Alphabetical Movie – Hotel Rwanda
Hotel Rwanda is a mercifully sanitized account of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. I say mercifully because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch as many as a million men, women and children hacked to death with machetes. After some amount of time, things would start to get a little bleak.
In all the talk about how Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists, you would think that all of the senseless killing in the 20th century was perpetrated by atheists. We are the scourge of the planet, mercilessly wiping out those who would oppose us by believing in god.
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Tub Time Machine
The ending of Hot Tub Time Machine creeps the fuck out of me.
Hang on, you ask, isn’t that a wacky comedy about how some guys travel back in time to the 80’s so they can relive their mis-spent youth and possibly learn some valuable life lessons?
Yeah.
So how is that creepy?
Well, my friend, let me tell you (spoilers a-comin’):
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Shots!
With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but watch Hot Shots! and wonder when Charlie Sheen began his inevitable slide into Charlie Sheenness.
Here you have a kid who folks thought should have been nonminated for a freakin’ Oscar for Platoon and he turned into the best punchline for celebrity gone horribly awry since Lindsay Lohan. Even while Robert Downey, Jr. gets to celebrate a career pulled from the ashes of his own addiction, Sheen seems committed to find new ways to embarass himself.
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Fuzz
What is the difference between movies like Hot Fuzz and Young Frankenstein and the Scary Movie franchise? Aside from the fact that ten years from now, those two films will still be funny and the Scary Movie films still won’t?
I mean, the Scary Movie films come from what I would consider to be a great pedigree of screwball comedies like Airplane, Hot Shots and Top Secret. Yet they are – and I’m sorry if you like those movies – absolutely horrible. They fail at satire, they fail at comedy, they fail at titilation. Their only success is that they can be made so cheaply that they make money in spite of themselves.
Alphabetical Movie – Home Fries
The reason I own Home Fries has nothing to do with how much I enjoy the film. The first time I watched it, I enjoyed it a lot. Subsequent viewings have not been so kind.
One thing about the film does hold up and it’s the reason I keep it around. I own this film because of Catherine O’Hara.
Alphabetical Movie – Home for the Holidays
Every time I watch Home for the Holidays, I enjoy it. When it comes time to watch the film again, I have absolutely no desire to do so. I’ve never been able to figure out why I respond that way.
Why are some films so re-watchable while other, arguably better, films are watched once and then all but forgotten? A lot of it is personal preference but still, I own a lot of movies that are better than The Mummy and yet, I’ve watched The Mummy more than most of them.
Alphabetical Movie – Hollywoodland
Hollywoodland is about the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of George Reeves. By “questionable,” I mean that there are some conspiracy theorists who believe he was murdered but the odds are pretty good that he killed himself.
I think the movie explores that fundamental disconnect most of us feel when we hear that someone who appeared to have everything to live for choose to end their life. It seems unimaginable that they would do such a thing.
Except for Kurt Cobain. That didn’t surprise anyone.
While many of us have contemplated suicide at some point, very few actually go so far as to attempt it. So while most of us can understand thinking about suicide, very few of us can actually understand doing it.
I was seeing a therapist a while back – because I’m as messed up as anyone else – and she asked me if I’d ever considered suicide. Sure, I said, I’d thought about it once or twice. But, I said, I’m an atheist. I don’t think that there is anything to look forward to after this life. Why would I ever consider giving up even a second of the one life that I have? It isn’t that life can’t suck. What’s the alternative, though? I may not believe in god but I still believe life is one hell of a gift and I’m not about to give up on it just because I had a shitty week.
So I look at George Reeves – who was freakin’ Superman – and I don’t get it. Even as the film shows me how low his life had sunk, it still doesn’t look too bad to me. Not so bad that death seemed like the best alternative.
I would imagine that is where the conspiracy theories come from. We all figure that if we had a job as awesome as being Superman, there is no way we’d kill ourselves. If we wouldn’t do it, there is no way he would do it. Someone else must have killed him! It’s the only thing that makes any sort of logical sense.
Except that people do things that don’t make any logical sense all the time. If we lived our lives purely based on logic, we’d never make rash decisions. Gambling Casinos would close up because we’d all do the basic math. Most of us would never have kids because we’d come to the logical conclusion that we didn’t have the slightest idea how to raise a child. Logic doesn’t rule our lives.
Yet we want George Reeve’s death to be logical because if Superman can end his life in such an illogical way, we could probably do it too.
And we could. The lesson in George Reeve’s suicide is that any one of us can reach that dark place – no matter how certain we are that we’d never find ourselves there. Reeves himself probably never imagined he’d kill himself.
But one night, against all logic, he did. So long, Superman.
Alphabetical Movie – Holiday Inn
I’ve seen Holiday Inn before so the following scene didn’t come as a shock to me but I want you to imagine that you are watching this film for the first time. Maybe this is your first time. That isn’t really important.
So, you are watching this movie for the first time and up to now, you have been watching a pleasant film about Bing Crosby trying to hide his girlfriend from Fred Astaire. I don’t blame him – who wouldn’t pick Fred Astaire over Bing Crosby?
Alphabetical movie – A History of Violence
About sixty minutes into this film, the two main characters have a fight that erupts into rough, angry sex on the stairs. “Angry Sex,” by the way, is not to be confused with “make-up sex.”
Make-up sex takes place when the fight is over and the couple has agreed that is it time to consummate their (at least temporarily) stable relationship with some nookie.
Angry sex, on the other hand, happens when two people are still angry. The fight has not ended but they are overpowered by lust just long enough to bump and grind before they get back to the business of fighting. If the movies are to be believed, angry sex is way better than make-up sex.
I can’t say that I have any first hand knowledge myself. I keep trying to test the hypothesis but every time I get my wife angry enough to explore angry sex, she just looks at my like I’m crazy.
I’m not sure it would even count anyway, since I’m only trying to get her angry so we can try having angry sex and that means I’m not actually angry. I could ask her if it was better afterwards but then I’d probably start another argument because she would be angry that I had gotten her angry just to have angry sex.
Obviously, I would completely spoil the sample if I told her about the plan ahead of time.
Which means I’ve had make-up sex but angry sex continues to elude me.
Science, sadly, offers no solutions. I can find absolutely no research on the difference in pleasure experienced. Biologists I follow regularly talk about fruit flies and ants and squid but they spend no time at all exploring whether these creatures are more satisfied after angry sex.
What are they doing with themselves? Don’t they realize that while they are doing all their research on genes and amino acids and stuff, they are completely failing to research what is actually important.
Meanwhile Maria Bello and Viggo Mortenson are going at it on the stairs while moviegoers watch and wonder if there is something missing from their sex lives.
I suppose that there is a lot of danger to this kind of research. If people discover that angry sex is really better, couples will be in arguments all the time. Is that the kind of society we want? A society filled with people fighting on airplanes and then sneaking off to the lavatory to join the mile high club (and most likely having to wait in a long line)?
The downsides are pretty obvious.
That is where the research can help, though. Suppose it turns out that there is a kind of sex that is better than angry sex or make-up sex. If science finds, for instance, that bear skin rug sex is the best sex, it would be a big problem for bears but not so much for anyone else.
I recognize the risks that these findings would have but it is important to remember that science is the search for what is true. If they find out that angry sex is the best sex, they cannot be held responsible for what the rest of us do with those findings. And if we are upset with them about it, we can just find ourselves a hot biologist and start a fight….
Alphabetical Movie – His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is about the newspaper business in the same way that Casablanca is about running a nightclub. The characters in the film work for a newspaper but what they really do is engage in entertainingly witty banter while, theoretically, doing their job.
Coming from a background in theatre (and by “background in theatre” I mean “I have a degree in theatre that I haven’t used in twenty years”), I find that I often look at films and jump to the conclusion that they are based on a play and when I jump to that conclusion, I’m usually right.
Grail Diary 