Rubber - A movie about a killer tire. Sort of. It was really ****ing weird. As I watched, I was pretty fascinated with it. It's different from anything I've seen before. It has some funny parts and I really liked the opening and the ending, as well. Having said that, it was not a very good movie and I don't think I care to ever watch it again.
Bigger Than Life - I had a hard time getting started on this. I think it took 3 or 4 tries. Partly because the channel I DVR'd it on isn't in HD and partly because of the way it opens. It's starts off so sticky sweet, Leave It To Beaver, happy 50's family, that I wondered if I could actually enjoy it, even after having read the synopsis and skimmed some of the overwhelmingly positive reviews on IMDB. I just wasn't sure. But I decided to just sit down and work through that **** last night, and I am really, really glad I did.
James Mason plays Ed, a schoolteacher who takes a second job working for a cab company. Rather than tell his wife about the second job, he lies to her and actually lets her think he might be having an affair because he thinks that would be less upsetting! Their lives are dull (by his own admission) and boring until he is hit with a rare illness that threatens his life. In order for him to survive, the doctors put him on an experimental drug called cortisone, which magically cures him as long as he takes it everyday for the rest of his life. Ed gets addicted to the pills and starts taking well more than the prescribed dosage, causing him to go psychotic. He starts telling the parents of his students that their children are morons, making his son go without food until he can solve math problems that he makes up and he lashes out at his wife, calling her an imbecile and saying he doesn't consider her to be his wife anymore. His wife is terrified, but unwilling to do anything about it other than hope he comes out of it for fear of what other people might think. This builds all the way up to Ed deciding that "God was wrong!" when he called off Abraham's sacrifice of his son, Isaac, and proceeds to head towards his son's room with a pair of sharp scissors.
It's a fascinating movie. It feels like a subversive jab at the Way Things Were in the 50's. There are a few reviews on IMDB from people who say that they had parents that were exactly like this. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see this movie back when it came out, how upsetting it probably was for people who saw it. The fact that I'd never heard of it, and it was unavailable on DVD, until Criterion released it early last year makes me wonder if people back then were, like the mother in the film, just unwilling to confront or discuss the things that were going on.
It's a really excellent movie, and I recommend it highly.
Justified: Seasons 1 & 2 - Finally got caught up, in plenty of time to be ready for season 3 in a week or so. Timothy Olyphant plays a cowboy marshall forced to work in Kentucky, where he grew up after he finally shoots one too many bad guys instead of arresting them. And, of course, a large number of people he knew and associated with in his younger days are still in the town he grew up in and many of them have taken to illegal activites.
I was a little disappointed with season 1. I liked it, and I love watching Timothy Olyphant, but it never really clicked for me. Season 2, though, I loved. I thought it was much more interesting and intense. I love the moral ambiguity you see in so many of the characters and how you never really know which way things are going to go. The Bennet family is/was an especially good antagonist, I thought. I have high hopes for Season 3.
I should also mentioned that BoobyTrap watched bits and pieces of it with me and that she told me I should add that she hates TO's ex-wife and keeps rooting for her to get shot, and that she has trouble following the story sometimes because "all the bearded white people look alike". I should mention, she is either not around or not paying attention most of the time while I've been watching it, which would make it nearly impossible to follow what's going on. And that she "was starting to like" Timothy Olyphant's character until the episode with the counterfeit money and his ex-wife happened. And now she just talks about men being stupid around vaginas. Which there is probably some truth to.
