Two fisted movie reviews

I don't know about you but when it's cold as Christian charity outside and the snow is blowing all day long Sparky and I like to get out of the house long enough to go to the grocery store and to Blockbuster. We rented two films that won Oscars the other night, which I'll review later after we watch them, and we also got this film:Let me start by saying that Julie Taymor is one of the most creative and inventive people in the entertainment industry today. Her films, plays, and other projects are truly some of the most visually stunning things around. I find myself drawn to most everything she does because I know it's going to be interesting.Having said that, I'll say that this film is nice to look at, the actors are pretty, the songs nice, and the interpretations of the songs are in some cases mind blowing, although in my case it doesn't take much to blow my monkey mind. But overall I found the story, the structure around which they put the Beatles songs, lacking. It was a shade hackneyed and trite. To show you how two people watching the same film can interpret it differently, Sparky loved the movie.

Performances that deserve singling out are those of the black guitarist, the Latino singer, and the guys who played Max and Jude, all of them were standouts. I found Evan Rachel Wood a bit, wait for it, wait for it, wooden in her performance. I loved her in Running With Scissors but I thought she was a bit out of her league here. The cameos by Salma Hayek, Bono, and Joe Cocker are fun. This film also has a milestone in it for me, this was the first time I saw a performance by Eddie Izzard that I was able to stomach, and I'll go so far to even say that I enjoyed him in this film. (I'd rather take a beating in the kidneys with a bag of oranges than watch Izzard do stand up or act in most anything. I get your shtick Eddie, you dress up in women's clothes and you put on make up and you say outrageous things, seriously I get it. It's been done to death Eddie and done to death by men who are actually funny, unlike you sir.)

Anyway, this film is worth seeing. Once.

We also watched a documentary on HBO about the artist Christo's The Gates. It was called, oddly enough, The Gates.

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I'm into modern art and I love most of the massive public art works Christo has done, with the exception of the wrapping of the Reichstag, so I really dug this film. The film begins by showing the long process it took Christo and his wife and collaborator Jean Claude to get this exhibition mounted. They actually began trying to get approval for it in the late 1970's. But bureaucrat after bureaucrat and Mayor after Mayor kept turning them down, even though Christo offered to pay for everything himself. But finally Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat who turned Republican so he could get elected in NYC, agreed to let them put the gates up. The film then shows us the process by which they installed the gates and the reaction to the gates when they were all up. The last 20 minutes or so is an almost wordless examination of the reactions of the people who viewed the gate up close.

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This film is a fascinating look at the process of making public art today. I really liked this documentary, in fact I liked it so much, I ate it up with a spoon.