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Thu Nov 02 2023 16:09 October Film Roundup:
- His Excellency (1952): This film seems a bit spiteful with its "fine, YOU run the colonies, ya lousy working class" attitude. It's also not very funny. An Ealing disappointment.
- The Admirable Crichton (1957): Another class-conscious comedy of manners, less realistic but funnier than His Excellency. There's an act break in this movie where British people decide to upend class conventions because the alternative is certain death, and I gotta say, that act break is doing a lot of work.
- When Harry Met Sally (1989): Sumana and I both loved this canonical rom-com, from the serially foiled meet-cutes to the heartwarming ending. Carrie Fisher is a hoot in a supporting role and really sells her comedy; she does something tiny like dog-ear a corner of an index card and I crack up.
- Contact (1997): This is a good movie but I thought it was way too slow. Robert Zemeckis probably would have paced it a little faster if the very famous and beloved screenwriters hadn't been so heavily involved. As it is, it ends up at two-and-a-half hours. Who has time for that? Movies should be 90 minutes long!
I dunno, it's probably fine. The early scenes in Arecibo and at the VLA are the ones that could most easily be cut, and those were quite fun. Lots of driving up in Jeeps like this is Jurassic Park. Contact also really shoved in my face how heavily Hollywood movies use old family photos as a narrative device. I knew about this before, of course, but now I can't let it pass by. My mind always fixes on it. However, I've watched a grand total of two movies since then, so maybe it'll fade.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): I watched this on an airplane, which is realistically the only way I was gonna see it, but the tiny screen foiled the main reason I wanted to see this movie, which was to catch all the little background references. But after skimming a few "We Found Every Easter Egg In The Super Mario Bros. Movie And Put A Bunch of Ads On The Page" websites, I don't think I missed very much. I did like the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning reference and the doomer Luma.
Unfortunately this movie has a running time of 92 minutes, which is way too short for on a boring plane ride, so I also watched...
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): Yes, two and a half hours of nonsensical action. The perfect length for a movie. The opening set piece was great. The artifact was great. Evil Werner von Braun was great...ly evil. The ending was great. Not the very end, that sucked, but the ending Indy thought he was getting before the final fake-out. In between: nonsensical action as the miles slipped away beneath my feet.
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