drama

Brokeback Mountain

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Brokeback Mountain. Focus Features 2005.

Before watching the movie:

Among this month’s selections I guess this isn’t the most widely watched. But I still consider it formative to my cohort. Everybody knew about the Gay Cowboy Movie. Many were not kind. But I think the fact that it existed, that it challenged masculine images, and came from a major studio with big name actors, affected our perspective, even if not all at once. The world was changing, and this was part of the background radiation in the course of that change. Almost two decades later, I don’t think anything about this premise seems nearly as controversial as it did back then. Is that representation in action? Is it the confirmation of culture warriors’ fears? Maybe it’s both, or maybe neither.

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(500) Days of Summer

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(500) Days of Summer. Watermark Productions 2009.

Before watching the movie:

This month I’m taking a look at movies that seem to have defined my generation but I missed anyway. So I’ll start off with one that’s been at the top of my list of movies I feel left out about for over a decade and a half.
All I really know about this movie is that it’s about a relationship, I think it goes badly, and it’s one of the defining movies of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character archetype, the millennial-coded hipster free spirit love icon. Also I know it as the movie that made it apparent that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to continue his acting career as an adult.

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Gigli

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Gigli. Columbia Pictures 2003.

Before watching the movie:

I have to confess that I thought this was a completely different kind of movie. I thought it was a carefree European romcom somehow that everyone hated for some reason. I thought it was in Paris, I thought Gigli was the girl’s name, and I didn’t really know anything else. Both of those things were wrong. In preparing to watch I have discovered that it’s more of a seamy crime comedy I guess? I wonder if I was mixing it up with another romantic comedy. I highly doubt it was Surviving Christmas. Probably Gigi.

Picking out posters, I do think that the marketing was partly to blame, at least what marketing I saw with the media I had access to in 2003 for an R-rated movie.

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A Chorus Line

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A Chorus Line. PolyGram Pictures 1985.

Before watching the movie:

When I think of classic musicals, this is one of the first ones that comes to mind. So I was a bit surprised to see the movie came out in 1985, when I always assumed it was one of the highlights of the musical trend of the 60s-70s. It turns out that it did open on stage in 1975, it just took a while to get made for the screen. My original criteria for “classic musical” was nothing from after 1980, which is why it wasn’t in my last series of classic musicals. But this feels more of a different age of musicals than what I consider to be modern musicals (though I guess shows from after sometime in the 2000s are by now yet another category from what I’m getting at).

I don’t really know much beyond “I Hope I Get It”, so I know that it’s about musical performers desperate for jobs, so I expect a lot of diegetic numbers. I don’t really have an idea of the shape of a plot, if there even is much of one.

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Soylent Green

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Soylent Green. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer 1973.

Before watching the movie:

Maybe the only thing most people know about this movie is the big reveal. It’s probably more spoiled than Citizen Kane but less than Darth Vader’s true identity. So what else do I know about it? Well, there’s a lot of other colors Soylent comes in, and Green is the newest. I think before I saw the poster just now I could’ve said we’ve already passed the future date of the movie.

I do have to say that naming a real life nutrition company “Soylent” after the fictional megacorporation committing brain-breaking sins against humanity is one of the most direct examples of geniuses who missed the point of their favorite story deciding to build the Torment Nexus.

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The Final Cut

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The Final Cut. Lions Gate Films 2004.

Before watching the movie:

When I decided to do a month of sci-fi movies I feel like I should have already seen, I didn’t realize that all of the greats were going to be from the 70s or that they’d be experimental and transgressive to the point that I’d start to feel like maybe I hate movies. I only knew that I had to include this movie that I was aware of from almost the time it was published and came very close to watching several times but always pulled back for some reason. Maybe because I was afraid it was going to be too disturbing, maybe because I had it a little mixed up with One Hour Photo, another Robin Williams drama from about the same time.

Robin Williams was the first actor I decided to search for and watch everything that came up, though I started to question that decision when I saw Jakob The Liar, and I ended up leaving a lot of what already existed at the time unseen. I’ve since closed that gap a little bit, but this one, which should be exactly in my wheelhouse even if it’s not a comedy, since it’s a sci-fi story speculating on the mind and perception, I stayed away from, because I was worried about what secret from his past the character was going to be unsettled by.

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The Man Who Fell to Earth

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The Man Who Fell to Earth. British Lion Films 1976.

Before watching the movie:

Once again I’m realizing I know even less about this than I realized. I had some inkling of a story about an alien landing on earth played by David Bowie, but I think more of the details are from Ziggy Stardust. Turns out Bowie didn’t even end up contributing music to this movie. I believe I recall being told something about the story, but I can’t recall anything more than what’s told by the title. From the summary I’ve glanced at now, it looks like what I was told would’ve glossed over a lot to make it appropriate for the age I was when it was discussed.

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THX 1138

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THX 1138. American Zoetrope 1971.

Before watching the movie:

So, this is George Lucas’s big debut feature, before his career became all about chasing/maintaining the success of Star Wars. Thanks to Lucasfilm naming their theater optimization standard after this film, it may have one of the highest ratios of name drops to proper discussion of the content in all of cinema. All I know is some vague idea of being dystopic.

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Silent Running

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Silent Running. Universal 1972.

Before watching the movie:

I have seen a portion of this movie before. I think it was accidentally recorded off the air as the lead in to what was actually supposed to be on the tape. I try not to directly spoil the movies I review here so I will not describe the turn of the very very last scene that I saw, but it was so disturbing, especially without context, that I vividly remember it  even now, decades later. Any readers who have seen this movie will understand what I’m referring to. The little I’ve learned since has only reaffirmed my understanding of it as a very melancholy, very 70s movie.

However, my striking personal memory only made me more determined after starting this blog that it had to be one to review here eventually. I came to that ending without context and it was distressing but also very confusing, and much like the less spoiler-averse people in my life, even knowing where it ends, I want to see how it gets there.

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28 Days Later

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28 Days Later. DNA Films 2002.

Before watching the movie:

The one thing I know about this movie is I’m pretty sure it’s the standard-setter for modern “fast zombies”. I don’t consider myself a horror fan, so I wasn’t that interested at the time. Now I’m doing a zombies month and dip into horror a few times a year on this blog so I guess my tastes have expanded, but it’s still not one of my top genres.

Looks like a lot of wasteland-type zombies, maybe similar to I Am Legend, which was a zombie movie even if the look in that one was more like vampires.

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