Culturally Speaking #75: A Series of Mini-Reviews

by Sarah Stodola

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I joined Netlfix recently...

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I really wanted to love The Squid and the Whale. It was filmed near my apartment in Brooklyn. And I love Brooklyn, so I wanted to love this movie. But in the end, all I can manage to say is that I liked it okay. Although, whoever did the costume design deserves an Oscar for so accurately recreating the more hideous elements of 80s fashion.

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Robin Wright Penn's short performance in the movie Nine Lives ranks as one of the best I've ever seen. The film consists of nine vignettes from nine different women's lives. Wright Penn's character's vignette has her bumping into an (the) old boyfriend in a supermarket. The vignette happens in real time, and the affect is rivetting. It has me convinced that Robin Wright Penn might currently be the best actor in the world (even a world with her husband in it). Some of the other vignettes of Nine Lives are quite good, as well, but nothing else approaches the quality of the supermarket scene, and the movie is worth watching just for that.

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Speaking of great acting performances, I watched On the Waterfront for the first time last weekend, and I finally get the universal Brando obsession. The movie itself seems only a little dated for one that was released in the 1950s. But Brando's performance has not dated one bit, and his struggles, especially with the female lead (Eva Marie Saint) and his brother(Rod Steiger), will tear your heart out.

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I've also been watching the first season of The Real World. Boy did they manage screw that show up in the long run.

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DiG! was really good too.

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Grizzly Man just made me sad. I know that a lot of people found it hilarious, but I just left the theater my couch feeling depressed about how people can be so impossible to deal with that one person found grizzly bears more amiable.

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Movies I did not like: Rent, Proof, The Constant Gardener, Farewell My Concubine, Girl Interrupted.

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When I'm not watching movies, sometimes I read, and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is the best thing I've read in a long while (since London Fields). I was skeptical, since it's written by a fairly old woman about events that generally only happen in the lives of old people, but she proved me wrong. I suppose it's the sign of a great writer, when one can take a series of highly personal and singular events and make them universal.

Click here for the last Culturally Speaking.

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Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted here.

© 2005 Me Three