Like Water for Chocolate, Bender's Big Score, All the King's Men, Christmas in July, Naked, & The Up Series

Like Water for Chocolate is a movie that was given to my parents back on VHS (one of the very, very few they ever were given, since they never purchased them, and, as far as I know, they've never purchased a DVD either), but I never watched. I have remedied that. Magical realism is a soft spot of mine, and lots of food preparation just made it even more interesting to me. The copious nudity didn't hurt either. I just didn't connect with the film as much as the parts suggested I should.

Bender's Big Score is a Futurama movie. If you don't think that the show was consistently the best animated TV show ever, then you're plain wrong. It took the best of the Simpsons, and added insanely geeky references (just watch the half hour long math lecture included on the DVD for the proof), and extremely effective pop culture satire, and just made extreme hilarity a constant feature. I utterly loved it. Of course I wanted more, and the next three films will have to do, but why the hell did Family Guy, that unfunny piece of crap (one of my favorite gags was the Family Guy calendar advertising 12 jokes a year), come back, while Futurama was so royally screwed throughout almost its entirely too short broadcast time? I also wasn't expecting nearly the amount of nudity I got from the movie. And I wasn't the one who brought up the fact that Amy Wong is cute. All this comes down to is how much you can ignore the blase decapitations and just enjoy Zoidberg, Farnsworth, Nibbler, and Bender doing their thing for 80 minutes, with cameos from just about everyone cool from the show. And Hanuka Zombie. Voiced by Mark Hamill.

All the King's Men is another version of one of the greatest American novels, by Robert Penn Warren. The 1949 movie version was excellent, with Broderick Crawford a mesmerizing Willie Stark. Sean Penn and James Gandolfini, among almost every other major actor in this film, can't even keep their accents the same throughout each scene. It's long, it's unnecessary, but I've seen it now. On a scratched Blu-ray disc. If you absolutely cannot read the book, see the earlier version. Avoid this one like the plague. I object to movies that aim for greatness and fail miserably far more than movies that aspire to be entertaining and only fitfully succeed.

Christmas in July is Preston Sturges's follow-up to The Great McGinty, and to be followed by a string of comedies over the next four years unsurpassed by a writer-director (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero). Unfortunately for me, it was more like The Great McGinty, in that it has moments of brilliance, but ultimately falls a little flat. Partially due to Ellen Drew's poor performance, but also due to a slightly unbelievable plot (a guy enters a coffee slogan contest, and his coworkers convince him he's won, goes out to spend his winnings, marry his sweetheart, and everything has to end happily). Sturges's trademarks are there, with slapstick, ridiculous names, and William Demarest, but the brief movie (only 67 minutes long) never feels like it has time to set.

Naked, on the other hand, is 130 minutes of pain. Not at the quality of the movie, but it's the raw emotion from David Thewlis's performance that makes this uncomfortable film with two pretty anti-women male characters worth seeing. The fairly constant violence against women made me feel icky, and I had to have the subtitles on, due to a low volume sound mix and Scottish accents (Ewan "Spud" Bremner!). I may not have entirely enjoyed the film, but I can heartily recommend it for anyone who wants to see David Thewlis wandering around, abusing women (mostly psychologically), getting beaten up, having philosophical conversations with random people, and generally being an observer of other people's messed up lives.

The Up Series starts out strong, as Seven Up!'s kids say extremely funny (and occasionally classist and racist) things, although Seven Plus Seven is fairly weak, with a bunch of fourteen year olds not the best communicators out there. But the later ones become meditations on fame, relationships, and just how hard it can be to live in world of the late 20th century (and early 21st in 49 Up). I wish that the one kid who ended up working at the BBC had been willing to talk. And it was extremely frustrating to watch Neil spiral into homelessness and mental illness, although he was able to recover. But having no foreknowledge of how they will grow up, have their hopes realized and demolished over the period of 42 years made it heartrending. Seeing marriages dissolve made me feel overly voyeuristic. It's basically actual reality TV, with as little preening for the TV as you never see on reality TV in this country. I can't wait for 56 Up in another five years. I need to know that they're going to be ok. Watching them all over the last couple weeks has suggested that this wasn't a good idea, as there's a fair bit of repetition, with many older clips used to occasionally take the piss out of them, other times showing how they had done just what they expected.