Not Top-10 List

I’m still behind, so it will be a little bit before I can get an arbitrarily numbered film list out (come to think of it, I haven’t even done 2005 yet–maybe this weekend.) So, instead some movies that (while not without their virtues) will not be on my top-10 list:

• The Notorious Bettie Page I was inadvertently reminded to do this by Tia, who takes the somewhat rare among people of taste but correct position that the film version of American Psycho is not, in fact, good. I guess some people admire the film for giving a feminist take on a “misogynist” novel, but the novel (while quite terrible) is not actually misogynist–it’s not as if Ellis is portraying Bateman as a good guy. And while it’s a relief to have most of the exceptionally gross violence excised, the problem is that without the violence you’re left with nothing but Ellis’s crude metaphors for Consumerism in Reagan’s America, which were excruciatingly banal when the novel came out, let alone a decade later. It was the kind of sophomore flop that made me question my immediate admiration for I Shot Andy Worhol. TNBP is, at least, reassuring about Mary Harron’s craft: it’s perfectly paced, very well shot, well-acted, and entertaining enough. She’s a potentially major filmmaker, no question. The problem, less egregiously than her previous film but still fatal, is her choice of material. Going into the film, I had no idea why Bettie Page was some kind of postmodern/(post)feminist icon, and leaving the film I still didn’t.
• Little Miss Sunshine A movie I was able to catch up on the individual screens thankfully installed by Air Canada, and…well, it was OK for an airline movie. As far as Annoying Indies go, I would take the opposite tack from IT; I much prefer last year’s much-derided Me, You, and Everyone We Know. Both have the annoyances that come from the parade-of-eccentrics structure, but July’s film is much more empathetic, and also manages to be both more original and more organic seeming, less willful. The characters in MYaEWK have some independent life; the ones in LMS are there to (only) score points, and the road-movie arc is deadly in all but the most gifted hands at this point. What makes LMS wacthable, at least until the conclusion, is the surfeit of acting talent; Colette, in particular, is a marvel, but everyone does the job.
• A Prairie Home Companion. Admittedly, I pretty much take the “be more funny!” position on Garrison Keillor, so YMMV. But I think it would be a condescending insult to the legacy of the great Robert Altman to claim that this snoozefest is a good picture.
• A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints Not that I wouldn’t like to tout a movie set in the mean streets (and I use the term advisedly: the movie even uses the mock-typewritten credits of Scorsese’s 1973 classic) of Astoria, but I don’t understand why this pretentious, frequently tedious movie got the kind of critical reception it did. It has its moments, but it feels repetitious, extends unintersting scenes and characters and leaves too soon from more interesting ones, has annoying visual effects, and (here the comparison with Scorsese is particularly unflattering) the music works neither as period background or in its own terms. He shows enough glimmers that he might make a good movie someday, but this ain’t it.
  

In addition to this, there are the movies that I’m extremely unlikely to see before writing: Inland Empire (not that I don’t admire a lot of Lynch, but I can’t say that the coherence of Lost Highway at the length of Dune holds much appeal); Fast Food Nation (Good book, but Didacticism+Richard Linklater=pass with extreme prejudice); the Iwo Jima movies (meh.)