Graduation Day

Films: Booksmart
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

Oh, I really, really wanted to like Booksmart a lot more than I did. I heard a great deal about it and the reviews are almost entirely favorable. And, truth be told, I did enjoy it well enough. But I wanted to really like it a lot more than I do, and I just kind of like it. I expected it to be something more than it is, but it’s really just Superbad with female protagonists. It also bears a great deal of similarity to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. For most people, that would be a positive, but it has all of the worst qualities of Ferris Bueller.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) have been close friends for pretty much their entire lives. They’re both top of their class in high school and have skated through high school to a potentially bright future. Molly is heading to Yale and Amy, after a summer in Botswana, is going to Columbia. What they’ve sacrificed is their social lives. Molly and Amy are considered stuffy, joyless nerds by their classmates.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1966

The Contenders:

Michaelangelo Antonioni: Blow-Up
Claude Lelouch: A Man and a Woman
Fred Zinnemann: A Man for All Seasons (winner)
Richard Brooks: The Professionals
Mike Nichols: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Wednesday Horror: May

Films: May
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

Every year, Dell over at Dell on Movies has a week dedicated to women in film. I don’t generally do a lot of blogathon-type things, but I like this one and thought I’d join in. Dell’s Girl Week is dedicated to women both in front of and behind the camera—women as directors and/or women as the main focus of the film. Since Wednesday is my horror movie day, I figured I’d add something to Dell’s event in the horror vein. That’s why I watched May, a modern and fairly upsetting take on the Frankenstein myth.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that it’s upsetting. It takes a long time for us to get where we’re going to go with May, but it’s also smart enough to slowly ramp up the crazy getting us there, so we’re not just waiting around for things to get out of control. We’re introduced to our title character, May Canady (Angela Bettis, but initially played by Chandler Riley Hecht), a friendless young girl who is cursed with a lazy eye. The initial cure is an eyepatch which causes her to be an outcast. Unable to make friends, she is given a doll named Susie that is encased in glass. Susie becomes May’s only real friend.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2008

The Contenders:

Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk (winner)
WALL-E

Off Script: Fright Night (2011)

Films: Fright Night (2011)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

I was very much prepared to dislike the 2011 version of Fright Night for a number of reasons. The first and primary reason is that it’s a rare movie where I’m happy to see Colin Farrell in the cast list. He’s one of those actors I tend to think could be replaced by a lot of other people in most cases, and I say this as someone who has genuinely enjoyed some of his performances (like Minority Report). Part of this is that I love the original Fright Night for its campy joys and figured (rightly, mind you) that this would be a much darker film. Intentional camp is rarely good, which means that we’re going to either lose that aspect or we’re going to have a lot of forced silliness.

There are some things that work in the remake’s favor. It’s a reminder of just how much the cinematic world lost when we lost Anton Yelchin. Yelchin was almost always engaging on screen, and he certainly is here. We’re also going to get Toni Collette, who I will watch in virtually anything, even if she’s a bit underused in this film. We’ll also get David Tennant in the Roddy McDowell role, and while the two versions of Peter Vincent are very different, they both have their strengths.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1972

The Contenders:

Cabaret
The Emigrants
The Godfather (winner)
Pete ‘n’ Tillie
Sounder

Off Script: From Hell

Films: From Hell
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

It seems like when it comes to movie adaptations, Alan Moore just can’t catch a break. Those films that got something like an endorsement from Moore turned out to be pretty uniformly terrible. The ones that he decided not to endorse (like V for Vendetta) generally turned out to be pretty credible versions of his stories. From Hell was the first feature-length adaptation of a Moore graphic novel, and I can imagine that Moore’s expectations were high. A Jack the Ripper movie starring 2001 Johnny Depp? Sign me up.

What makes From Hell different from what might be expected in a Jack the Ripper story is that this one is going to spend a surprising amount of time in the higher ranks of society. From Hell posits that the Ripper, while clearly ghoulish, was committing his crimes for a much higher purpose that involved the Royal Family. It’s a hell of an interesting conspiracy theory, and given the sort of space that it really needs to be explored (like in, say, a graphic novel), it’s one that could easily be made compelling.