A few weeks ago, I watched (or at least finished watching) two movies from the PVR. I don’t know if I’ve talked about them yet. They were The House of Mirth and Laurel Canyon. I’m concerned about being backwards because one of them was critically acclaimed and one was disliked by the critics. And my feelings were (ahh-hha!) backwards!<\/p>\n
House of Mirth — starring Gillian Anderson (Yes, from the X-Files) as an upper-class woman in a time where the options were marry or perish. I thought this was a terrible movie. Just awful. Anderson and Eric Stoltz both seemed to be…acting and I spent the whole movie thinking they were manipulative characters, schemers. In the final scene Stoltz’s character…SPOILER ALERT…finds Anderson’s dead body and weeps. Huh? My dislike of this movie may have been tempered by two things: 1) I think Stoltz was a manipulative fuck of a character in “The Passion of Ayn Rand”, which I saw on late night TV about a year ago and this has colored my opinion of him forever and 2) I watched a LOT of this movie dozing off. Speaking of Rand, this movie was the film equivalent to Atlas Shrugged – it generally puts me to sleep quickly. And I’m NOT devoting a year to watching a crap movie. (On another note, it appears I’ve seen a large # of Stoltz movies…hmmm, about a dozen. That’s a lot for me). Here<\/a>‘s House of Mirth’s entry on IMDB. ** (and that’s just because who doesn’t like Anthony Paglia and Dan frigging Ackroyd playing bastards?)<\/p>\n Laurel Canyon — it occurs to me that perhaps this movie was just more of an Elaine movie. (But then again, I like costume dramas…and House of Mirth just blew). Laurel Canyon is set in contemporary Los Angeles and stars American Psycho star Christian Bale and current “Would you just shut up about her?” It-Girl Kate Beckinsale as med students spending time in his mother’s house in (ahh-haa) Laurel Canyon. The mother is Frances McDormand (yeah! From Fargo!) and is totally a kick-ass rock n’ roll type mother, but one who never did a lot of, ya know, mothering… The movie is about how these 3 get together and everything kinda unravels, but in new and imaginative ways. Fun, Fun. The ending was a pisser, but totally worth the rest of it. And here<\/a> is IMDB’s entry on Laurel Canyon. ***1\/2<\/p>\n So the reviews said Laurel Canyon was not good and House of Mirth rocked. Liars, all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few weeks ago, I watched (or at least finished watching) two movies from the PVR. I don’t know if I’ve talked about them yet. They were The House of Mirth and Laurel Canyon. I’m concerned about being backwards because one of them was critically acclaimed and one was disliked by the critics. And my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-really-deep-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laineyd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}