Let's all go to the lobby
Wednesday, 17 August 2016 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59I went to the movies Sunday and saw Don't Think Twice. I had planned to see Indignation afterward, but I had developed a low-grade migraine and I had been away from home for too long, so after a short meander in the mall, I went home.
Don't Think Twice was very good. It isn't a comedy; it's a movie about an improve group, so there's a lot of funny stuff, but the movie itself isn't particularly funny. Some members of the group are hoping to get hired by an SNL-like show; some don't want things to change, but their venue is closing, so change is inevitable. One man's father is dying. One has reconnected with a woman he went to college with. One of them actually gets chosen for the SNL-ish show, and it throws the dynamics of their relationships all out of whack.
It's a nice movie about good people. More than anything, it reminded me of a movie I wrote about earlier in the year, Between the Lines. (https://carose59.dreamwidth.org/117348.html) It's a private end-of-an-era movie.
There were previews for a movie called Hell or High Water and I thought about it a lot on the drive home. It's an action movie about two brothers who start robbing banks to save their home/mother's home (I'm unsure which). They are, of course, the heroes. We want them to get away with it. But everything about the tone of the previews tells me that is not going to happen. As I watched them, I thought of Taps (Timothy Hutton leads a military school to resist closure and demolition after the commandant has a heart attack. [That's from memory, the details could be off.]) There are others that I can't think of, but I used to love lost cause movies like that; they were thrilling, at least in the beginning. The problem is that I'm older and more depressed and it's harder to be thrilled by the romance of the lost cause because it's redolent of failure and despair: I can see the ending in the opening credits, and I know when it ends, nobody's going to be happy—particularly me.
Still, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking I want to go home and watch Taps.
And maybe I'll stay for Hell or High Water when I go back to see Indignation. It really is thrilling to watch someone standing up, fighting for that lost cause. Maybe I need to watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington again, too.
Don't Think Twice was very good. It isn't a comedy; it's a movie about an improve group, so there's a lot of funny stuff, but the movie itself isn't particularly funny. Some members of the group are hoping to get hired by an SNL-like show; some don't want things to change, but their venue is closing, so change is inevitable. One man's father is dying. One has reconnected with a woman he went to college with. One of them actually gets chosen for the SNL-ish show, and it throws the dynamics of their relationships all out of whack.
It's a nice movie about good people. More than anything, it reminded me of a movie I wrote about earlier in the year, Between the Lines. (https://carose59.dreamwidth.org/117348.html) It's a private end-of-an-era movie.
There were previews for a movie called Hell or High Water and I thought about it a lot on the drive home. It's an action movie about two brothers who start robbing banks to save their home/mother's home (I'm unsure which). They are, of course, the heroes. We want them to get away with it. But everything about the tone of the previews tells me that is not going to happen. As I watched them, I thought of Taps (Timothy Hutton leads a military school to resist closure and demolition after the commandant has a heart attack. [That's from memory, the details could be off.]) There are others that I can't think of, but I used to love lost cause movies like that; they were thrilling, at least in the beginning. The problem is that I'm older and more depressed and it's harder to be thrilled by the romance of the lost cause because it's redolent of failure and despair: I can see the ending in the opening credits, and I know when it ends, nobody's going to be happy—particularly me.
Still, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking I want to go home and watch Taps.
And maybe I'll stay for Hell or High Water when I go back to see Indignation. It really is thrilling to watch someone standing up, fighting for that lost cause. Maybe I need to watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington again, too.