More Movies

FAY GRIM
So I went and saw Hal Hartley’s new movie, which we missed at Toronto last year. I usually am not crazy about his movies – the dialog is so forced and artificial that it tends to get on my nerves. This time it worked somehow, and I thought the first half was completely hilarious, and expanded the characters from Henry Fool quite well. The second half gets more convoluted and is full of bizarre monologues about terrorism and politics, during which I mostly zoned out. I’m not entirely sure what the point was; it was definitely an overdose of ideas and themes. It was nice to see a big part in a non-romantic comedy given to a woman, and I do like Parker Posey in spite of the fact that she always seems like she’s playing every character as herself. I was also glad to see that Saffron Burrows is still working, even though she looks like she’s in the final days of a hunger strike.



BUG
I refuse to see anything resembling a horror movie by myself, so Steve accompanied me to this screening. It’s a great character study, and not as scary as I thought it would be, although it’s certainly horrifying and nerve-wracking. You can tell that it was originally a play, but that didn’t bother me. The actors were uniformly excellent, and the film gives a great sense of time and place – one of my favorite things to experience at the movies, since Hollywood films only succeed in achieving a sense of complete artificiality. Ashley Judd is 100% convincing as a desperate trailer-trash woman at the bottom of a downward spiral, and both the men in her life are terrifying in their own special ways (Harry Connick Jr. as the abusive husband fresh out of jail was still disturbingly hot though). There’s a lot of funny dialog in this movie, although it’s mostly funny in the ha-ha-nervous way. I’d definitely recommend this film for anyone who’s interested in feeling acutely uncomfortable.