Movies I Watched This Week 5/11/08-5/17/08

Seven Up!/7 Plus Seven- I've wanted to see these films for a while. This is a series of films that follows a group of British children starting at age seven and films the children every subsequent seven years. The films are a mix of observational footage and interviews with the children. Questions range from asking the children what they think about their schools and the opposite sex to issues such as poverty and race. My favorite thing about the films were how seriously the children took the questions and how thoughtful some of their answers were.

War Dance-One of the best documentaries I've seen in a while. Of course it's sad: the first half of the film is children in northern Uganda telling their stories of living in a area riddled with conflict and dealing with the death or disappearance of family members. But interlaced with these stories is the story of these children preparing for a national music and dance competition. The second half of the film is the competition itself with wonderful performances by the children. I watch a ton of documentaries and often times style and beauty are sacrificed in order to place the focus on the story being told. War Dance, however, is a gorgeous piece of cinema that blends story and style to relate emotions in a way that is not often seen in nonfiction films. The cinematography is stunning, quite possibly the best I've seen in a recent documentary. The film does a wonderful job of conveying both the terror of the civil war in Uganda and the hope and exuberance within the students' music and dance. Here's an extended trailer:





Mystery Science Theater 3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders: I caught part of this in a motel during a road trip a couple of years ago. I have always meant to track it down, but haven't until now. I love bad movies and Merlin's Shop is the perfect blend of outrageousness and hilarity making it one of the most watchable bad movies ever. For me the MST3K commentary is pretty hit or miss, it was decent for this film, but I could easily watch this without the MST3K guys. It's that bad/good.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: I'm not the biggest Tommy Lee Jones fan but this was pretty good. I'm surprised by how much I have been enjoying the recent resurgence of the western, a genre that formally was at the bottom of my list. Oh, and I totally had a crush on the living Melquiades, but not so much when he was dead.

The Orphanage: A few creepy moments, a better than average horror movie storyline, and a really terrifying scene of a party with children and adults in animal masks. The ending was kind of sappy and the way the story was told felt disjointed. I did sleep through parts of it so I can't say I fully liked or disliked it. It was intriguing that I would watch it again to form a more complete opinion and to be creeped out by the party scene.