Silverado (1985)

This is diverting and fun – almost all of the actors are comedians – and I enjoyed myself. Scott Glenn is so great. He is truly an underrated performer. And I love see Kevin Costner in movies in the early 1980s. He's so cute and fun; in Silverado he's downright playful. He's absolutely delightful to watch.

Kevin Kline is, quite oddly enough, not playing for laughs, even though this is obviously a comedy, and I'm not sure what that's about. But his seriousness doesn't get in the way of the pleasures of Silverado, which are really all about friendship and shooting the bad guys off of horses when they aren't expecting it.

Wyatt Earp (1994)

I gotta be honest. I had a lot of trouble telling all of these mustachioed men in Wyatt Earp apart. They truly all looked the same to me. And so I know that there was some clan that Wyatt Earp needed to kill, but I couldn't have picked a single one of those men out of a lineup. 

As for this 190-minute epic film, I really don't understand why USAmericans were so into three-hour movies with Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson or Tom Hanks in the 1990s. This fucking drags. 

And there is another problem too. Costner is a stoic dickhead throughout for whom it is almost impossible to feel any kind of sympathy. The film tries to dig into some ethical problems or something, but it fails at this. Instead we get a bloody revenge film pretending to be something resembling law and order. No law and order about it. This is just a vigilante film about a dude I didn't like very much. 

I will say I quite liked Dennis Quaid in this. But I don't have much else to say that is good. Oh, actually no I do. The photography is pretty great at times.

This was the final film I needed to see from the 1995 Oscars. I watched this, if you can believe it, on DVD. It was split into two discs, even. Extra old school.

The Big Chill, Revisited

I first saw The Big Chill in 2004 but I watched it again today in preparation for the Supporting Actress Smackdown on Sunday. Some impressions:

It has been five years but I always had the impression that all the characters were around thirty years old. Now that I am almost thirty, I don't think these guys look thirty at all. Kevin Kline and Glenn Close each look about thirty-five. The others too. Goldblum looks younger, but that could be because he is an idiot in this film. This may sound weird, but I think this perspective is because I felt like I had more in common with the people in this film five years ago than I do now. It's strange. I would think it would be just the reverse.

I am a big fan of Mary Kay Place still.

I always thought that Jeff Goldblum was really stupid in this movie, and I could never figure out why the other people in the movie had this idiot joker as their friend. This still makes no sense to me, but this time around I found myself really irritated in addition by Kevin Kline. I think the four women, Tom Berenger and William Hurt are fascinating in this movie, but Kline and Goldblum are, to me, almost completely lacking in interest.

William Hurt gives a brilliant performance in The Big Chill. Like, he is truly excellent in this picture. He would win an Oscar in '86 (three years later) for his flamboyant performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman, but his work in The Big Chill is subtle and nuanced and interesting.

This film is not about suicide.

...But I actually think there is something in the work that William Hurt does in the film that goes toward explaining their friend's suicide.

And I know everyone says this, but the soundtrack is still amazingly good. And the moment when JoBeth Williams plays the Rolling Stones on the organ is fabulous.

Two More Movie Reviews Because I Have No Furniture and I'm Almost Done Packing

Body Heat is pretty standard neo-noir fare and I liked it a lot. It's a Lawrence Kasdan film (go figure) from 1981. Body Heat was recommended to me recently by my friend Linda and then, randomly, my friend Jai started a class all about neo-noir and this film was one of her first assignments. The planets, it appeared to me, had aligned and I needed to watch this movie. In the madness of moving, I just got to the movie a couple of days ago. Body Heat is a really good erotic thriller set in Florida during an out-of-control heat wave. It is mostly based on the mid-1940's Billy Wilder film Double Indemnity and has a lot of its plot points and twists with two really important exceptions. First, the male body (in this case a gorgeous but milquetoast William Hurt) is as glorified as the female (a smoldering Kathleen Turner.) This would, of course, have been unheard-of in the 1940's, but it works well in this film, further feminizing and subverting the normal dominance of the masculine in films of this type. Second, the femme fatale wins out in the end, getting everything she ever wished for and besting all of the men in the movie. Great performances all around: Richard Crenna and Ted Danson do great supporting work. Kim Zimmer (!) shows up in a brief cameo and is stunningly beautiful. Body Heat also features a really cool performance by a young Mickey Rourke that I really appreciated. By the way, this movie is hot. I feel I should mention that. Everyone sweats all the time during the film, soaking their shirts and covering their bodies in moisture. At one point Kathleen Turner and William Hurt recline in a bathtub full of ice water, so hot is this film. John Barry's music creates the ambience perfectly. All in all an excellent homage (with a twist) to the film noir of yesterday.

Imagine Me & You, though terribly titled, is an utterly adorable romantic comedy. It's the story of perfect couple Heck & Rach (Matthew Goode of Match Point & Piper Perabo of Coyote Ugly) and their newly married life. This relationship of theirs is thrown for a loop when all of a sudden and out of nowhere, Rach falls in love with their florist for the wedding, whose name is Luce and who is a self-sufficient, a-little-bit-lonely lesbian woman. Luce is an awesome character, impossible not to love and I can't blame Piper Perabo for falling in love with her instantly. Trouble must ensue, though, obviously. Rach just got married, her husband adores her, etc. etc. But Imagine Me & You handles every bit of this struggle beautifully. Matthew Goode is absolutely adorable, the girls' relationship is totally cute, completely believable, and the film feels honest through and through. Its meditations on love are poignant, fascinating and beautiful. The importance of love in our lives is forefront in this film and the important question it seems to be asking is not one similar to the question in epic love stories like Brokeback Mountain (What are the consequences of denying true love?) but a different one, more concerned with what true love really is. This is a romantic comedy, not an epic tale of love, so I probably shouldn't have compared them, but Imagine Me & You's question is interesting as well. The film begs the character not to settle for a happiness that is only partial. It's a film about taking a leap into the unknown and toward crazy-love, the at-first-sight kind, where you don't know hardly anything about the person. Luce says early on that true love is always love at first sight: "I think you know immediately. As soon as your eyes... Then everything that happens from then on just proves that you have been right in that first moment. When you suddenly realize that you were incomplete and now you are whole." It's beautiful. There are probably ten more really sweet things just like this in the movie. I loved it. The gay romantic comedy is usually such a lame, trite affair, but this one is superb. Rent it. Even if you aren't a lesbian.