Hilary and Jackie, Airborne, Gleaming the Cube, & Partisans of Vilna

Hilary and Jackie is the sad story of two musical prodigies pushed too far and how one goes insane. No, they don't take revenge, although that would fit with the next three films... It's written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who has worked with Michael Winterbottom on a lot of movies. It also has extremely good performances from Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths. It's full of good music and I recommend it. It's quite good.

Airborne, a movie I've seen far too many times, was something I decided to inflict upon a friend, because... I enjoy inflicting that movie on everyone? We decided to have a crappy skating/skateboarding mini-fest this past weekend. Airborne is the amazingly accurate representation of Cincinnati as a hockey town, obsessed with all things hockey, along with the humor of pulling someone's pants down and prank montages. It's awesome. Plus, the final hill is all over the city, and in Kentucky. And there's a scene where Krohn Conservatory is both empty and appropriate to rollerblade in. AWESOME! And I didn't even bring up the awesome cast, of a young Jack Black, bravely going balls first into a tree, Edie McClurg (Rooney's secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off) overacting and extremely oblivious, Shane McDermott who never did another movie, and now sells real estate in Texas, and last, but not least, Seth Green as the complete spazz of a cousin who gets the girl by getting thrown against the wall of a restaurant, and no other redeeming qualities. AWESOME! Plus, it's music by Stuart Copeland, written by two guys who never wrote anything else, and directed by Rob Bowman, who has done a lot of TV, and three other movies: The X-Files Movie, Reign of Fire, and Elektra. Just wow. You owe it to yourself and this great, flawed country to see this amazing piece of classic America.

Gleaming the Cube is the excellent Christian Slater solves problems the only way he knows how: skateboarding into them! Apparently, his parents adopted a Vietnamese kid back in the late 70s and he started to work for a guy who was involved with gun-running. But the evil white guy goes too far and starts killing people, so Christian Slater has to team up with his dead brother's Vietnamese girlfriend and a reluctant Steven Bauer, playing a "hip" cop to bring down the gun-runner and prove that his brother didn't kill himself. Plus, it has a lot of unnecessary skateboarding tricks, Max Perlich as his best friend, and Tony Hawk and a bunch of other skaters as other friends. It's just another wow film. Sometimes you just have to watch something you know is going to be a train wreck because you want to be able to talk about the film forever with anyone who has seen it. So see this film and talk to me. If you happen to be in the District, I have it, so talk to me.

Partisans of Vilna was made back in 1986. I really didn't realize it was so old, although watching it, it did seem like a very low budget documentary. Of course, it was just that it was old. Sometimes you can't tell. It's about the Jewish resistance in Vilna during the Holocaust. And it was pretty long. But it was of considerable interest to me, being both Jewish and both sides of my family being originally from Lithuania. Considering how long ago it was made, a lot of the people who were involved were actually still alive, which made it more interesting. It does fall into the same problem that every Holocaust documentary you see has: if you've seen one, you've seen them all. It's just the amount of depression afterwards that's different. Since a lot of them survived, and they took out quite a few Nazis, this one ends up on the low end of the spectrum.