Smiley's People, Igby Goes Down, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Silkwood, & Norma Rae

Smiley's People isn't as good as Tinker, Tailor, but it's still a superior miniseries. Neither of them have nearly enough Patrick Stewart, and really, that's a damn shame. I know that the books didn't have more, but it's like Hearts of Darkness with the Kurtz section down to a page or two. Seriously, I hate when someone is all over it all and doesn't really appear. Damnit. Guinness is brilliant again, and the supporting cast is also good.

Igby Goes Down has some very very good scenes, and some very very good things in it, but there are some things that don't seem right at all. Good cast, even with not one but two Culkins. It just sort of felt like a movie that was trying to do way too much with not nearly enough. I think it has to do with the Culkins. I still can't get past them. He wasn't bad at all, just felt slightly off. I can't even put my finger on why I found the movie slightly off-putting, except that I also hated The Catcher in the Rye. Young angsty jerks don't tend to agree with me.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an early Bresson film, but I really didn't care for it. Had a feeling of pointlessness. And it was slow, even at only 86 minutes. I think I'm going to hold off for a long while before I check out another Bresson film.

Silkwood is an excuse for Meryl Streep to use another accent. And to put another Confederate flag on screen. I'm just wondering if there's a point to saying that she was very good in it? That Kurt Russell and Cher were good was only a little more of a surprise. Craig T. Nelson was a bad guy, rather than a dad in this film. You know that he only has two roles, right? Dad and bad guy. The ending of the film is way too mawkish. Can't there be a ban on endings just like that? Amazing Grace over a montage is just eh.

Norma Rae is a movie I had seen the most famous scene in my true film class back in college. One of our projects was to use a scene from a "true" movie and then write a paper on it. I wanted to do the famous one take call in All the President's Men, but that was too long, so I apparently wrote about a scene in Erin Brockovich where she gets a phone call. Clearly I wanted to deal with phone calls. Actually, looking through my papers from that class, I wrote about a different phone call in All the President's Men. I was obsessed apparently. Norma Rae is a better film than Silkwood. Probably would have had an even worse impression of Silkwood had I not seen Norma Rae right afterwards. Of course there are problems with this movie as well, but those are fairly minor compared to Sally Field as Norma Rae.

Yeah, I watched two straight 70s liberal films. So?