Killer of Sheep, The Fly, The Fly II, & From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China

Killer of Sheep was a movie that pretty much became famous through normal people not watching it. At only 83 minutes long, I was hating myself for spending $9.50 on it. The scene where Stan and his wife are dancing was just about the only thing that seemed remotely worth watching. Every other scene required people who were clearly not actors to emote at least a little, and they certainly couldn't come close to showing human emotion. Maybe if something had happened or the couple of middle aged women next to me hadn't been constantly trying to guess what would happen next and then conferring and saying things like "Oh no!" and "Don't do that!" and "EWWW!", I might have been less inclined to dislike the film. But aside from that scene of dancing (one of Those Scenes that Wong Kar-Wai is so good at), the film was just boring. I am not enough of a film nerd to enjoy it.

The Fly I and II come on one DVD, which meant a back-to-back watching, and realizing that it's really, really obvious that it's not Geena Davis in the opening scene of Fly II. If you can't get the hair color right, try harder. The special effects in I are far better than II, and that Cronenberg is a better director than the guy who did the special effects in I and never directed before just makes the difference between Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and Eric Stoltz and Daphne Zuniga even more pronounced.

From Mao to Mozart is an Oscar winning documentary about Isaac Stern's trip to China in 1979, three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, at the invitation of the government. As a somewhat inadvertent companion piece to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, it's interesting to see that in just three years, some of the damage from that closing of China has been fixed, but that it has seriously harmed some parts of Chinese society irreparably. Does it hurt my classical music cred when I say that I got Isaac Stern confused with Itzhak Perlman before watching the film? And how much?