguese with English subtitles, of a boy from the slums who managed to use that heritage to get himself out of them. Between this film and Bus 174, which I saw last year and which is also about the desperately poor people of Rio, I never want to actually go to Brazil, but I do wish that I could help those people who, although many of them are criminals, should not be written off as truly, inherently evil or worthless (even though they basically have been written off that way). I also think that it should remind us why WE should SEE and care for those less fortunate among US. Anyway, the movie is also very different from "Bus 174." The style of depiction of this film seems to weave you into the story from both the chronological inside and the outside so that before you know what has happened you're trapped in the middle of it. The sense of deja vu from time to time actually reminded me of "Memento," although this one is delivered far less brokenly than that one. The subheadings, which are actually printed on the screen right in the middle of various scenes, give what otherwise feels like a narrative a bit of a documentary feel and are therefore rather ingenious as well. Graphic - sometimes upsettingly so - but since it's reality - harsh reality - isn't that a good thing?

The Princess Bride

Not Another Teen Movie

Billy Madison

So I Married an Axe Murderer

Final Destination

Monsters Inc.

8MM
An attempt to make the traditional good guy-bad guy plot more scintillating by throwing sexual deviance into the mix goes wrong when the weakly-acted lead (Nicholas Cage) lies to his wife and ignores, avoids, forgets, and then endangers his family until he doesn't seem like much of a good guy himself. It may have been an attempt to humanize and thus complicate the basic action-suspense movie formula, but all that it succeeded in doing was demonizing most of the male characters while leaving the females flat and angelic. Blah.

Bill Cosby, Himself
Hilarious at times but derogatory to fathers, mothers, and children in his persistently negative generalizations of those roles. The traditional humorous treatment of parental violence toward children is also disturbing. No wonder his wife was angry at him for making this video. His children must be mortified.

The Longest Yard (1974)
A selfish, thoughtless, violent man continues to behave selfishly until he finds a way that being unselfish will be "worth it" to him, and I think that we're supposed to cheer. Perhaps the guards' unjust violence toward Burt Reynolds' character was supposed to mitigate the negative image of him from earlier - I certainly didn't rejoice in it - but I didn't see any real change in the man either.

Wild Animals 3D

The Idolmaker
An interesting, enjoyable movie based on the true story of an Italian-American man with the talent, the strategy, and the drive but not the looks to be a pop idol (which is an interesting statement in and of itself). Slightly predictable, but satisfyingly so. I recommend it.

Love's Labour's Lost (2000)
Slightly amusing but uninspiring and not even particularly convincing performances. The best line was delivered by the casting director, who had a Black man play a character whom another deems at one point to look "pale." The technique of interspersing 1930s songs and dances with Shakespeare's words is creative but adds to the overall sense of ridiculousness. Plus, it seems rather anachronistic combined with the references to WWII (which apparently ends within a year of the fall of France, without any casualties to any of the characters, of course).

The Wood

Jerry Maguire

Supersize Me
Often hard to watch but very entertaining - mesmerizing, in fact - and quite persuasive, not to mention very helpful as a diet motivation aid. Fortunately my house was already full of mainly very good food at the time, and we almost never go to McDonald's anyway.

Persuasion (1995)

Something's Gotta Give
A delightful movie. Diane Keaton is incredible, as usual. She plays a divorced woman with a grown daughter whose success and beauty attract a thirty-six year old doctor, surprisingly well-played by Keanu Reeves. Their relationship is refreshingly believable and hot. She also teaches Jack Nicholson's philandering old bachelor the value of a strong, interesting, and accomplished woman. I love the pattern this year. ;)

Hot and Bothered: feminist pornography

Finding Nemo

Hercules
The first Disney movie with a brown-eyed brown-haired Caucasian heroine since Beauty and the Beast. Of course, just like Belle, Meg is both highly intelligent and different from other girls. Then again, as Disney goes, the former is enough to establish the latter all by itself.

Gangs of New York
Despite bad reviews, this movie was excellent! Intriguing plot and character development, great acting, spectacular footage, and a satisfying ending and "thesis" that inspire me to want to learn more about the historical background to this compelling story. I tip my hat to Leo diCaprio for taking on such challenging and emotional roles. (I'm thinking of Romeo Montague in William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996), Jack Dawson in Titanic (1997), and, of course, What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993).) If he has a negative reputation at all, it's probably because he's both so talented and so BIG. Likewise, Claire Danes, Kate Winslet, and Cameron Diaz have been very qualified as actresses to oppose him as leading ladies, while his co-star in Grape, Johnny Depp, is equally maligned and underappreciated for also refusing to fear boundaries of time and gender.

Guys and Dolls (again)

Reservoir Dogs

The Lion King
Another Disney movie in which a jealous brother tries to take over the king's position by plotting against said king and his son. (See also Hercules). What's the solution here? I wish that I could say that women wouldn't do the same if they had that kind of power to covet from each other, but we've already been socialized to covet any kind of power that other women have as it is. Is it really our socialization, though, or is it inherent human behavior to seek power? If it's the former, then we should be able to work to overcome this kind of thing. If the latter ... well, then our intelligence must be good for nothing more than our survival in the wild.

Jurassic Park
Has anyone else noticed the similarities between the scene from this movie in which three of the humans take shelter behind a dead tree trunk during the Gallimimus stampede that wouldn't have taken place had not Dennis Nedry let out the Tyrannosaur and the scene from The Lion King in which Simba takes shelter on a dead tree branch during the wildebeest stampede that wouldn't have taken place had not Scar set the hyenas after the herd...?

We Don't Live Here Anymore
The construction of this otherwise probably common movie about two philadering academics and their at-home mom wives, who try to adapt to their husbands' inclinations, continually surprises the viewer enough to actually seem original - and yet looking back, a plot summary would sound positively insignificant. An intriguing film, surprisingly enough not easily resolved in one's mind.

William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Some suppose that Shakespeare invented the name "Jessica" for this play, the earliest known use of it. The fact that it's called a Jewish name and means "wealth" certainly supports that supposition. And the fact that it's become so popular, despite (or, rather, perhaps, because of) the characteristics of our namesake, says much about the culture that we have inherited from Shakespeare's day. As Shakespeare constructed her, she has no love for her father, leaving him, stealing from him, and renouncing his religion for that of his persecutors' to marry a man whom she, like the other women in the play, makes rich. This excellent representation of the work does a masterful job of capturing all of the conflicting circumstances which make a modern reading of it impossible to reduce to mere comedy or tragedy.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
A fascinating attempt to recreate with modern technology an old movie that almost perfectly succeeds - with any imperfections adding to its appeal. And yet it still improves upon the form, giving all of its female characters a much more active role in the events of the film - and yet keeping them slaves to their weaknesses, such as thoughtlessness, blindness, and attraction to undeserving and cocky but handsome men. The Wizard of Oz references bear at least a second viewing....

The Godfather

Le Petard {The Closet, 2001)
A French comedy with English subtitles about a "drag" of an accountant who pretends that he's gay in order to keep his job - unfortunately that play on words would only work in English - with Gerard Depardieu in a supporting role as a misogynist boor whose world turns just as much upside-down as the other guy's. Wonderfully cheeky, light humor, as one can expect from the French. Highly recommended. (And yet I must note that unfortunately, this movie depicts the accountant's ex-wife as a heartless, controlling, incompetent mother....)

Ray
Some aspects of this movie affected me at an inexplicably high level. Of course, I always enjoy multifaceted, difficult characters that don't appear to be all good or all bad. Those are not unusual in relatively neutral representations of real-life people and events, though (as opposed to something like Mommie Dearest). Ray was a misogynist, a womanizer, and a junkie (for a number of years anyway), but he was also a determined innovator in so many ways, and he did demonstrate adherence to his own brand of principles. The mode of presentation of the real-life man's story, though, WAS unusual. It was in many ways not chronological, so the viewers didn't understand the whole history behind everything for a while, which was a great way to get and keep them intrigued enough far enough into such a long movie to hold them in it until the end; it also broke up the narrative progression often enough to help accomplish the same thing. I particularly enjoyed the connection set up by Ray's recollections of the death of his brother between his use of his vision to see before his loss of it and his use of touch to see afterward. Perhaps best of all, though, Jamie Foxx's acting was absolutely incredible. He was Ray Charles Robinson throughout the film.

Citizen Kane
Odd, long, rather pointless in the end. Only interesting for the intriguing friendship between Kane and Jed Leland (which didn't get nearly enough treatment in the film, as far as I'm concerned), the scandalous similarities between Kane and William Randolph Hearst, and its unique (for that time) way of telling a story - that is, framed by the overall premise of the newspaper reporter's unsuccessful investigation into one detail of the late newspaper man's life - but a shaky premise at that. Also inconsistent at times.

The Woodsman
I rented and watched this movie because it's about a paroled sex offender, and one of the paper topics from which I'm letting my students choose this term is sex offender registries. It was worth my time, though. It was thought-provoking and well-acted. After the three movies that I've finished in the last two days, though, I need to see a comedy or something.

Shark Tale
I was shocked at the racial stereotypes rife in this movie. The opening sequence, with the fish that resembled taxi cabs speaking with heavy accents, made my jaw drop. Then we were treated to Will Smith's character, a materialistic young man from the South side who works at a "whale" wash (and yes, the movie even includes the song, "Car Wash"). His boss, played by Martin Scorsese, is "the Don" - a shark whose favorite son is a dumb brute, while his other son, the black sheep in the family, is a vegetarian; speaks in a nasal, relatively high-pitched voice; and enjoys (cross-)dressing as a dolphin. I wasn't sure whether to see the movie as mocking of those stereotypes or as reinforcing them, but in the end I leaned toward the latter. We wouldn't want our children to watch a satire, but a movie that depicts the good old familiar stand-by character (stereo)types and ridicules out-groups - that's a winner at the box office!

Dressed to Kill
I watched this movie for my research, but it's not exactly what I had in mind for that. It's easy to do a feminist reading of it, though. As is so typical, this movie, from the creator of "Carrie," is about the dangers of female sexuality. Both of the main female characters fantasize about rape, but they're not punished for that, for if they were actually raped, they would still not be in control of the sexual experience. The victim, on the other hand, is killed while returning for her forgotten wedding ring to the site of some extramarital lovemaking that the movie presents her as actually seeking to some extent. She is a mother, so of course she must be punished for doing anything for herself rather than for her son. She also bestows the gaze as much as she is subject to it in the actual presentation of the film, while we never share the other female lead's perspective. [Spoiler ahead.] The killer's actual motivation for punishing her is not her adulterousness, though, but the simple fact that she turns him on - which "turns on" his female personality, and then she kills. (Sex = female = danger, see.) The other female lead turns him on too, but she only does it at the bidding of another man - a police officer trying to break the first case - just as all of her other displays of sexuality in the movie are done only at the bidding of men, as she is a prostitute. It seemed strange to me that she never hit on another male lead who saved her life once or twice - until I realized that. And I was rather annoyed by the fact that what it turned out that the first female lead was writing down while perusing a painting in a museum was not anything particularly significant but a SHOPPING list, of all things. A great plot, though. Thought-provoking. And some comically bad lines and bad acting - which I sometimes find fabulously entertaining. This was one of those times.

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

The Incredibles

Yellow Asphalt

Maria, llena eres de gracia (Maria Full of Grace)

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Napoleon Dynamite

Vera Drake

Bride and Prejudice
Just like A&E's Pride and Prejudice, the Bollywood version successfully captures Jane Austen's fabulous combination of imperfect but endearing characters, humor and emotion, and scandal and daily life. Particularly valuable for me in this film - besides its highly entertaining resemblance to one of my all-time favorites, of course - was its masterful illustration of the tensions that the main character faced in seeking an equitable relationship with a partner - with the support of her father - who nevertheless allows his wife to do all of the "woman's work" in their home. And of course, its explosion of stereotypes and preconceived notions about India was delicious as well.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

In Good Company
Although a little slow, this movie was surprisingly good - particularly its overall realism, which I was certainly not expecting after the beginning. The only thing that really displeased me about it was the implication that a single mother cannot teach her son anything useful, since the young male lead, whose father left him and his mother when he was age four, actually said that no one had ever taught him anything worthwhile until the older male lead did. You can guess the tone of their relationship at the end. Then again, this entire movie, like Shark Tale, was rife with such cliches. In particular, the black-clad corporate basketball team, ruthless, unethical, and heartless in its drive to the basket on the court just as to high profits off it, stood out to me.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
This controversial movie based on the true story of a real-life serial killer, while technically very well done, actually changes a good number of the particulars, as I discovered later, thus casting Henry Lee Lucas in quite a rosy light (i.e. having some "moral" ground for some of his actions ... a little like Monster did for Aileen Wuornos) ... yet at the same time blaming his mother for all of the atrocities of his childhood (because we need to by sympathetic to serial killers, apparently, but not mothers). It also puts blame on his would-be girlfriend Becky's mother for Becky's childhood atrocities (physical and sexual abuse by her father), the trauma over which the two of them - Henry and Becky - bonded. And yet Becky had left her own daughter, Lorelei, with Becky's mother who supposedly consented to Becky's sexual abuse while Becky herself lives in Chicago with Henry and Otis, her brother (in real life her father), who would become Henry's partner in crime after a night out bonding over some prostitutes, whom Henry murders. The movie does not openly acknowledge that issue about Lorelei, however, instead choosing to emphasize Henry's mother forcing him as a child to wear a dress and watch her have sex with all sorts of men, even with his father in the house, which seems to result in him having an unavoidable and murderous reaction to the prospect of intercourse. Ah yes, it's a "Monster Mother" screwing up a man's sexuality again, with quite disastrous results - apparently to the tune of a hundred-some deaths, in real life. (Don't get me wrong: Henry's mother treated her son unspeakably, but a lot of other unspeakable things happened to him too, only a couple of which the movie even mentions - and even then it's still clear that it's constructing his motive as a direct result of his mother's behavior - nothing more, nothing less.)

Seeing Other People

Sex and the City Season 6 Part 2 Episodes 1-8 plus Bonus Disc
The beginning of this last part of the last season of the show seems to have gone too far in trying to ramp up the events in honor of the end of the show. It got to the point that some events, such as a sex video on the Internet and an accidental death by falling out a window, were treated briefly and basically strictly humorously in an almost dismissive way that was rather disturbing - and quite unusual for this show.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Finding Forrester

Marnie

Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother)

Dead Again

The Manchurian Candidate (2004 - again - twice)

The Eyes of Laura Mars

Team America: World Police

The Bourne Supremacy

Big Fish

eXistenZ

The Aviator
The opening scene of this movie surprised me with the realization that this movie, too, lends itself well to inclusion in my thesis. Howard Hughes was OCD, of course, but this film presents all of that obsession as stemming from one moment in his youth, when his mother bathed him - and the scene does raise Oedipal suspicions, of course - while warning him about typhus and Blacks. This representation of her as a racist is calculated to turn a modern audience against her immediately - and her son's later obsession with that moment, which interferes with his ability to function in society, solidifies that impression. No, Howard Hughes does not murder anyone, but he was clearly a genius - and yet his mental instability seemed to interfere with his contributions to society. Whatever he did, he did it because he overcame what his mother did to him - not because her warnings kept him alive and then his parents' money afforded him the luxury to live out his every whim and dream. But would someone so obsessive really only recollect one moment from his childhood? Should we not be troubled by his misogyny and disregard of others' needs instead of celebrating him in opposition to the denigration of his mother, who remains nameless and lifeless except for that one moment that returns over and over again to torment her son?

Grease (again)

Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride
Clever, funny. Very entertaining.

Coach Carter
At first it seemed as though it was going to be another sports movie - it even starred a lot of the same young actors that seem to be in all such movies these days - but the "urban" component surprised me with how close it hit to home for me, reminding me of the "old days" that I don't really want to remember. The fact that it was based on a true story probably helped imbue those scenes with enough realism to enable them to feel so familiar to me as well.

Birth
A really good movie. Strange, with an unexpectedly twisting plot and a thought-provoking conclusion. Incredible acting from the kid who plays the ten-year-old boy who is supposedly the reincarnation of Nicole Kidman's character's dead husband.

Alexander (2004)

Bride & Prejudice (again)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer: Part 2
Worse than the first one. More beautiful women in love with mediocre criminals, more on-screen gore, and almost nothing about Henry as a person. This director chose to pass up a moment in which Henry could've connected with another pretty young girl over their similar histories of getting completely screwed up by a Bad Mother too. Really just a snuff film this time.

De-Lovely

The Pacifier

Finding Neverland (twice)

eXistenZ (again, with my students this time - so actually twice more)

Sin City

Robots

U-571
It wasn't until halfway through this movie that I established, definitively, that I had seen it before. I had been getting a sense of deja vu all the way up to that point, but I couldn't be sure that it wasn't because so much of it was so cliche that it was the presence of all of those tropes that made it seem so familiar to me. And as stated in one of the special features on the DVD, "The story is the star of this movie."

Shi mian mai fu (House of Flying Daggers)
This movie, based upon the premise of a combination of Robin Hood and Romeo and Juliet, was interesting for the simultaneous challenge to and reaffirmation of gender roles that I've seen in every other Ziyi Zhang movie that I've watched as well. Nothing at all like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon either. Not to be missed.

Sideways

Hairspray
I originally watched this movie thinking that Divine acting the role of a mother might make it relevant to my research, but it's really not. Still, I love the way that the film depicted being oblivious to race and weight in judging others and oneself as obvious and natural. It draws attention to the fact that neither is usually the case ... but both should be.

Mulan II

Horem padem (Up and Down, 2004)

Monster-In-Law

The Wedding Date

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes from Burma

Alexander the Great (1956 - again)

National Geographic: Beyond the Movie: Alexander the Great: The Man Behind the Legend

Copycat

Rock School

Much Ado About Nothing (2003)

White Christmas

Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas

White Christmas (again)

Scrooged

American History X

Requiem for a Dream

plus one more just for fun

for a total of 130 movies, or one every 2.8 days!!



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(C) 2005 Jessica B. Burstrem