Girl Detective

#57 in my movie challenge for the year was Wrath of Khan. My husband has joked that he married me even though I’d never seen this. Having befriended and dated geeks, though, I knew all the basic points. I was surprised to find Kirk’s “Khan!” not nearly as drawn out as it is in parody. Bad hair, bad wigs, bad costumes. Weirdly smooth pecs on Ricardo Montalban. Like many things geeks hold dear, its impact is not as strong for those of us who come to it later in life.

Not bad, but hardly epic.

#56 in my movie challenge for the year was Happy Accidents, a weird indie mystery/romance from 2000. Marisa Tomei (who with red hair bears a startling resemblance to one of my friends from college) starts dating Vincent D’onofrio, who may or may not be from the future.

Funny, kooky and sweet.

#55 in my movie challenge for the year was Spike Lee’s Inside Man. A solid thriller with a great cast, I found it oddly charming.

#54 in my movie challenge was Anchorman. Will Ferrell is funny, but it is (again) Steve Carell who makes this movie worthwhile. The humor was of the bizarre, often painful kind, but there was enough wacky charm to make me like the movie, in spite of its excesses.

#53 in my movie challenge was Bruce Almighty. Borrowed from the library when I read that a sequel, Evan Almighty, will star Steve Carell, the only reason to watch this fairly awful movie.

#52 in my movie challenge for the year was The Ref. My husband G. Grod chose this Chrismas flick instead of a feel-good holiday classic like It’s a Wonderful Life or The Shop Around the Corner. A thief (Denis Leary) takes a bickering couple hostage on Christmas Eve. Life lessons are learned. Leary is funny, though a bit too nobly wise. I suspect he was trying to emulate Bogart in To Have and Have Not, as a good guy with flexible ethics and a drunk partner.

Funny enough.

(Weird fact about me: I’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life. As a child, I watched the Marlo Thomas remake, with Trapper John as her husband. Years later, when a friend described It’s a Wonderful Life, I realized I’d been watching a remake, then never got around to seeing the original.)

# 51 in my movie challenge for the year. Yet another date night, and we managed to do both dinner and a movie, because the pizza at the newest Punch is ridiculously quick, and decent to boot. My husband G. Grod’s and my second date was Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan’s debut as Bond. It wasn’t great, but we’ve gone on these eleven years to have a pretty decent relationship in spite of merely OK movies on our first and second dates. (The first was Get Shorty.) But Casino Royale was something I wasn’t expecting: a very good Bond movie. It was fun to watch, it didn’t rely overmuch on gadgets, it had a nice homage to a classic Aston Martin, and it gave Judi Dench a good number of scenes in which to chew up the screen. Daniel Craig makes a very good Bond. He’s fit, he’s handsome, he’s a good actor. My only complaint is that he’s yet a bit long in the tooth to be playing the early-career Bond from this story. But I think it’s a problem inherent in the character. By the time an actor has enough panache to play the worldly Bond, they’re old enough that the three year gap between movies means for a quick obsolescence.

Oh, ouch. Craig is almost the exact same age as I am, even a few days younger. Then again, I’m just a midwestern American mother of two; I have no plans to appear as an action hero anytime soon.

The last two films we’ve borrowed from the library were Hero and Ong Bak. Yet they don’t make my movie challenge for the year, because I was unable to stay awake through either of them. What I saw was pretty (Hero) and fun to watch (Ong Bak) but both were long, and without strong narrative lines. My husband G. Grod enjoyed them for what they were, though.

#49 in my movie challenge for the year was Mysterious Skin, based on the novel by Scott Heim. I do movie and book challenges to remind myself of what’s important, and to show it’s possible to have small kids and still find time to read and watch movies. It’s not easy, and many things go undone (our house is messy; we’ve all but given up on our yard), but it can be done.

I liked but didn’t love the book when I read it last year, and I felt similarly about the movie. It was a good, faithful adaptation of the book. Joseph Gordon Levitt was mesmerizing in the role of Neil, a young, small-town hustler. There’s rough, graphic sex and child abuse in the movie, so this is not for the faint of heart. But it is a well-done indie that handles tough subjects well, and has strong performances.

#55 in my book challenge for the year is The Film Snob’s Dictionary by David Kamp and Lawrence Levi. A slim volume packed with definitions of key phrases, films, and people beloved by so-called Film Snobs. The book not-so-gently mocks Film Snobs, and takes pleasure in knocking down some of their sacred cows. It’s a weird conceit, since it’s not a compendium of actual good things, but rather things that some people think are good and that authors sometimes agree with, or sometimes not. For example, there is no Truffaut entry but there is one for Office Space, a film that only snobs “get”. While of dubious utility unless you’re soon to be attending a gathering of Film Snobs, it is clever, entertaining and informative. Its short entries make it an idea bathroom book.

#48 in my movie challenge for the year was our first family movie, Cars. All four of us went! Drake sat on G. Grod’s lap, and I had baby Guppy in the sling, where he mostly slept. Drake was attentive for the first hour, and rather wiggly but OK for the second. Cars was a long movie to pick as his first theater experience, but he did great. He mentioned popcorn several times the next day, and his Lightning McQueen and Sally cereal-box cars have been favorites ever since. I really enjoyed the movie as well. The animation was well done and I liked how the characters looked like the actors who voiced them. I thought it was a sweet story that wasn’t saccharine, and I only wish Owen Wilson could find a live action movie role so good.