Flutterby™! : Movies

Two mindless films we've watched recently. Last weekend we were in the video store, trying to choose between five or so, and ended up with Proof, a movie adaptation of a play written by David Auburn with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles. A well acted and directed play that seemed a little week in the screenplay, like many things that use mathematics as a background it sometimes seemed like the conceit ran a little thin. If I was able to drop any complaints about that, however, it was a great look at sanity, family relationships, and how we can become confused about the boundaries between lucidity and hallucination. Especially apropos given some of the struggles that Charlene's been facing.

We enjoyed it, I think Charlene enjoyed it more than I did, but I kind of felt like that had ended up being my choice. So yesterday evening after a hard weekend of felling trees (I wish I'd gotten video, we had one that was leaning over the house and a shed on an eroding bank, and we were concerned that any attempt to drop it was going to take out buildings, but we need to fix the shed anyway, so we emptied the shed just in case, I cut a wedge, and put a fifty or sixty foot tree within inches of where I wanted it) and swinging a hammer (towards making it so we aren't just concerned about the contents of said shed), Charlene suggested Match Point.

So we got Match Point, an "erotic thriller" directed by Woody Allen. I'm not much on the "erotic thriller" genre, I have trouble finding people sexy when I know that the story demands that one of them kills one of the other of them, but it started strongly enough. Chris Wilton (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers ) is an ex tennis pro turned instructor at an exclusive club, does the usual social climbing thing, and... yet... I'm not wanting to write a full review, and I don't think I can treat it fairly without doing either that or offering spoilers, but I started dozing off after the umpteenth time I watched that character, who has been almost mechanically effective in accomplishing his goals, be completely unconvincing in showing me why he'd exhibit the specific stupidity around which the movie turns. I suppose that any story which posits that much of life revolves around luck is going to have this sort of flaw, that the turn of the tale will be around things that the protagonist allegedly can't control, but it just didn't work for me.

So, Proof was worth a brain-dead evening looking at family insanity and how we can come to question our own because of expectations, Match Point left me dozing off.

And, yes, this means that we didn't see District B13 or An Inconvenient Truth this weekend.