"YOU'RE BACKSLIDING INTO THE FIRES OF HELL!" Heavy movie-going weekend here in the NYC metro area for this blogger.
Friday night's feature was "Saved!," which can probably best be described as an attempt to make an 80's John Hughes movie with a very 21st century sensibility and set it at a fundamentalist Christian high school. The setup? The summer before her senior year of high school, Mary (Jena Malone, who doesn't get nearly enough work in Hollywood) is told by her boyfriend that he's gay. She becomes convinced that she's had a vision of Christ telling her that to cure her boyfriend, the only solution is to have sex with him. So, she does. On the first day of school, she discovers that her boyfriend's parents have sent him away to be "cured." Chaos ensues. What's particularly great is the cast--Eva Amurri (Susan Sarandon's daughter) as the one Jewish girl at the school, Patrick Fugit as the preacher's kid who's rebelling, and (rather shockingly) both Macaulay Culkin and Mandy Moore are REALLY good and really funny in their roles. Check it out as it expands (though it's not for everyone, as some may be offended by the heavy-handed satire of religion).
Yesterday's feature was "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." Honestly, there's not much to say about it--though I miss a couple of the cuts they made, and the final freeze-frame is godawful, it finally hits almost the level that the books do, and the kids are growing as actors. The film may be a bit confusing for those not already familiar with the books, but, to be honest, who isn't familiar with the books? Highly suggested.
I went into today's feature, "The Day After Tomorrow," with modest expectations, especially in light of David Poland's massively negative review. But you know what? It's a lot of fun. Yes, it's more than a little uncomfortable to watch New York City get destroyed on screen, and there are a number of tiresome sequences (most notably a bizarre "Jake Gyllenhaal vs. Escaped Wolves" chase/fight). In fact, several plots, most notably a boring segment involving Ian Holm and his cronies at a climate-change monitoring station in Scotland and Sela Ward playing a doctor waiting for a rescue team to retrieve her and her young cancer patient (perhaps she's doing penance for turning down the role of Laura Bristow on "Alias"), become extremely tiresome and could be omitted altogether, but still, if you liked "Independence Day" as a trashy disaster movie, you should enjoy this one.
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