I managed to have a wonderful winter break, not only because I spent most of my time either asleep or reclining, but also because I also saw a number of great movies. Now, this isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. First off, artsy-fartsy movies aren't that easy to come by in Northern New Jersey. Most of the multiplexes nearby were still carrying How The Grinch Stole Christmas well into the new year. I could have ventured into New York City, but with movie prices the way they are in the big city I wasn't about to give up my tuition money just so I could see Chocolat. Lucky for me, there's a Mecca of artsy-fartsiness just ten minutes down the road in the town of Montclair. There, in three theaters - each one sketchier than the next - I was able to find movies like Best In Show and Quills.
I wish I could say that the only challenge was finding a place showing these films. While I absolutely adore my friends from home, most of them weren't exactly itching to take in Quills or any of the other films on my must-see list. Actually, I suppose that Quills was the easiest movie to get everyone out for. I just told them that there'd be a lot of sex talk, feces, and necrophilia and, before I knew it, we were at the theater. (Random aside: No actress today has a better heaving bosom than Kate Winslet. No one.) Other movies proved to be harder sells.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first movie I convinced my crew to see. To avoid a scene at the movie theater, I had to reveal that the film was entirely in Mandarin with English subtitles. Jill, my good friend and polar opposite, decided to make other plans for the night, but I kept the rest of the crew together by playing up the fact that the fight choreographer for Crouching Tiger, Woo-ping Yuen, was the same guy who did all the fight scenes for The Matrix. This helped considerably. In the end, all my friends adored the movie. The fight scenes really were damn cool, and the film itself was beautifully shot.
Next up was writer-director David Mamet's State & Main. Since it's a comedy, it was a whole lot easier for people to commit. I also had the advantage of going on Christmas Day. Every year, my friends and I head out of our homes after Christmas dinner to see a movie. Three years ago it was Titanic, then The Faculty, and finally The Talented Mr. Ripley two Christmases ago. Since it's a tradition, and no big movie was out at the moment, my friends felt compelled to come along. It helped a bit that I had dragged a few of them to see Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner a few years back and they loved the Japanese girl with the bazooka. Nothing clinches a deal like a Japanese girl with a bazooka.
Our Billy Elliot outing turned into a Greek tragedy since I made the horrible mistake of forgetting to call Jill. She wasn't too happy about that. Luckily, we worked everything out, saw the movie the next night and, oddly enough, everyone else liked it more than I did. I really enjoyed all of Billy's (Jamie Bell) scenes with his ballet teacher, played wonderfully by Julie Walters, but some of the movie was too sentimental even for me. I would've been willing to overlook the sentimentality if the ending hadn't been among the worst in film history. I won't ruin it for anyone, but I will say that it was agonizingly trite. Honestly, it was a relief that I was the one who didn't like it that much. If it had been Jill, I would've never heard the end of it.
Thank goodness that I had prepped my crew over the years with other films. It helped with State & Main and then again with Best In Show. One quiet night of senior year, I rented Waiting For Guffman and it was a hit. Since Best In Show was done by the same director, Christopher Guest (Jamie Lee Curtis' husband, by the way) and writers Guest and Eugene Levy (also known as the dad in American Pie), getting everyone to "The Screening Zone" (a frightening little movie house) wasn't a problem. Best In Show, starring largely the same cast as Guffman, definitely matched its predecessor's humor, if not surpassed it. Fred Willard's entirely improvised performance as the dog show commentator is one of the best things captured on film this year.
Luckily for my friends, the last movie I dragged them to was at the biggest multiplex in our area. In the comfort of cushy Loews/Sony Theaters seats, we took in the critically lauded Traffic. Director Steven Soderbergh used various filters to differentiate the scenes in Mexico from the scenes in the United States. As you can imagine, Jill was not a happy-camper when the film began and we were treated to a grainy Benicio Del Toro speaking Spanish. She immediately leaned over and asked, "Is the entire movie like this?" I told her that it wasn't and, as soon as Michael Douglas came on, she relaxed a bit. Jill didn't end up liking the movie that much but, in my opinion, Traffic is the best film of the year. It is epic in a way that most of this year's movies just haven't been able to accomplish. Not to mention that the performances were stellar, with the best, in my opinion, coming from Catherine Zeta-Jones.
By the time I moved back to Medford, I had seen six movies, all of them good. (Actually, I also saw Miss Congeniality but it was a matinee so that doesn't count.) Traffic clearly takes the cake in my book and, if the Academy has any taste, will take home the Oscar for Best Picture in March. I hope that my difficulties in getting my friends out of the multiplexes and into the movie houses will inspire my brothers and sisters out there who yearn for artsy-fartsy cinema not to give up. There are ways to make even the most obscure film appealing to the masses. If all else fails, you can just lie and then explain that you were misinformed about the movie. This last excuse also works well for porn.
