Nora's movie months

Because we have Netflix, and because with Netflix you can choose to stream some of their movies on your computer or X-Box, we've been watching more movies than usual lately, once Liam is asleep.

Here are my brief reviews and recommendations (and sometimes more importantly, my NOT recommendations) in case you also want to watch a new movie almost every night like we were doing for a while.


ROLE MODELS: Duh. Paul Rudd is in it. Of course I'm more inclined to like it because he's so ridiculously adorable and I want to snuggle him and sing 80's sitcom theme songs with him in the rain. BUT? If that ten-year-old boy wasn't such a potty mouth, would it have been so inappropriately funny? Well. I do like laughing at LARPers.

YPF: The full title of this movie is Young People F**king. Yes, really. If you don't mind watching people (four couples and one trio, YES REALLY) progress from foreplay to the "afterglow" (with nudity) and you don't mind a mildly amusing movie being mostly pointless, go ahead and watch it instantly. But don't waste a DVD rental on it and don't watch it with your kids or parents around.


THE PUFFY CHAIR: YES. YES, watch this movie because I LOVED it and I haven't LOVED a movie fully in a loooong, loooooong time. This is a low-budget independent film that relies on dialogue instead of circumstance/stunts/boobs to drive it, and it was well-done, well-acted, realistic, and well worth your time. Please watch it and please love it.

QUIET CITY: I only chose this one for its name, because I am the original Quiet City and this movie keeps coming up in my Google alerts. UGH. I hated it. I'm sorry. I wanted to like it. This was another one that relied on somewhat improvised dialogue to drive it but NOTHING EVER HAPPENED. The dialogue didn't drive it anywhere and pretty skyline shots will only go so far.

WEDDING DAZE. I should have known. I should have known not to watch a movie starring Jason Biggs and Isla Fisher, but I did it. And OH MY BONES was it awful. Just awful. Just stupid and not funny and awful. I want to puke on it. Puke on it and set it on fire.

MY SUMMER OF LOVE: Eh. Whole lotta nothing going on here despite the attempt at portraying a spontaneous and passionate friendship between two high school girls. It could have been good, but it wasn't.

SMART PEOPLE: Oh, how I hated this movie. It was forced and I didn't believe a second of it.

TEETH: I honestly didn't know what to think of this movie while I was watching it and for most the the following day. I'm taking a deep breath here before I talk about it. And I'm going to censor some words so that searches for certain words won't land on my blog. Ready? It's about a high school student who's taken a vow of pre-marital celibacy and when she's sexu@lly violated she finds that her vag!na, which she knows NOTHING about, has teeth in it. And these teeth bite off the offender's wee-wee. And through the course of the movie she goes on to be violated by a male gynecologist (who loses fingers), a classmate and her step-brother. Sounds crazy, right? It was. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I guess this "feminist horror movie" has made a lot of waves- but I still can't find a guy that's seen it actually liked it. Wonder why...

THE BIG, BAD SWIM: Eh. Also pretty boring. It's the intertwining lives of the members and instructor of an adult swim class, and yawn.

CHOKE: I was really excited about this movie because I so adore the book by Chuck Palahniuk. And it was not a bad movie. It was a good movie. I can't help but compare the two, though, and I don't think the movie was good enough. I did, however, think the choices of Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston and Kelly MacDonald in the lead roles were perfect.

THE ILLUSIONIST: This was pretty good. Nothing special or pressing for me to say about it, but I do recommend it.

BAGHEAD: YES. Written and directed by the Duplass Brothers (responsible for The Puffy Chair), this was both very funny and pretty scary. Four friends take to the woods to write a film they can take on the festival curcuit, while a mysterious man who wears a bag over his head creeps through the trees around them... dun dun DUN! Watch it.

Some examples of what's waiting in our queue (instant and DVD) that I'm looking forward to:
Persepolis
Milk
Rachel Getting Married
Lars and the Real Girl
Frost/Nixon
W.
The Triplets of Belleville
Conversations with Other Women
Alice
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
One to Another