Summertime

This is a great Kate Hepburn movie. I love her freckled face and arms, her big blue eyes, her frizzy red hair and her energetic abandon. I love her as the sad, over principled, and overwhelmed "fancy secretary" on vacation in Venice. I've seen this a dozen times, and it's still fresh as a summer night, all romantic and colorful and cool. I love watching her fall in love, and tear herself away before the affair has time to cool down. Such a dear movie.

Rebel Without a Cause

James Dean: HOT. I liked seeing old Los Angeles, and the Griffith Observatory. I thought the characters were generally unsympathetic and that the story unravelled too slowly in some spots, and too quickly in others. I didn't buy that Dean and Wood fell so madly in love all in that one same day. And Plato's obvious homoerotic attachments were disturbing and creepy, although I can guess that was the idea. Did I mention James Dean was HOT?!

Lovely and Amazing

No one in this movie was either lovely or amazing. What a bunch of losers. Was I supposed to like them? The mother (Brenda Blethyn) was clearly over her head and out of control (getting liposuction? adopting an African American ten year old?), the actress was whiny, pouty, and not suited to Hollywood whatsoever, the older sister (Catherine Keener) just lame beyond words ("fuck off" and "fuck you" aren't clever, lady), and the adopted little girl a total brat. Can no one be accountable for their own actions? Can't anyone take some responsibility? Can't anyone see past themselves. Can anyone watch this movie and not gag?

ER: Season Two

I'm counting TV dvds because it's my blogspace and I'll do what I want. I got this set for Christmas, watched a couple, and then forgot that I hadn't watched them all. This was a happy discovery, because even though I've basically seen ER seasons 1-6 or so a million times, I still have missed a couple here and there, and wanted to follow it beginning to end. This is a pretty darn good season--better than season one, I think--because the pacing is up, the human interest versus hospital interest is in balance, and the cast is fabulous. George Clooney--good grief, your are freaking sexy. Smoldering. Yum. I love ER, and I can watch these over and over, they're just that good. This is the season when Dr. Lewis keeps her sister Chloe's baby (when the baby goes back to Chloe at the end I lose interest; actually, I don't like Dr. Lewis' personal story that much this year, snore). Also, Carter graduates, Benton keeps fighting the system, Ross falls in and out of touch with his dad, Hathaway dates Shep (shut up Shep, you annoy me), and Weaver comes on board. Oh, and Carter dates Emily Valentine. Oops, Harper Tracy. Whatever. She annoys me. Her and her red lipstick. The bonus features suck hardcore; a whole extra disc and only a handful of bloopers (there had to be more!) some lame deleted scenes, and a couple of dreary featurettes. Nothing noteworthy. Looking forward to season 3 and beyond.

Terms of Endearment

Okay, can I just say I love Shirley MacLaine. I'm glad I'd only ever seen one tiny snippet of this movie before, because that way it was all kind of new to me. I bet if I'd seen it in the 80s the way I'd seen, let's say Heartburn or something, that I'd be all in to it in a big way. Now I just kind of liked it. I didn't get too sucked in, and I didn't bawl when she died. (I actually had no idea she was going to die. Frankly when she did I didn't care because I didn't like her all that much. I didn't like any of them all that much. Except Jack Nicholson, because he was the only honest person around.) Anyhow. I'm glad I finally saw it. Now I can get over it.

Donnie Darko

I guess I wound up thinking Donnie Darko was good. Okay-ish. Not great. I think what happened was that I wanted to like it more than I did. I wanted to see the parts and bits that had been referenced by people so many times before and go "ah ha, so that's what they mean, oh, yeah, man, that's hilarious!" But that didn't happen. Sparkle Motion? What a downer. Who cares? I really like Jake Gyllenhaal, and Jena Malone, but otherwise I thought it was kind of boring. And long. And trapped between real and surreal just enough so that I didn't buy that it was either completely fake or completely plausible. The rabbit freaked me out. And at the end I just felt kind of hollow. Like, yeah, okay, I get it: People touch our lives and one moment can change things forever. I don't know...it was a downer.

Midnight Cowboy

This was NOTHING like what I'd expected. Was this revolutionary for its time? Drab. Plodding. Gritty in like a dingy way, not in an edgy way, I think. I craved external characters, because I got sick of the cowboy all the time. Dustin Hoffman was great, but he grossed me out. That apartment hovel squatters place grossed me out. The Cowboy grossed me out. I was happy this mess ended. Bummer, because I wanted to like it.