Life During Wartime: Review of the most recent Todd Solondz film

“Forgive and forget” is the mantra repeated throughout Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime. It is, for all intents and purposes, a sequel to his 1998 ironic comedy Happiness, although it’s been completely recast. The new film picks up a decade or so after the first film. The characters have, in rather limited ways, grown and matured.

25 Years Ago This Month (September 1985)

It seems there was hardly anything worth mentioning in September '85. Personally, I remember it was the month of Hurricane Gloria hitting the Atlantic coast - my first hurricane experience. I remember we had to put tape on the sliding glass door to keep it from shattering if it should have been hit by flying debris. I recall lots of tree branches coming down and I remember going out on the front lawn when the eye of the storm passed over.

Movies of note that opened this month include Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a weird wild trip through the NYC underworld during a single night, and Agnes of God, a mostly forgotten film now that earned Meg Tilly an Oscar nomination.

In historical news:
- An earthquake of magnitude 8.1 struck Mexico City killing some 10 - 12 thousand people.
- Robert Ballard located the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.
- Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb's hit record.
- The first of five deaths occurred from Tylenol laced with cyanide.

There weren't even any really notable celebrity deaths or births. Well, the Yankees' Joba Chamberlain turns 25 this month.

25 Years Ago This Month (August 1985)

*Clicking the label "1985" below will take you to a list of all posts related to movies of that year including other "25 Years Ago This Month" entries.

August 1985 was the month of teen comedies with the release of the John Hughes comedy Weird Science in which geeks Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith create Kelly LeBroc from a doll. I used to watch it a lot as a kid, but it's a lesser Hughes film.

Next up was Real Genius, still one of my favorites, starring Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarrett as two super geniuses at a super genius school unwittingly designing a new powerful laser to be used as a military assassination weapon.

Fittingly, time has not been kind to My Science Project starring Dennis Hopper as a hippie high school science teacher whose students bring him a glowing orb they found which can transport them to different times and places. Yeah, you didn't miss much.

Another classic from my childhood released this month was Better Off Dead with John Cusack as a recently dumped, suicidal teen who screws up each suicide attempt. Sounds hilarious, doesn't it? It really is though. And it's totally bizarre with the two Asian characters who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" and the paperboy who chases Cusack around for the "Two dollars!" he's owed.

Less classic was Teen Wolf. Despite starring the hot-at-the-moment, fresh off the release of Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox, this film only took $33 million. It was enough to be #1 for August releases but only 26th for the year.

The Devil Wears Prada Movie Review

The Devil Wears Prada is one of those Hollywood productions based on a best-selling novel, cast with big name movie stars, filled out with great production values, all in service to a lifeless script.

The screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna is based on the novel (unread by me) by Lauren Weisberger. The basic plot is thus: fresh-faced college graduate Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) seeks idealized position writing articles for a publication such as The New Yorker (it seems no one told Andy that in 2006, print publications were going the way of crank-start cars and anyway, big-time magazines generally don’t hire inexperienced 22-year olds as writers). She gets a (sort-of) lucky break getting hired as the junior assistant to Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep), a fashion maven and editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. It’s a job “a million girls would kill for” and if Andy can last a year she’ll have her pick of great magazine jobs.

Life Is What I Do Between World Cups

Another month-long World Cup tournament is finished and I have to return to a normal schedule that doesn't involve waiting for the next match to start or thinking about who's going to win or worrying if the USA is going to lose to Ghana.

Thankfully at the start of September qualifying begins for the 2012 European Championship. But I'll have to wait nearly 2 years before the USA plays anything related to Brazil 2014.

Time to start saving money for a holiday in Brazil in 4 years.

Going Away

I'm off to Switzerland for 2 weeks, then Italy for a week, then back to Seville for 2 days and then back to teaching English to kids at summer camp for the month of August. So it's unlikely there will be too many posts through the end of the summer.

I'll try to get something up occasionally, but see you back in September. If there's anyone even there.

Classic Movie Review: The Graduate

Watching Mike Nichols’ classic The Graduate for the first time in about ten years or so I was struck by several things: Dustin Hoffman’s performance seems like preparation work for Rain Man; Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson was sexy and brilliant; the screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry is bitingly funny at times; Benjamin Braddock is not nearly the cultural revolutionary that I remembered him to be (or that he seemed to be in the 60s). While the film is undoubtedly a classic, it is hardly great.