Angels in America, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, & Tanner '88

Angels in America is very good. I also very much liked the little Cocteauan touches in the dream and heaven sequences. I really need to see Orpheus. That's in my queue. Of course, almost everyone in it is very good. I'm not sure if Al Pacino is overacting or if Roy Cohn really was that big of a prick. But he just got on my nerves so much. Or maybe it was just that everyone else in the film was outstanding and his mediocreness just looked like crap. I'd have to rewatch it, and devoting six more hours to a strangely uplifting story of gays and AIDS in America in the mid-80s just doesn't fit with how I want to spend my time.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is missing just about everything that made the first one good. Mainly any sense of actual goodness or Pride and Prejudice. And why, exactly was there a need for a sequel? Sometimes there are some stories that do just end with the characters riding off together into the sunset. The sequel is just Bridget embarrassing herself constantly. Blargh. So frickin' stupid. V. v. stupid. And you'd think I'd like any movie with a lot of scenes in a Thai woman's prison. But they're just ridiculous, like the rest of the film. And I know it's very shallow of me, particularly considering some of the women I've dated in the past, but Renee Zellweger looked horrendous in the film.

I also finished Tanner '88, which I thought was outstanding. I'm not sure how much I would have liked it without the bits of polling and focus group stuff. There are definite weaknesses, not the least being the horribly dated aspects of it. And it's loose as hell, and occasionally silly, but it's just very interesting and worth watching. Pamela Reed is the best thing, but there are good performances from most of the actors, except Matt Malloy, but the best of the playing themselves was Bruce Babbitt, someone I had pretty much forgotten existed. Which is a damn shame, because he was Interior Secretary under Clinton. And, of course, simply the fact that he wasn't anti-environment like Norton, he was a great Interior Secretary. The Altman and Trudeau influences were somewhat obvious, although Altman's fingerprints were all over it, while Trudeau isn't nearly as clear. Just the sort of political aspects from Doonesbury.