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A cautionary tale from 2004. It ain't over until it's over, kids...

I finally bit the bullet and boxed/bagged up our VHS tape collection. Our VCR is disconnected and even before that happened, we weren't actually watching our tapes.

In memoriam...

Movies we had on tape

Mighty Aphrodite
The Fifth Element
Shirley Valentine
Star Wars: A New Hope
Say Anything
Legally Blonde
South Park
Being John Malkovich
Mystic Pizza
Clueless
Pulp Fiction
Slacker
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
When Harry Met Sally
Lawrence of Arablie
Akira
Like Water for Chocolate
Tales of the City
Say Anything
Toy Story
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Mulan
Red Dwarf
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Godfather (Widescreen Edition)
The Graduate
High Fidelity
Singles
The Mind's Eye
Beloxi Blues
The Usual Suspects
Bowfinger
Goldmember
Truly Madly Deeply
Waynes World
Breakfast at Tiffany's
To Play the King
American Pie
Devil Hunter Yohko 2,3 & 4-Ever
Fawlty Towers
BioHunter
Buena Vista Social Club
Ren & Stimpy Show vol 1
Absolutely Fabulous Series 2
An Affair to Remember
Company - Original Cast Album Documentary
The Wedding Singer
Five Corners
Go
Next Stop Wonderland
The Full Monty
Supercop
All About My Mother
200 Cigarettes
Shrek
History of the World Part 1
Casino Royale
Eyes on the Prize
Sex and the City
Boogie Nights
My Cousin Vinnie
Austin Powers International Man of Mystery
Army of Darkness
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Darkman
Pee-Wee's Playhouse
Parliament Funkadelic: One Nation Under a Groove
Total Recall
Pride and Prejudice (miniseries)
Real Genius
Time Bandits
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Addams Family Values
The Critic
The Godfather Part II
Healthy Bread Baking (must have come with the breadmaker, another sore subject)
Being John Malkovich
Wizard of Oz
Sidekicks
POV: Blacks and Jews
Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers
Independent Lens: The Political Dr. Seuss
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
An episode of "24"
The Tick

But I cannot get rid of: My Fast Show tapes (maybe I'll buy that 7-DVD set from the UK?)

(Contains spoilers)

I saw the new movie version of the musical Sweeney Todd last night. Overall, I was pleasantly (though perhaps that word seems odd, given the grim subject matter!) surprised at how well it turned out. The actors sang well and looked the part(s), the imagery was great (Tim Burton was born to film this!), there were still elements of the grim humor that's such an important part of the show (though at times, my father and I were the only ones laughing)

The acting was superb. Although all the actors looked younger than I'm used to seeing in those roles (Johnny Depp may be in his 40s, but he still looks like a college student to me), they inhabited their characters fully.

Helena Bonham Carter was fabulously creepy too -- looked like a broken China doll. The "Down By The Sea" scene was funny and sad at the same time.

There were other nice touches, like the scene when Anthony first sees Joanna and sings to her. Judge Turpin notices this, invites the boy in, and then proceeds to have Beadle Banford beat the **** out of him to discourage him from further wooing. Anthony picks himself off the ground in the alley, wipes the blood off his face, and resumes singing, but with a gleam in his eye. He's in love, yes, but boy is he pissed off. It's a mirror of Sweeney Todd's victimization, rage, and determination to get even, and it works very well in the movie.

Unfortunately, they did have to leave out some of the original show in order to make this a reasonably short film (two hours as opposed to three.) Some of the omissions were understandable and didn't make that much of a difference, but in other cases, well... for example, I missed the beggar woman's obscene rhymes ("Hey, hoy, sailor boy, want it snugly harbored? Open me gates but dock it straight, I see it lists to starboard!"), Michael missed "Kiss Me", the duet between Anthony and Joanna, and we both regretted the lack of "More Pies Please/God That's Good." (It was in there in a truncated form.)

Many people have given this movie negative reviews, and I think the problem comes in towards the end. In the stage musical, there is the same piling up of corpses, and the final tragedy, when Sweeney realizes what he's done and Toby kills him for killing Mrs. Lovett. However, as my mother put it, the chorus that introduces and ends the musical on stage acts as a way to distance yourself from the violence. It's a reminder that we're watching the modern equivalent of a Greek tragedy, and a bit of a relief, one which is totally denied here. The absolute last scene is visually and emotionally grim and devastating, and unrelievedly over the top. There's something about having all the actors get back up and take their bows, even when they're covered in blood...

Still, overall I thought it was a good movie and I'll probably get the DVD (I may just skip the last few minutes!)

...Which is too bad, as it's one of my favorite novels.

However, it sounds like they totally schmaltzed it to death.

The film gently waves back and forth in time between a high society wedding in 1954 (according to the novel) and the present day when Vanessa Redgrave is dying, while her daughters, played by Richardson and Collette, are in a melancholy deathwatch, trying to find time to get everything said when both time and their mother’s mental clarity are in decidedly short supply.

While the woman fades to black in her deathbed, she remembers that wedding so long ago, when she had an idyll with the great love of her life that turned out, in its consequences, to be more bitter than she’d ever have guessed.

Redgrave’s younger self is played by Claire Danes, as a nightclub singer of ambiguous ability (my vote is no, if you must know, as much as I’ve always loved Claire Danes). She’s a faithful maid of honor at her wealthy best friend’s wedding. With an advanced case of the prenuptial jitters, the prospective bride is momentarily paralyzed by the fact that she’s really in love with the son of one of the family’s loyal retainers (who has grown up to be a dashing doctor).

Danes the bridesmaid is in love with him, too. So, it seems, is the bride’s drunken and painfully closeted brother, played ridiculously with nothing that resembles libido by Hugh Dancy.

And Michael Cunningham was partially responsible. What a shame.

This script is literary in the very worst way. You may not really appreciate how very good these actors are until you hear them keep this movie afloat — barely — with dialogue that should never have left the page (watch, for instance, as Toni Collette uses the word “metamorphose” in a putatively intimate conversation and gets away with it. THAT, so help me, is an actress.)

What the heck happened? The original book was certainly emotional, but Minot was good at cutting away at the right time and not over-explaining things. Plus, part of the whole point was that the main character didn't go for heart-to-heart talks with anyone - and went to her grave avoiding them, with one exception -- the man she hasn't seen in 40 years -- and that's just in her head.

In fact, most of the action takes place in her memory or in her imagination. Maybe it's difficult to dramatize that.

And what are all these bizarre love triangles? Why over-complicate things? The book does talk about her previous relationships as well as her marriages after that fateful weekend. Again, was that just too hard to show?

Oh well... on the plus side, Michael will be happy to know I won't make him watch it!

At least the movie version of A Very Long Engagement was nearly as good as the book. See, Hollywood people? It CAN be done!

Some movies I've seen recently that I really enjoyed:

Thank You For Smoking: Wicked satirical humor. My favorite scene is the one where the three lobbyist buddies argue about which of their clients is the most lethal to the American public.

Friends With Money: Not a lot happens, exactly, but the acting and dialogue are wonderful, and somehow very true to life.

V For Vendetta: I forgive the Wachowsky brothers for Matrices parts 2 and 3. I actually liked this film a heckofalot better than the widely praised first Matrix. The political commentary is timely (and not overdone), and there's a fairy-tale element (Brothers Grimm, not Disney) to it as well that gives it some emotional resonance.

Three good movies! Go figure!

Recently, King Yen on Piedmont Avenue was sold, and has now become Holly's Madarin. A friend called me and raved about how fabulous the meal she had there was, so naturally, I had to try it. We went on Friday, a couple days after they opened, and ordered won ton soup, chicken salad, Yu Shiang chicken and stir-fried green beans. They offer a choice of white or brown rice, a nice touch.

The won ton soup: nice light broth, not too salty, with lighter-than air won tons floating in it and some fresh spinach leaves. One of the best won ton soups I think I've ever had.

The chicken salad: barely qualified as salad. Deep-fried pieces of chicken arranged over a bed of iceberg lettuce dressed with a vinagrette and some ground peanuts, and garnished with what looked like a couple of maraschino cherries. The chicken was nicely fried but flavorless. Not what I was expecting at all, and not something I'd be likely to order again. (When they asked how we were enjoying our meal, I expressed my ambivalence about the salad, and they said that it's a similar recipe to one at Uncle Yu's, where the new owner used to work, and that it was a top seller there. No accounting for taste, I suppose.)

The Yu Shiang chicken: julienned carrots and some other vegetables I didn't recognize (was seaweed in the mix?) combined with strips of chicken. Nice spicy sauce. I liked this one a lot.

The green beans: also nicely spiced, not too salty, with flecks of chili and crunchy beans.

Overall, I was happy with what we got and would definitely go again — and I'll definitely be getting that won ton soup!

After dinner, we rented Crash. The same friend who had told me about Holly's had told me how much she enjoyed this film. Sadly, I didn't share her high opinion. The cast was good and it was definitely an interesting movie, but not especially enjoyable. It felt rather contrived to me — so many scenes of person of racial group A encountering person of racial group B and within two minutes, saying something very cartoonishly stereotypical.

Maybe that's part of the reason I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain so much — far less dialogue, with many scenes having no conversation whatsoever!

Saw Brokeback Mountain (which I haven't been able to stop referring to as "Bareback Mountain")