Three flicks. One good, one bad and one ugly (or not entirely bad, but just sort of lame). The good movie this month, surprisingly, was Babel (a more obvious choice would've been Borat, but...) A sometimes fan of Alejandro González Iñárritu, this film was layered, subtle and as good as his second feature. The bad: Crispin "Hellion" Glover's What Is It? We saw this film, as well as Glover's Big Slide Show performance, at Anthology last week. While Glover compared himself to the likes of Bunuel and Herzog, he came across more like P.T. Barnum. Employing (I use that term loosely since I don't think he actually paid them) subjects with Down Syndrome and a range of other physical and mental abnormalities, Glover was really trying to be cutting edge, but the final product was just embarrassingly bad (sort of the same effect as changing one's middle name to Hellion... ahem). The ugly (or not great, just so-so) was, hesitantly, The Queen. Dame Helen Mirren was the only thing that carried this film along, as she always does. Not intending to see this film at the theater, we went because it got 98% on rottentomatoes. We got burned. Watching the royal family squirm in modern society was fun, but the fact that it only portrayed Elizabeth in a one-week glance was an odd script decision. This queen has seen so much in her lifetime as monarch. To center the entire film around Princess Di was... well, lame. Again, it wasn't a terrible film (it was Frears, after all), it just wasn't necessary to see it on the big screen - really more of a TV movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment