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Watched two movies yesterday: Lost in America and The Falcon and the Snowman.
I must admit to a small filmmaking fetish. No matter how bad a movie otherwise is, if it does one small thing right I'll always have a soft spot for it. And that thing is perfectly capturing the way married people (or a couple that has been together for a long time) fight. The way something starts with "could you please close the dryer door when you empty it?" a few minutes later has turned into an all out verbal brawl that slowly subsides and flares up again and what is said is never what it is about.
Lots of films try to capture this and, in my opinion, most of them fail. The cadence is off. But every once in a while I'm watching a movie and halfway through such a scene I realize that the screenwriter and the director nailed it perfectly. As an example, consider The Real Blonde, a small indie film starring Matt Modine and Catherine Keener from back in the mid-90s. I have zero recall as to what this movie was about, what its story was. Anything at all except that halfway through Modine and Keener have a "couple's fight" that was perhaps the best I've ever seen.
This was the first time I've seen Lost in America since high school. I found it funny then and have always been a huge Albert Brooks fan. Well, let me just say that from my current perspective it is all the more brilliant. The argument between Brooks and Julie Hagerty at Hoover Dam is near perfection. It plays more comedically but it has the cadence perfectly as well as the ebb and flow.
Glad I watched it again.
I was "meh" on The Falcon and the Snowman the story of a kid who ends up working with classified information at a sattelite communications company in 1974 and decides to start selling the information to the Russians. It was ok but nothing particularly interesting and it proved that Sean Penn was just as annoying 20 years ago as he is today.
Looking up the real story after watching it I was disappointed (but not surprised) that the movie whitewashed much of the guy's motivations and cleaned up his capture to make him look much more noble. Also, once I did that I realized I knew someone who had connections to the company in question at the time in question. So I was able to have an interesting conversation with someone on the fringe of the incident.
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