23 February 2007 - 7:32 pm

More movie updates: (so you wanted to hear about my date, but I am refusing to mention it, did you notice that?)

Watched Suicide Kings. I fell asleep during it, because, yet again, I was suffering from a migraine. Yvonne asked if I had had any coffee that day, and I realized I had not. And neither had I the week before when I had a more major migraine in a hotel. Hmm. Addicted to caffeine again?

Anyway, Suicide Kings. I had been told it was bad, but the cover art made it seem like it might actually be amusingly so. It just reminded me of Reservoir Dogs, which I also fell asleep to, waking also during the torture scene. Ho-hum, I have no idea what's happening, and I fall back asleep. Not a very rousing recommendation, but hey, my body just had other ideas. Like Reservoir Dogs, I got the gist of it without actually watching the whole thing. Close enough.

Moving on, I watched The Mother. It only caught my eye because Daniel Craig was in it. On the cover art, there he was in the background, with his shirt off. Okay, I'll bite. He's involved with this woman's daughter, and after the mother becomes a widow, becomes involved with her too. Oops. The part that is interesting is the mother is just a regular middle aged woman, nothing gorgeous and MILF-like. Involved with a totally hot guy. I really liked it. (Okay, what middle aged woman wouldn't like that fantasy? Forget age, what woman wouldn't like that fantasy, plain, ugly or beautiful?) I tried to watch the director's commentary like three nights running, and again kept falling asleep. Finally made it through it the other night.

I realize I listen to the commentary because I want to know if there was something I didn't catch about how to interpret these movies. Sure, knowing about the special effects and how they went about making the movie is interesting, but I'm really looking deeply into the characterizations. The one pivotal scene in The Mother, I was really hoping they would talk about why Daniel Craig's character completely changed. Did he really feel that way all along, or was it the substance he had just consumed talking? Or did it matter? And they didn't talk about it. And in the end, it didn't matter and could have been how he truly felt, but I had wanted to understand that character's motivation better, because I had felt confused. I want to strengthen my ability to interpret other's motives and intentions.

Okay, and I get these are fictional characters, so they could be false and untrue representations, but I figure if it involved me, effected me, touched me, then it probably was fairly true and accurate of someone or how someone could behave.

Anyway, I listened to the commentary on Amelie also this week, (thick French accent) and then listened to Intacto's commentary (thick Spanish accent), having seen the movie originally when it was released back during AFI's festival in the fall of 2001. Then I watched Intacto once again, again falling asleep. I love that movie. It's about love, and luck. Two completely different things, and two completely intertwined things. And how damaging not saying the truth can be. Here's a classic conundrum portrayed in the movie: the hero is the only survivor of a plane crash. Good luck. In tending to his wounds, the authorities discover the stash he had taped to his body having just robbed a bank, and is turned over to the police. Bad luck. It goes from there. What might be bad luck now, could be good luck later, saving you from something worse. In the director's commentary, he speaks of these lucky people as being vampires, stealing other people's luck, consciously and unconsciously. Touch and intimacy are very important, and an issue of control and dominance, depending on who is doing it to whom. Anyway, the visuals are stunning, set all over Spain, and the games of chance they play are most original.

Of course, now I have an entirely new set of films to watch this week, and will have more to say later on that.

Oh, and my car is in the shop again. What fun.