Holiday Movies

These holidays were spent mostly at home. Laziness and illness (both me and Amber) were to blame. The end result was that we watched a lot of movies.

• American History X is a very good movie about a younger brother following in the footsteps of his older skinhead brother. Edward Norton was great as the older brother. Somehow, the racist dialogue repeating “facts” about minority crime etc. reminded me of some of the rhetoric of Godless Capitalist¹.
• Amores Perros does not try to mess with your head like 21 Grams with its convoluted timeline. But the move did not appeal to us.
• Cold Mountain: Finally a romantic movie of my kind with many more shootings than kisses. It is a good movie. But what it desperately wants is to be a great one. Unfortunately there are too many flaws for it to be a great movie. Like Amygdala and Foreign Dispatches, the omission of African Americans and the issue of slavery is strange. I think it seems to be an effort towards a more romantic notion of the Confederacy. In addition, the lead couple (Nicole Kidman and Jude Law) don’t have much chemistry. This makes the single sex scene in the movie a bit out of place (not that I didn’t enjoy seeing the beautiful Kidman). Pace David Edelstein in Slate (SPOILER ALERT), I think the scene with Natalie Portman would have been better if the filmmakers had kept the original book version of it. The moral ambiguity there would have fit better.
• Donnie Darko: I was wondering why I never saw this one in the theater and it turns out it didn’t stay there for long and was on 50 screens at best. It is a good sci-fi movie and I recommend it to everyone.
• Finding Nemo: Excellent and very entertaining.
• In America: This is the story of a family coming to America and coming to terms with their loss. It is seen mostly through the eyes of a young girl. I liked it very much and Amber says she loved it but she cried a lot. So a warning to guys taking their cry-able wives or girlfriends. The movie is actually bitter-sweet and not a tragedy.
• Les Invasions Barbares: A very funny movie (yes, Amber cried even in this one). I think it is a French Canadian movie. I have a question for Canadians who have seen it: Are Canadian hospitals as crowded and corrupt as shown in the movie? Those hospital scenes seemed straight out of Pakistan.
• Lola Rennt: Well, the title “Run, Lola, Run” describes the movies very well. Lola runs in this movie. A. Lot. This is a multiple scenario movie done reasonably well.
• Monsters Inc is an OK movie.
• Nirgendwo in Afrika is about a German Jewish family who escape to Kenya in 1938. A reasonably good movie worth watching. It is supposed to be based on an autobiographical novel. I have a question for people who know Jewish history better than me. You see, late in the movie after the war has ended, the family is thinking whether they should return to Germany. Were there any German Jews who returned to their old homes in Germany after World War II?

¹ I am not equating Godless to neo-Nazis.