Waitress, Fighter, The Firemen's Ball, & Red Angel

So I moved the weekend of the 5th, and thus I've been very slowly putting things away, working very hard, and being social. That being social has severely limited my ability to actually watch movies. And thus, from Friday the 4th to January 14th, I only watched four movies. And three of them were over the last two days of that. Pretty much for eight days, I watched no movies. Probably the longest stretch in... man, maybe in my memory. Although that would include rewatching movies which I used to do often. But I didn't watch any movies at all for eight days. And I only felt bad when I saw the three Netflix movies next to my TV, because I was thinking, Netflix is finally not losing money on me. I'll get them back for that though. Unfortunately, I don't feel like writing a lot about the films. I generally liked all of them, although none were quite as good as I was hoping.

Waitress is a minor little film, although enjoyable. And not just because of my enormous man crush on Nathan Fillion. Keri Russell wasn't annoying, and Andy Griffith was funny. It's a shame that Adrienne Shelly was murdered, because she clearly has some talent. And man, the food porn... (Homer gurgling noise)...

Fighter is the first in a little Czech filmfest. Well, this one isn't Czech, it's an American documentary about two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia going back to Europe to go see a lot of the places that are connected to their war time experiences. Their actual experiences are fairly similar to many other documentaries and stories, but what makes it interesting is the interplay between the two survivors, who are pretty different, having many personality conflicts.

The Firemen's Ball is Milos Forman's last film in Czechoslovakia before he came to the US, and this was a short comedic film about a dinner and lottery going horribly wrong. The petty corruption, thievery, and infighting are clearly metaphorical for the Communist party. Pretty much everywhere, the party becomes corrupt. Although really any bureaucratic group of sufficient power will eventually become corrupt. Anyway, it's not as good as Loves of a Blonde, and certainly not as good as his American films.

Red Angel is depressing as hell. It's about a Japanese nurse who gets sent to China during the Sino-Japanese War. She gets raped, tries to do the right thing, and then feels guilty over the death of many of those she's close to. It's really horribly sad. Almost unwatchably a downer. I felt pretty crappy watching it, because I was rooting for the Japanese soldiers to live, when I knew that these were the same people who were responsibly for countless atrocities at the time the movie was set. So it would be a twinge of guilt at my feelings, until that character died. And then I felt another twinge after realizing how I felt.