Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries, The Long, Hot Summer, Rhapsody in August, The Boys of Baraka, Notorious C.H.O., & The Science of Sleep

Stupid work has been keeping me from watching and keeping up on this nearly as much as I would like. I also have watched the second season of Veronica Mars and the third season of Arrested Development (both well-worth watching), along with worked insane hours of work, so that really explains why my movie watching was so low the past couple weeks. Probably won't increase much until after November 7th, either. Oh, and go Bengals and Buckeyes. So these are more half-assed than normal.

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries was better than I was expecting. I really felt like I needed another show to make sure I never cleared off my DVR, and this was it. Lots of recommendations from Sci-Fi nerds and the promise that it was much better than most TV Sci-Fi. Well, it's not as good as Firefly/Serenity, but very little is. Certainly a worthwhile add to my Series recording list. Now, I just have to finish the first and second seasons before the third premieres on October 6. Or else I will continue to be someone who is alone in watching it among friends, rather than joining people at a Frak Party, or some such. Maybe I'll just try to watch as much as I can and still go. The effects were actually pretty good, the acting was generally not bad, and the story was interesting. (plus Grace Park and Tricia Helfer are attractive...)

The Long Hot Summer was another of those movies in the late 50s that should have been made a few years later, because the restrictions from the production code were driving me crazy. Yeah, they did get to say that women think about sex, but you could tell that if this were a little later, the son would have been made impotent and the daughter's non-Paul Newman beau gay. Damn them for neutering films. Then again, All the King's Men was a pretty neutered version of the book, and the remake is supposed to keep all that in and still be boring as hell. Not that the original was boring, I happen to really like it. It was weird to see Orson Welles, because at first I thought, "Orson Welles", and then "It can't be him", and I went back and forth until I just checked the IMDB.

Rhapsody in August is Akira Kurosawa making everyone feel really depressed because it's all about how people were affected by the atomic bombs. A little later than Hiroshima Mon Amour, but I still got a little weepy-eyed when the kids were wandering around Nagasaki looking at the various monuments and the like. Maybe some Americans don't want to remember that we're the only country who've ever used nuclear weapons in war, but it's pretty hard to forget that. Using the children as a way to get people to connect to the story was pretty effective as well, since there were four of them and most people could identify with one of them at least. And, of course, it was strange to see Richard Gere speaking in Japanese. I couldn't tell if it was halting or if he was mispronouncing words, but he seemed fairly up on it, at least when he wasn't supposed to be muffing words.

The Boys of Baraka was an interesting look at the Baraka program, which takes high risk kids from Baltimore and sends them to Kenya to try to get them out of the areas where they're likely to go to into the drug trade or get into trouble with the law. It was interesting, especially comparing that to the somewhat bleak view that the Wire is seeming to get into this season. I'll have to think about them together at some point in the future (may not actually happen).

Notorious C.H.O. is Margaret Cho's second concert film, and this one was more about sex and, consequently, I didn't care for it nearly as much as her other films that I've seen. Just wasn't nearly as funny to me. Eh.

The Science of Sleep was strange, in the wonderful way that a Gondry film can be. It felt much less organized than had it been written by Charlie Kaufman, and it was much more visually impressive, like his videos. It reminded me of Eternal Sunshine, as they're both about relationships, although clearly opposite ends of them. I'd like to think that I don't go quite as bizarre when one of mine starts, but then again, my imagination does like to get way ahead of reality. Can't quite remember my dreams, though, so I can't tell whether I've ever gone so far as to have them end up becoming real. And that is, if there is even one, the problem with the film. If you're looking to find a movie with closure, or one that isn't going to confuse you at all, you're not going to like the film at all. In fact, you may even hate it. I can see someone hating it very easily. It takes both an ability to separate dreams from reality and an overactive imagination in the realms of love and relationships to get, and some people don't really want to work that hard while watching a film. It's not as immediately brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, but really, few films are. It's more of an earworm, slowly burrowing in, taking over your life, until you'd be happy to ride around on a mechanical horse below cotton ball clouds with the woman you love (and may or may not love you back). Then you wake up.