Periodically, I will list movies here that I see on DVD and recommend that readers watch. I will post a list of my favorite films so you can calibrate my recommendations with your own preferences–or not.
Here’s my first list of recommendations:
1. “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. Great cinematography–when I first heard about this movie’s cinematography, I thought ‘how exciting can it be to visualize a story about a man who can only move one eyelid?’ However, after watching Schnabel’s movie, I have to say that the cinematography was truly outstanding. The narrative was also well-written and well-spoken.
The only I had to the movie, from a casting perspective, was that all the actresses attending to the paralyzed man ‘Jean-Do’, the protagonist of the film, were attractive. My experience in health care institutions is that you’re lucky if you have even one good-looking health care person, much less three.
2. “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride”: A documentary about Hunter S. Thompson. Primarily a series of reminiscences and observances about Thompson as a person and ‘Gonzo’ journalist. Reminiscences and observations about Thompson from Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Tom Wolfe and–very oddly, Bill Buckley. William F. Buckley was one of the last people I would have thought to interview about Thompson, but there you have it.
3. “The Business of Being Born”: Another documentary, this one about how we have been conditioned to believe that all women have to give birth in hospitals, attended to by doctors. In the U.S., it turns out, only 1% of births occur outside hospitals, vs. >70% in many Western countries. The kicker is that the U.S. has a higher rate of infant mortality and complications WITH universal hospital deliveries, than other countries do with close-to-universal midwife-assisted births.
4. “Charlie Wilson’s War”: This was another well-done Mike Nichols film, based on a true story about a Texas congressman, Charlie Wilson, who drove Congress to fund a covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Tom Hanks & Philip Seymour Hoffman, especially, did very good jobs. The script was very good and surprisingly (at least for me) funny. Editing was also very good–the film moved along, but at the same time, didn’t feel too rushed.
If you want to see a stunningly good documentary which touches on this subject, check out “The Power of Nightmares”. This documentary, one of the best I’ve ever seen, details the evolution of the Neo-Conservatives and Al-Qaeda, and traces both back to a common view of American societal immorality in the 1940s.
5. “Wristcutters: A Love Story”: A small film that I didn’t expect to like as much as I did. Great premise for a love story: a young man, Zia, played by the actor Patrick Fugit, from “Almost Famous”, kills himself and goes to a place that’s only, as he puts it, slightly worse than Earth in life. It’s kind of like purgatory, and is inhabited only by people who kill themselves. Zia meets a woman, played by the actress Shannon Sossamon, who believes she is there mistakenly, and falls in love with her, while looking for his girlfriend from his past life (she killed herself out of sorrow as a result of him killing himself). The film has a cameo from Tom Waits, among others. Well-acted and a good script, though a little slow in places.
That’s all for now.