Movie madness
I spent the Christmas holiday weekend watching movies. I saw
Brokeback Mountain, King Kong, The Producers, and
Casanova in theaters, and watched the DVD of
Dark City three times (the DVD has two commentary tracks that I wanted to hear after my initial viewing). I'm glad to report that I enjoyed everything that I saw.
Brokeback Mountain featured great performances by Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams.
King Kong was quite a cinematic achievement. I think that Peter Jackson could have cut out some of the many encounters with frightening creatures on Skull Island, though. It's a long movie, so we could have done without at least one or two of those scenes. Each scene was impressively crafted, but there were so many of them that it got to be a little exhausting after a while. Plus, these scenes didn't really do anything to move the plot forward at all.
The Producers was a lot of fun. Some people might not like the fact that it's very old-fashioned, but I loved that it was a throwback to the big-screen musicals of old Hollywood. I'll almost certainly never get an opportunity to see Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane reprise their roles onstage, so at the very least this film captures their great, but ephemeral, Broadway performances on film for generations to come.
After
The Producers ended I sneaked into the theater that was about to show
Casanova. The cast was great, and the story was frothy fun, but for me the real star was Venice itself. I'll see any movie that is set in Venice, but it's always a nice bonus to see something that also happens to be enjoyable.
And as for
Dark City, it's been a favorite film of mine since it premiered in 1998 and I just wanted to see it again, so I borrowed the DVD from a co-worker.
Over the long weekend I also watched the 13-episode HBO series,
"Epitafios", in a couple marathon sessions. It was filmed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for HBO's Latin market, but was so well-done and so well-received that they decided to show it on their regular plain-old HBO channel (it seems like there are about 50 different HBO channels now). I was able to watch it via HBO On Demand (yet another HBO option). [
Note: "Epitafios" is currently being shown on the HBO Signature channel on Wednesday nights at 9:00pm EST.]
This show was exceptional. I only wish that I'd seen it when it was originally aired. For some reason they left episode #7 out of the On Demand queue, but at least I got to see the rest of them.
"Epitafios" was a very stylish thriller that gave me a genuine sense that anything could happen and that any characters could die at any moment. Usually when I watch a psychological drama about the hunt for a psychopathic serial killer I don't really worry very much about the main protagonists because of my certainty that they wouldn't/couldn't kill off a main character. But with
"Epitafios" I didn't really have any such comfort at any point of the entire miniseries. It kept me on edge from the beginning of the first episode to the closing scene of the finale.
I have to admit that the killings are a bit Byzantine in the elaborate planning and details that would be required, and it's rather unbelievable that anyone could be so accurate at predicting the actions and reactions of the other parties involved, but if you suspend a little of your disbelief you'll be able to enjoy the ride. There's one trait of the killer (besides being a homicidal maniac) that bothers me because it's been done in movies and on TV cop shows too many times before [
Hint: the folks at
GLAAD could give you a list of movies that have gone down this road before], but I didn't let that color my opinion about the show's many merits.
Be warned that if you can't handle
The Silence of the Lambs or any other movies that have Hannibal Lechter-like characters, you might have to look away from the screen at least once in each episode. This killer adds a sick sense of poetry to his murders, making them into macabre art installations with cryptic meanings.
Bravo to the writers, directors, cast, and crew! And thanks to HBO. I just heard that they're going to order a second season. I don't know how they'll manage it (perhaps a copycat killer), but when they've figured it all out and get it back on the air, I am
so there!
Posted by tonylagarto
at 12:22 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, 28 December 2005 4:46 PM EST