Day: May 10, 2015

If you have little tolerance for make-up-breakup relationships this is not a movie for you.  But if you like mostly improvised movies that don’t employ a lot of dialogue about the fragility of relationships, you will be as enchanted as I was.  Much like Drinking Buddies, this movie stuck with me for days afterward and I highly recommend it, assuming you meet the above qualifications.

Cost: Free from library.  One of those “why not?” movies.
Where watched: at home.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2011/like_crazy.html

I’ve been waiting to see this for years* which tends to either make the movie going experience disappointing or exhilarating and I’m happy to report that this experience fell on the exhilarating side.  I spent a lot of time feeling bad for Zac Efron, whose good acting cannot overcome his distracting good looks while meanwhile Christian McKay, with his run-of-the-mill face blew me away as a young Orson Welles.  It’s a solid movie about the theater and I think it made a very good book-to-film adaptation.**

Cost: $3.00
Where watched: at home.

*It never really opened here, though I was watching for it.  Then the library didn’t have it.  Once, Matt and I walked to the video store with the express purpose of renting it and the store’s copy was missing. It was only when I was combing the same video store’s sale racks for a copy of Fast & Furious 6 that I found this copy for sale.

**Because I read the book in preparation for the movie. In 2009.  Here’s a quote from the book I saved on my Goodreads Quote page:
“She left for the Mercury, but I stayed on the roof for a while. I breathed in the city: its warming wind, its noise. And I was one young man on a roof who had just spent the night with a beautiful woman…and the sunlight suggested winter and hard days to come, but we would all survive somehow, and the seasons were bigger than any of us anyway–and we were all tumbling along on the breeze of something enormous and eternal and gloriously busy.”

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2009/me_and_orson_welles.html

I’d heard the title over the years and always assumed this was a science fiction movie.  Come to find out it’s an excellent portrait of a woman of a certain age coming into her own and I was absorbed throughout.  There were some worrisome  elements* but overall, it’s a grand tale of redemption and easily passes the Bechdel test.**

*I’d like to think that the situation at the end will continue to work for all parties, but I’m not certain it will.
**Unlike other movies this not only has two women characters, and those women characters talk to each other, but also when they talk to each other about something other than a man, what they talk about is a woman!

Cost: free from library
Where watched: at home. I watched 95% of it on a Monday night and had to shut it off because I was falling asleep.  I finished the last bit several days later.

poster from: http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Now-Voyager-Bette-Davis-Bette-Davis-Paul-Henreid-on-Midget-Window-Card-1942-Posters_i6074489_.htm