Two Quick Reviews

I haven't been seeing many movies in Tally. There are two main reasons for this: I have no time and they don't show movies here that I want to see.

The Student Life Cinema program on campus has been showing some fun movies, though, so I caught two of those in the last week or so. They're free, so that's awesome, but these last two have been less than brilliant:

Duck Season (Temporada de Patos) is a poetic Mexican movie about adolescent boredom and desire. I liked it, but it's not great which is what Nathaniel made it out to be. I was a little disappointed that it didn't aim a little higher than it did. It's undeniable that the film's poetry has a uniqueness and power, but in a lot of ways it's about the same ennui that films about disaffected youth are always about.

Hard Candy I liked even less and not just because of its subject matter. This is a very difficult film in a lot of respects. It's well-made, but it... well I don't think it has much of an opinion. Its political stance is shaky and the end made no sense to me at all. It is a squirmer, though. I cannot deny how good the film is at making its audience shudder and grimace. But so what? Or rather for what? It's a film that wants to be a Postmodernist exploration of extreme Feminism. Its opinion (deliberately) never comes to anything. The director never takes a stand: and this is the point. But the point is then nothing. Or the point is that this issue is too much to deal with. And again, I say: so what? The characters are hateful for the most part and the film ends up being about as satisfying as last year's The Dying Gaul. I have to say, though, I thought Patrick Wilson was fantastic in the film. His performance totally rocks. I still can't forgive him for playing Joe Pitt in Angels in America (a character I despise) but maybe one day I will stop thinking of him as Joe Pitt.