Spider, Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars, The Ruling Class, Under Capricorn, Bent, & Hiroshima Mon Amour

This is going to be fairly brief, since I've been pretty sick this past week, plus work sucked. And I went to NYC for an office holiday party and saw friends I hadn't seen in years. Basically I was really busy every day until today, and I'm still coughing a lot.

Spider has an amazingly good performance from Ralph Fiennes, although, really, it shouldn't be amazing. He's just that good. Depressing movie though.

Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars has terrible video quality. If that was the improved version, then... I don't know what the hell was going on in the original. Murky, bad sound, and worse, it made early 70s Bowie look bad. How was that possible? And it's not like D.A. Pennebaker doesn't know what he's doing, because he's the man responsible for Don't Look Back. Just an utter mess of a movie. Listen to the albums, it'll be much more enjoyable.

The Ruling Class has another good performance from Peter O'Toole in a way too long movie. Him as Jesus Christ was somewhat enjoyable, but it became ridiculous when they brought in the Electric God or whatever. What the hell? Before that it was full of very funny lines. After that it was a sharp satire of sanity of the rich and powerful and the House of Lords. But during that, it was just stupid.

Under Capricorn was a mess for a Hitchcock. Yeah, it kept the long takes of Rope, although it wasn't entirely made of them, but it had no real tension, and most scenes moved like molasses. The cast was wasted, and the story was boring as hell. Plus, the DVD was crap. The only thing that made it somewhat worth watching for was the head in the bed. That was quite a shock. And I even knew that was coming.

Bent has a great performance from Clive Owen as a gay German during the Holocaust. Just from that sentence, you can tell it was a happy movie. However, I'm really not sure how that movie could have possibly been rated NC-17. I don't recall any extended frontal male nudity or anything else that normally makes movies rated NC-17. What's up with that, M.P.A.Freakin'A.?

Hiroshima Mon Amour made me start crying about five minutes in, and didn't let up. I never want to see another mutilated body ever again, but I know that that's a problem with this planet: we're always going to have war. At least until we get rid of everyone. The long beginning showing the survivors of Hiroshima made me extremely uncomfortable. Not just for that, but also because I almost went to see the movie on the big screen with a date. I would have felt very uncomfortable there. I still would have loved the movie, but that would have been a good story for why I screwed up that relationship (She looks really good now too, better than when I dated her). The plot of the movie itself didn't really work all that way, although it's interesting to compare that to Hollywood films of the time, since there's no way any of it would have been made here with that adultery and unmarried sex bit. But as a look at the effects of Hiroshima, it was very effective.