The Lion in Winter
While, yes, I understand that it was a play first, and, yes, I understand that acting was different back then, and, yes, who the fuck am I to question Anthony Hopkins and Peter O'Toole, but, I mean, give me a fucking break. The beginning and ending were nice, but after a while it just all got to be a bit much. There's only so much Peter O'Toole running from one room to another yelling like a mad bastard that I can take. And the dialouge, I felt, was trying just a little bit too hard.

On the other hand: John Castle was great as Geoffery, even though the part is only one note, struck over and over. And the opening sequence, where Jane Merrow's breasts are trucked up into that U-gouge medival neckline? That's a good time.

Oh, and I've decided that I hate Katherine Hepburn.

Overall? 6/10 (Respecatable)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Based on the book of the same name, this movie reminded me a lot of Woody Allen's "Bananas." In so much as that it was trying very hard to be funny but really wasn't so much. The best sequence was the driest: The take off on "8 1/2" / every other Fellini movie was quite hilarious, to me. Also, I think it spun on Belle de Jour, which I just watched today. Will have to go back and check. If you've seen the films it plays on, this movie's worth it for this one sketch.

The others were forgettable, except the classic capper to the film: Woody Allen as a reluctant sperm as a man's body (run like a navy ship) tries to get it together to have sex. Also choice: an insanely young Regis Philbin during the "Guess My Perversion" sequence, though the sequence itself was pretty crappy.

Overall? 5/10 (Eh.)

Glengarry Glen Ross
Another opened-up play, and this one shows it, too. Never have I found David Mamet so annoying as when Ed Harris is delivering his lines. Watching Alan Arkin do his thing, though, will never get old. So many guys in this movie are perfectly cast: Alec Baldwin is the corporate higher-up, waiting for you to give him an excuse to shit on you. Kevin Spacey is the blank, careerist, seemingly incompetant boss. Jack Lemmon is old, funny and a little down on his luck--he does best with making the dialog sound natural, too. Alan Arkin is the prickly guy. Ed Harris is the dick who thinks he's smarter than everybody else, even when he's not. Jonathon Pryce (of Brazil) is the mark.

And Al Pacino. Al Pacino plays the same role that Al Pacino's played a thousand times since: complete asshole and smooth-talking hustler who could sell water to a well. Ricky Roma is the protoypical Pacino role, and he fucking eats it up.

The cast and the kinetic energy of the dialog keep the movie from getting too bottle up in it's tacked-on-feeling plot or it's general lack of craft in direction.

Overall? 7/10 (if you're a dude) or 3/10 (if you're a chick)

Secretary
A lot of pieces of film-making claim to be erotic, but few actually are. The first spanking sequence in Secretary is truly one of the most erotic things I've ever seen put on film. And subsequent sequences build on, complicate or subvert that first blush of eroticism wonderfully. It's the best filmic equivilent I've ever seen to the blossoming of erotic exploration. Very well-done.

It suffers, a little, from it's time-period and semi-indie aesthetic (the middle-time plot meanderings remind me a little of Garden State and like faire that is solid but has that middle-wander, where the film loses coherence for those five or ten minutes when focus matters most. I don't know if this indicates that filmmaking is harder than it looks, or that these directors/writers go through one too few rounds of polish to clean that out, but it's an important feature of the sub-genre, and I'd like to see someone take it apart).

And it also suffers from the fact that I find James Spader a bit disconcertingly walleyed.

But I stand by my initial assesment: very, very good. A mostly well-made film on a woefully under-addressed subject (Moral, as portrayed by the film: Most people are neither, but some people are doms and some people are subs. There is nothing wrong with this, and good for them when they find each other.) that addresses it's characters with warmth and depth.

Overall? 8/10. (Good, not great. Worth seeing.)

Belle de Jour
Catherine Deneuve is a stone fox. A stone fox's stone fox, if you will. The stone fox of a stone fox's ... well, you get the idea. The woman is attractive. The basic premise: Severine is psychologically unable to make love to her husband. She hears of another woman of her social-stratum who has become a prostitute, from time to time. So she does the same.

What is interesting to me is the ... ambiguity the movie leaves open. What really drove it home were the two trailers included on the DVD. The original, 1967 American trailer: A woman is tempted by the pleasures of the flesh! The 1992 re-release trailer: A woman departs on an erotic journey to find her inner being!
Neither of these one-lines really sum up what's going on in the film: a woman has a problem. She hears of something that strikes her as related to her problem and she undertakes it, she doesn't know why. She is doing what people do: trying something, even though they don't know why because perhaps it will fill a need or answer a question even they themselves can only vaguely define.

So far, it sounds much more like the 1992 trailer got it right, but it misses, too. Her journey is not 'erotic.' Sometimes it is erotic, other times it is horrifying. Some times it is magical and transporting, other times it is crass and harsh. Sometimes when it's crass and harsh it's transporting.

(Severine, here, like Maggie Gyllenhall's character in Secretary, seems to be a bit of a sub by nature... but putting the blonde, aristocratic Severine in the role of a sub rather than the cutter that is Gyllenhall's character in Secretary reeks of drastically different gender politics, which I can talk about at further length, should anyone care.)

So the 1992 trailer gets it wrong, too. Yes, she does become sexually 'enlightened,' but she's also narratively punished for doing so and wishes she hadn't done it, it seems. But would her life have been so much better in her chaste marriage to Pierre? Really the movie is about someone with problems she can't solve, but who tries to anyway. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and in the end, it comes crashing down on her.

But I guess that message is, to be fair, a little complicated for a two minute trailer.

Overall? 8/10.