30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 29
Feb. 15th, 2011 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenSo close...sooooo close. Man, I should be studying. I just can't memorize this stuff any harder. It's all there. I know every flash card, by heart at this point. I've re-read my notes and the textbook more times than can possibly be necessary. I need to stop and not psych myself out, but I'm worried that the test will end being much harder than I'm thinking it could be, given the material.
Must meme to distract myself.
Day 29 - A movie that changed your opinion about something
I have carried a grudge against the Coen Brothers since No Country for Old Men won the goddamned Oscar for Best Picture. What a waste of a decent thriller that movie was. Don't mistake me--the first hour, hour-and-a-half of No Country was taut, exciting, and enjoyably bizarre.
The movie just should have ended forty minutes earlier than it did when [SPOILER]. If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I mean. How it continued on after that happened is still something confusing for me. There's no [SPOILER]! How can you have more movie--fully a third or more of a movie!--without [SPOILER]? It just rambled on and on. I think I resented it because the build-up had, until that point, been absolutely first rate. Then [SPOILER] happened, and it went on, rambling and incoherent and plain stupid. It was even harder to take when everyone seemed to think it was genius filmmaking. Hipsters. Save me from hipsters.
So when True Grit started to get all this noise, I half wanted to hate it on principle. Surely, they'd fuck something up with this one, too. At the same time, everyone made it sound amazing, and the idea that this wasn't just going to be a sausage fest (I think there was one female character with lines in No Country) was appealing.
I...loved it. The end was a little abrupt and unnecessary in some ways, but this time the disappointment was limited to about five minutes (instead of forty), so I could ignore that. The performances were first rate, the story well assembled, and the characters all well worth spending time with, the precocious protagonist most of all. It was what I think a great western should be, with pathos, the conflict between the open and the closed west. The best tension to be found in westerns is in the contrast between those who live the life of the open lands, stretching out before them, unfettered with petty things like farmsteads or laws carving them up, and those who wish to bring civilization to that lawless space.
And there is no question but the civilizing force will win, which is why it's so funny to put the strength of that force, of the inevitability of time marching ever onward, into the tiny but determined body of Mattie Ross. It makes sense--the children are the future and all that--but she's an old maid at 14, a crusader beyond her years. Her forthrightness is a perfect counterpoint to the dissolution of age in the form of Rooster Cogburn. It's usually the other way around, with the old complaining about the wayward youth. I loved the juxtaposition. That, and what Matt Damon's character was about. (Humor, I think. He had to have just been there for comic relief.)
So, yeah, this changed my opinion about Coen Brothers movies. They don't all suck.
Previous days:
Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23-26
Day 27
Day 28
Must meme to distract myself.
Day 29 - A movie that changed your opinion about something
I have carried a grudge against the Coen Brothers since No Country for Old Men won the goddamned Oscar for Best Picture. What a waste of a decent thriller that movie was. Don't mistake me--the first hour, hour-and-a-half of No Country was taut, exciting, and enjoyably bizarre.
The movie just should have ended forty minutes earlier than it did when [SPOILER]. If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I mean. How it continued on after that happened is still something confusing for me. There's no [SPOILER]! How can you have more movie--fully a third or more of a movie!--without [SPOILER]? It just rambled on and on. I think I resented it because the build-up had, until that point, been absolutely first rate. Then [SPOILER] happened, and it went on, rambling and incoherent and plain stupid. It was even harder to take when everyone seemed to think it was genius filmmaking. Hipsters. Save me from hipsters.
So when True Grit started to get all this noise, I half wanted to hate it on principle. Surely, they'd fuck something up with this one, too. At the same time, everyone made it sound amazing, and the idea that this wasn't just going to be a sausage fest (I think there was one female character with lines in No Country) was appealing.
I...loved it. The end was a little abrupt and unnecessary in some ways, but this time the disappointment was limited to about five minutes (instead of forty), so I could ignore that. The performances were first rate, the story well assembled, and the characters all well worth spending time with, the precocious protagonist most of all. It was what I think a great western should be, with pathos, the conflict between the open and the closed west. The best tension to be found in westerns is in the contrast between those who live the life of the open lands, stretching out before them, unfettered with petty things like farmsteads or laws carving them up, and those who wish to bring civilization to that lawless space.
And there is no question but the civilizing force will win, which is why it's so funny to put the strength of that force, of the inevitability of time marching ever onward, into the tiny but determined body of Mattie Ross. It makes sense--the children are the future and all that--but she's an old maid at 14, a crusader beyond her years. Her forthrightness is a perfect counterpoint to the dissolution of age in the form of Rooster Cogburn. It's usually the other way around, with the old complaining about the wayward youth. I loved the juxtaposition. That, and what Matt Damon's character was about. (Humor, I think. He had to have just been there for comic relief.)
So, yeah, this changed my opinion about Coen Brothers movies. They don't all suck.
Previous days:
Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23-26
Day 27
Day 28
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 02:44 pm (UTC)I guess my opinion changes a lot!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 02:48 pm (UTC)[And it wasn't like I hadn't had a crush on her since Grease2, anyway.]
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 02:54 pm (UTC)No, in all seriousness, it felt much more maniac than the first movie, which I think both a Batman and a Burton movie should be if they can help it. It also had Christopher Walken in it, who's always fun.
But Catwoman. Holy God. I cannot believe that Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry were ever supposed to be playing the same character. One is sex on stilletos. The other...not so much.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 03:09 pm (UTC)And yes, Michelle Pfeiffer in the Catwoman suit.