Someday I’ll get around to writing up a travelogue for our Australian trip, but for now, here’s reviews of the movies I watched on the flights. On the way there, I slept most of the way but still managed to see Tim Burton's Corpse Bride -- it was kind of hard to hear the dialogue, but it seemed fairly entertaining, and visually it was quite cool -- and Shopgirl, which was flat, dull, and uninspired – I really liked the novel (by Steve Martin, who plays the male lead here completely stripped of personality), but I found the movie impenetrable.
The return flight had video on demand, which actually worked for most of the flight. I tried to watch Crash (I didn’t know at the time that it had won the Best Picture Oscar – we actually managed to not hear about the Oscars until we had the chance to watch them on Grant’s Tivo when we got back), but the opening line, when Don Cheadle says mournfully and profoundly that people in Los Angeles are so disconnected that they crash into each other just to feel something, was so idiotic that I turned it off. I also tried to watch Hustle and Flow, but I couldn’t understand a damn thing anyone was saying.
I did watch all of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is very well made and makes the Enron debacle comprehensible. It’s just amazing how they managed to get away with it for so long, and then how quickly it fell apart.
I also watched The Castle, a moderately entertaining Aussie film about a redneck family fighting to keep their house from being condemned so the airport next door can expand. It’s a little too condescending to the white trash, who are a little too wacky, but it has a certain affection for them at the same time. I’d like to believe the rather shocking comment that the homeowner makes about “now I understand how the Aborigines felt” was made out of naiveté and genuine good – if misdirected -- sentiment.
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