Movie Weekend

This weekend was crazy busy. We took a trip out to Vernal to visit Ben's sister and her family, but also managed to secure some tickets to Sundance films and catch up on our movie watching. I managed to see 3 movies. 2 of them were very intense, really well made movies, and one was just silly. This is what I thought, for what it's worth:


Children of Men was one of the most high stress movies I'd seen in a long time. It was beautifully acted. Beautifully directed and shot. And beautifully, if not grittily art directed. The thing I loved most about this film was that they took us to the future, but it was a world we still recognized. It was as if London had turned into Isreal or Baghdad. It was the same city, destroyed by terrorists and let go by it's inhabitants. They just didn't have the energy to try to make things better. It was a far cry from the bright and shiny, though also scary, world of Minority Report and movies like that. But it did a brilliant job of convincing you that we were just a few decades away from ALL living like that.



Babel was also intense, but in different ways. Again, I really liked the acting, and the direction, and the art direction. I tend to be a sucker for films that have several stories that connect to one another, and I really enjoyed the slightly non-linear way the film went together. It was only apparent at the end of the movie where the stories intersected, and I really liked that. One of the story lines felt, in Ben's words, like a bit of an after school special. It was a little bit indulgent. But overall, I was pulled in and really did care about the characters, despite only seeing a third of a film about each of them.


For Your Consideration was disappointing. Obviously, and ironically, this isn't going to be nominated for any Oscars. But I was hoping for a return to the Christopher Guest team's style that I love. I feel this troupe is getting a bit stale, though. It just wasn't funny. It could have made a funny half hour, at most, but not a 2 hour film. I wish we could see another Waiting For Guffman out of this group. This was not it.