Movie Monday #14
1) Best in Show - Sometimes when a movie is just good and really funny, I don't know what to say about it besides that. My favorite part of this movie is that the dogs seem like regular dogs, rather than professional actor dogs, so in every scene they're just doing regular dog stuff - snooting, licking, looking around - while the actors are performing. I laughed constantly. If you haven't seen this, you really must. Highly recommended!
2) American Psycho - I really thought this was going to be a regular serial killer movie. I was expecting a long episode of Wall Street Dexter, but what I got was an indictment of American patriarchy and its various -isms! When I worked at Starbucks we had a lot of early morning businessman customers. They were pretty samey and their traditional greeting was "Hey, guy!" (no actual names used!) so we called them the Hey Guys. This is a movie about Hey Guys. It makes me wonder what all those Starbucks Hey Guys were doing in their spare time. I lolled when Patrick Bateman insisted that his secretary wear heels to the office because you might think "thank goodness that era of life is over" but it definitely isn't. My favorite part of this movie was when the Hey Guys say out loud "There are no girls with good personalities." I appreciate that this movie just comes out and says that men are not supposed to like women and many of them don't. How could they, when the "worst" insult someone can fling at a little boy is to call him a girl, and then that is reinforced for decades until you become a grown man holding both contempt and potential horniness for women in tension with each other? Yikes, I've gotten too serious. I screamed with laughter every time Patrick said "I have to go return some videotapes." I loved this movie. Highly recommended if you can stomach the violence and blood.
3) After Hours: This is a movie about a man who does not know that if the vibes are very and obviously off, you can just leave. Somewhat in his defense, he lost all his cash outside of banking hours in 1985, which basically meant he was stranded in pre-Giuliani New York City. The nice thing about that is that Catherine O'Hara is free to lead a roving band of bloodthirsty vigilantes in her ice cream truck. That makes this movie sound like more fun than it actually was, though. Catherine O'Hara doesn't get there until pretty late in the game. Before that the movie kind of plods along, punctuated by moments of comedy that are not quite funny enough, in contrast to the bad things that happen, which are VERY bad. Griffin Dunne gives a good performance as a falsely accused, cashless office drone who just wanted a simple hookup and instead got caught up in an Odyssey of coincidences. Also, every blond weirdo in NYC wants to sleep with him. I didn't understand that, and to his credit, neither did he. This movie is alright. It was one of Roger Ebert's favorite movies of all time, so YMMV. Not NOT recommend, but not strongly recommended, either.