What I'm Watching
When I don’t workout regularly on my rowing machine, my DVDs from Netflix tend to languish. When I do workout regularly, I go through DVDs like water. After all, I need something to distract myself from the monotony. In the last few weeks, I have watched a bunch of DVDs, four in the last week alone
For the curious, here are these four in order, with a brief synopsis and critique:
The Triplets of Belleville: 2004 Academy Award nominee for Best Animated Feature, it tells the story of how a grandmother, with assistance from the famous singing trio The Triplets of Bellville, tracks down her grandson after the mob kidnaps him during the Tour De France. A strange, strange movie. Definitely innovative, but a weird plot and told with almost no dialogue.
The Hebrew Hammer: in this send-up of Shaft, Adam Goldberg plays a stud Hebrew detective who saves Chanukah from the nefarious doings of Damien, the evil son of Santa. Cute with some funny moments and hilarious character names. The Hammer's love interest is Esther Bloomenbergansteinthal, and he teams up with Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahiem, the head of the Kwanzaa Liberation Front. Best line of the movie is in the theme song, which is a take-off of the theme from Shaft: "No one understands him like his mother."
25th Hour: a Spike Lee joint starring Ed Norton as a drug middleman spending his last day of freedom before going to prison for seven years. This may be the first movie with Ed Norton I've seen, and he is every bit as good an actor as I've heard. As for the movie, it is the right mix of bitter and sweet, with beautiful imagery, and is full of compelling dialogue and scenes. The most indelible moment comes when Norton's best friend, at his behest, beats him up to make him look ugly when he arrives at prison. The aftermath is especially powerful, when all sound except for birds chirping fades out, and we see everyone coming to grips with what just passed.
THX 1138: George Lucas' first movie about a futuristic society in which all emotion is outlawed and people are required to take drugs to keep themselves constantly sedated. An interesting and dark, though not original, look at the future. (Ray Bradbury did it first with Fahrenheit 451.) Raw, it shows the muscles that Lucas would later flex with his Star Wars and Indiana Jones' franchises.