Watch it. love it. NOW! (new Mountain Goats video)

She & Him

I just got tickets to see the awesomeness that is Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward in San Francisco!

speaking of children...

I watched this last night (the theatrical version) and it was riveting, all 3 hours and 10 minutes of it. So now I have to buy the long version... It was also the first Bergman film I've ever seen, and since it was his last, now I'm inspired to watch the others to compare & contrast.

I watched two movies last night
This:

and this:

Back when I took my first film class, our teacher distributed a handout with the AFI's top 100 films of all time and I made it a goal to see them all. I have seen a lot of fantastic films because of this list but there's also been some stuff that has just not been my cup of tea. Platoon is certainly in the latter category. Terrible voice over narration from Charlie Sheen (writing letters to his grandma!), characters that were pretty one dimensional, and a message that was didactic and completely unsubtle.


On the other hand, Forbidden Games was a wonderfully complex and beautiful movie. Definitely a bit macabre-two children in France spend their time collecting dead animals, saying prayers over their bodies, and making and stealing crosses for their cemetery. It's a great meditation on war, death, religion, and childhood. I think my favorite thing about French cinema is the way children are portrayed: not too cute, complex, and actual human beings rather than props (which so often is the case I feel in American films). I'm thinking about someday soon posting a list of my favorite films about children, and this will certainly be on it.

Wandafuru raifu (After Life)

We watched this last night in my film class and it was just wonderful. After death, people are sent to a place where they pick their favorite memory from their life which is then filmed. The catch is this will be the only memory they will take to eternity, everything else is erased. The director, Hirokazu Koreeda (who also did Nobody Knows) interviewed 500 people asking them what would be the one memory they would take with them after death, and some of the actual footage from these interviews are used throughout the film. It's definitely a bit slow but this doesn't keep it from being completely engaging.