I like movies

So here are some notes on some that I've seen recently. Hopefully I'll get back into the habit of writing...

Closer is phenomenal, which is more than I ever thought I'd say about a movie with Julia Roberts in it. This was also the first movie to alert me to the presence that Natalie Portman can, despite all evidence presented in Star Wars, act, and that George Lucas is not just a bad director, he can actually produce remarkably bad acting from remarkably good actors.

Capote is also a good movie, although possibly primarily notable because of the voice that Phillip Seymour Hoffman uses for the entire movie. There's also some good story and stuff, and I liked that they portrayed a gay character without either sweeping his sexuality under the carpet or making it the focus of the movie. This, to me, goes much farther towards treating gays like any other members of society than any number of movies about gay cowboys.

Speaking of gay cowboys, while Brokeback Mountain may have been the more politically charged movie this Oscar season, Crash was an amazing movie, and I strongly recommend seeing it.

On the other hand, I don't so much recommend V for Vendetta. The comic on which the movie is based is very good, and would have made for a wonderfully topical story. However, the screenplay, written by the Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame, loses much of the interest of the story. The title character, V, goes from being a (likely insane) anarchist into a superhero-like freedom fighter, who even gets to absorb bullets and kill bad guys in a strongly matrix-inspired knife fight at the end of the movie. The Norsefire party's rise to power goes from being the understandable (if mistake) response to an exchange of nuclear weapons between NATO and the Soviet states to being the result of (somewhat unbelievable) staged attacks on England. In short, the movie takes an original story told in shades of gray and converts it to a black and white superhero drama, indistinguishable from any other of the superhero movies produced in the past decade. It's sad, because V could have been so much more.