Romeo + Juliet

I fell in love with Luhrmann's ROMEO + JULIET when Brian Dennehy's said "Bring me my longsword" and Lady Montague reached for a Longsword .44 Cal.

This movie was everything I look for in a Shakespeare adaptation: audacious, creative, and fun, yet true to the heart of the play in question.

As a Netflix guy, I don't own a lot of movies. I own this one.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S is a movie about people I don't like, living in a milieu that doesn't intrigue me, beginning a relationship that's founded, among other things, on the joys of petty larceny. It's title song is a horrifying bit of schmaltz, and it features a racial charicature so offensive that I'm surprised the movie isn't reviled today.

No, I did not like it. Not at all.

Thank You for Smoking

I enjoyed the heck out of THANK YOU FOR SMOKING.

TYFS puts its message right out there, but don't see it for the message. See it for the delivery. The movie follows Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a smoking lobbyist who's so darned good at his job that he can't help but love it. Nick's the kind of guy who can appear on a talk show loaded with anti-smoking spokespeople and utterly blow them away. He's morally flexible, incredibly cunning, possibly evil, and so much fun to watch that the movie's 90-minute run time races by.

The movie maintains a satiric distance, but it holds true to its universe (and its protagonist's questionable worldview) throughout. By not winking at the joke, it builds both comedically and dramatically, with a conclusion that's amusing, satisfying, and arguable.

You may or may not agree with the politics or science of the film (Offshore oil drilling is morally equivalent to clubbing baby seals? Cell phones cause brain cancer?), but you can enjoy funny, well made satire no matter your predilictions. TYFS is just that, and it's a lot of fun.

Enjoy.

Three Times

THREE TIMES, directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou and starring Qi Shu and Chen Chang, is supposed to be a briliant movie. It won a Golden Horse for Best Taiwanese Film of the Year and was nominated for a Golden Palm, so it has some serious bona fides, but those bona fides didn't translate into a movie I could engage or enjoy. I suspect it's because THREE TIMES is too Chinese - it's so deeply embedded in Chinese themes and concerns that there isn't much there for the Occidental viewer.

THREE TIMES consists of three short stories, each a play on the theme of love missed. The first, set in the mid-'60s, casts Qi as a pool hall attendant and Chen as a soldier who falls in love with her, only to miss the connection in the end. In the second, Qi plays a courtesan and Chen a wealthy patron, one who always speaks of freeing China from foreign domination while blithely allowing the young woman to remain in servitude at the bordello. In the third, the two play a couple in modern Taipei, so thoroughly engrossed in their own personal worlds that they're incapable of reaching out to another human being.

These sound like interesting premises, but they depend upon an understanding of nonverbal communication and social cues that, in turn, require a deep familiarity with the culture on which they're based. The second story, for example, is a silent movie: its dialogue consisting of intertitle cards and the only sounds are that of the of the courtesan's sad songs. The sad songs are Chinese traditionals, done in the scaling, high, nearly nasal tone that was fashionable at that time, and which grates on my ears today. As for the first and third stories, they depend upon an understanding of the culture and history of Taiwan - one which I, as a viewer lacking in that knowledge, couldn't deliver.

If you're Chinese, you may love the heck out of THREE TIMES. For me, it didn't deliver.