Sorry for the late post. The last month or so was busy personally and relatively slow movie-wise. Here, alas, are some viewing highlights from the month of October.
A beautiful 4K print of Lawrence of Arabia was released to theaters and it was a great opportunity for me to catch up on the deservedly legendary film from David Lean. I had only seen it once, in my early 20s, split over a couple of nights on DVD. Needless to say, it wasn't the optimal viewing experience, so seeing it again was like seeing it for the first time. And it didn't disappoint. From Omar Sharif's first appearance in the desert to a fatal moment involving quicksand, there aren't many movies that simply look like this one.
Argo--the based-on-fact story of the CIA's rescue of six American employees who escaped the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis--is Ben Affleck's third directorial effort and probably his best so far, though perhaps there is a bit too much racheting up of the tension in the final scenes. But a lot of it works, especially in the first half, where Affleck's Tony Mendez enlists Hollywood insiders played hilariously by John Goodman and Alan Arkin to help him create a believable front as a movie producer going to Tehran for location scouting.
My review of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is here and it's probably the first great movie of the awards season (for whatever that's worth).
I'll hopefully post my review of Silver Linings Playbook soon as well. It's a surprising, screwball comedy from David O. Russell with terrific performances from its two leads, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.
Robert Zemeckis's early comedy Used Cars is one of the funniest movies of that era, with Kurt Russell playing a used car salesman who must try to keep his boss's business alive while the boss himself is actually dead. It's absurd in the best way, especially when they use their connections (Lenny & Squiggy, of all people) to hijack network airtime to insert live commercials into big TV events.
In my ongoing trek through the Bond series, I finally got through the Connery years and, after perhaps the high point of them all, From Russia With Love (which I briefly touched upon in the previous month), the series really never hit a false note until Diamonds Are Forever, the movie for which Connery returned after a one movie hiatus, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (the lone George Lazenby flick), which rivals Russia at the top of the Bond list.
On television, I was happy to see that the H2 series, How the States Got Their Shapes returned with a new season. What I loved about the first season is inherent in the title: it investigated the how and why our states got their particular and varied borders. Perhaps all of the really interesting stories behind the certain states' shapes were already used because this season has reduced its episodes (literally, the running time has been cut in half) to binary oppositions: "East vs. West", "Red States vs. Blue States", even "Redneck vs. Hillbilly". The show is still informative and entertaining, but it really isn't about the deeper story of how the lines on our country's map were drawn, which makes me a little sad.
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