Once again, I am forced to concede that I read embarrassingly few books these days and that even when I do, I fall back on the authors most familiar to me. At least in the case of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, it’s a solid, widely praised, book that all fans of the genre are probably expected to be familiar with.
With this selection, the watch-list for the Marriage and the Movies course finally enters the modern era, by which I arbitrarily take to mean movies that were made after I was actually born. The power couple here is played by Meryl Streep, who looks astonishingly young in this movie, and Jack Nicholson, who looks pretty much looks the same as he always does. If you pay attention, you’ll also spot Kevin Spacey as a minor thug in his first ever film appearance.
I have no idea how this film ended up in our to-watch list. Ordinarily this means that my wife added it to the list but she can’t recall where it came from either. Since she almost always adds romantic or animated films to the list and since this isn’t a cartoon despite its poster, I assumed that this was a romantic film.
Just because I thought very highly of Brazil and heard that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a cult hit and quite a unique visual experience, I was rather looking forward to watching it. As it turned out, this was certainly unique and not quite in the way I expected. It also really isn’t all that good, which probably explains why its Rotten Tomatoes rating hovers around the low 50s.
This is easily the most anticipated release of the year and, as the follow-up to the incredibly successful first film which I couldn’t stop gushing about, expectations for it were very high. The media blitz prior to its release was so relentless that it sometimes felt as if you’ve already watched most of the movie spread across the various teasers. Unfortunately while I’ve always suspected that this would have a hard time matching up to the first one, even those lowered expectations were largely dashed.
Not quite the end of the month yet, but let’s get this out of the way:
This pick for the Marriage in the Movies course is the longest one to date. At a full three hours long, it apparently qualifies as an epic and indeed includes both an overture and an intermission with orchestral scores! It’s also clearly an American propaganda film, made to bolster morale on the homefront while the Second World War was still raging. In most cases, that’s a recipe for a bad film yet Since You Went Away manages to be surprisingly effective and affecting.