(no subject)

[proximoception]

Movies I love but my fiancee does not:

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: apparently a not uncommon gender split?
The Big Lebowski: I think John Goodman's character annoyed her too much
eXistenZ: she admits it's objectively excellent but dislikes the ickiness
Titus: couldn't get over the nightmarish twig hands
Andrei Rublev: she couldn't get even halfway through because of the hurt animals
l'Avventura: she was too affected by it
Eyes Wide Shut: dirty old man issue
7-Up series: perhaps she's still too new to them, or I'd given away too much
Top Secret: go figure

She has little patience for Terrence Malick movies, though I suspect she'd like Badlands--and Days of Heaven, the print of which had audio problems, if she'd just give it another chance.

Movies I thought I loved but, after showing them to her, had to agree they really weren't such a big deal after all:

The Parallax View
Shadow of a Doubt
Hud

I won her over on Lost Highway and The Ninth Gate, which she'd seen ages before and disliked. We haven't yet watched AI together--she found it silly, like many did. We broke off The Wire, Season 1 against my will because it was making her too unhappy, despite her admiration for it. I think she had a similar reaction to The Edge, liking it but not wanting to remember it.

Among movies I intemperately loathe, she liked Juno, Dogville and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Ladykillers (later) impressed her but left me pretty indifferent.

Point being, these are the only times I remember us disagreeing even a little. And I think I remember all of them: it makes us unhappy to not agree, somehow. Because of the rarity, or is the rarity because we reach for a middle ground of taste in order to avoid unhappy disagreement? Probably not so much the latter, is my feeling, especially on my end--my passionate reactions tend to be inflexible. And I think it's quite rare for her to agree with me just to shut me up, though not unheard of.

Some of her favorite movies are The Glass Menagerie (earlier), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Chinatown, Scenes from a Marriage, Glengarry Glenn Ross, Dersu Uzala, Chicago, It's a Wonderful Life, Waiting for Guffman. I agree about all those--I did run out of interest in Chicago and Wonderful Life after the third or fourth viewings but can't deny they're very good. She loves Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut.

She introduced me to the sublimity of The Warriors and Watcher in the Woods, I her to Road House. We both already knew about Showgirls and The Doors.

Comments

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i'm hoping that's not the mamet the edge you're referring to.
that movie is so much the worst movie my friends & i have seen that it has become a standard term of reference for bad things (a la root canals).

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, love it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Not that anything can be done against resistance so dental, but here's something I wrote on a discussion board explaining the last line and what I love about the movie:

Here's my take. The pilot died trying to save all of them from crashing. Perrineau died saving the leads' lives in the sense that they were able to run away while he was being eaten; the tribute's including him has some irony to it, though he was a genuinely nice guy and knowing him may have helped save the billionaire in some sense. Baldwin saved Hopkins' life at the waterfall, and this is very important to him, look at his face in the scene after. The crucial plot strand of the movie is the billionaire's discovery of a noble meaning in his life: to save the man who saved him; then persisting in this effort despite that man's later trying to kill him. The unworthiness of the object doesn't destroy what he's found in being a loyal friend. Call it existentialism if you want. Baldwin is touched by it while dying, and reaches out as well as he's able, in words. They've both discovered the proper way to be. Hopkins has a chance of holding onto it in civilization, if a slim one. But at any rate the photographer saved his life during this trip, and died during it. Saved his life at the waterfall, instinctively or to save his own; but saved his Life by being someone to work with, care for, save. Beautiful movie.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

indeed.

and certainly from looking at imdb there are plenty of people who enjoyed it (although not enough to get it rated higher than 6.6 thank god). i couldn't speak too much to its flaws without (god help me) seeing it again, but i loved the moment where harold perrineau decided he would stab himself in the leg just for the hell of it. and it's not that i have anything against mamet, he's just incredibly inconsistent. i enjoy some of his plays, and state and main was entertaining, but as another example, ronin was garbage, and he had deniro, jean reno, jonathan pryce, stellan skarsgård, and sean bean to work with.

as someone else put it "Ronin is a genuine achievement and should be compulsory subject matter in every film school programme, for it is one of the few movies in the history of the medium to have no plot whatsoever and still be allowed to waste millions of dollars on cast, stunts, and locations."

and someone else on the edge:
"From the first scene, at the airport, the situation between Hopkins, McPherson and Baldwin was obvious. Having seen the trailer, I knew the two men would soon find themselves alone in the wild woods facing a hungry bear. When they did, after 30 minutes or so, I waited for those Mametian twists and turns. But they never came. Hopkins found evidence for adultery, but it was soon clear that the Hopkins character was too good to kill Baldwin, while the Baldwin character was too weak to kill Hopkins. So the whole film, including the ending, was predictable."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Sometimes more to life, and plots, than knowing who's to kill whom. Only sometimes. Ronin was a rewrite for money, wasn't it? But I recall enjoying it on its own relaxedly rocket-launching terms--not Wag the Dog, which was obvious (at what it was interested in) and uninspired.

Best Mamet movies are from his plays. The other ones he directs himself are all good, but seem to be variations on the same plot. And recently he's gone mad, of course--man needs to rewatch his own Homicide a few hundred times.