Movie Mon. - It's Hard to Play Sudoku and Pay Attention to Movies at the Same Time

Reduced movie watching this week due to massive Sudoku addiction among other things; here be the brief reviews.

Casanova: Period piece with Heath Ledger playing the infamous ultimate lover, who is commanded to find a wife and settle down or else be exiled from Venice upon pain of Inquisition. I was pleasantly surprised by this one; I went in expecting a stodgy drama, and was greeted by an entertaining comedy instead. It's sort of Dangerous Liaisons Lite; all the intrigue, but 1% of the drama!

Tristan and Isolde: Now, here's the stodgy period piece! Film based on the legend of star-crossed lovers caught up in the wars between the Irish and the Britons following the fall of the Roman Empire. Have to admit, I actually dozed off during this one, and had to rewind it a ways when I woke up and thought to myself "hey, why are the people staging a revolution, and whose head is that Tristan is holding in his hands?" Not a badly done film, but just couldn't keep my interest at all; maybe if I'd tried to watch it while I wasn't sleep deprived . . .

Mammoth: Intentionally cheesy film from the Sci-Fi channel about a frozen mammoth that gets possessed by an alien life form and terrorizes a small town. Not a whole lot to say about this one; its self-aware humor worked some times, and other times fell flat. Most of the times the humor fell flat involved the inclusion of "zany" sound effects, used in a "look, we know how silly this is, all right? Now, back off!" sort of way. Self-aware and tongue in cheek: fine. Slapstick and sound effects reminiscent of the more painful moments in The Batman Film That Must Not Be Named: not so much.

Black Christmas: Slasher film from the 70s starring Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin as girls in a sorority house being stalked by a psycho killer around Christmas time, brought to us by the director responsible for Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, A Christmas Story, and Porky's. Now, Silent Night, Deadly Night this is not; it's actually a very well done little film. It predates Halloween (in fact, director Bob Clark takes credit for the idea for Halloween on the commentary) and thus avoids many of the clichés of the genre which would pop up post Halloween and Friday the 13th. Margot Kidder is fun as the foul mouthed, drunken sorority girl, and most of the other cast members do a good job as well; one thing that's enjoyable about the film is that the characters all feel well developed. Best scene in the movie is probably the murder intercut with shots of the children caroling; switching back and forth from the (mostly off-camera) violence to the creepy little kids was pretty effective. Much better film than I had expected.

Shopgirl: Romantic dramedy based on the book by Steve Martin about a department store worker (Claire Daines) who becomes romantically involved with an older, wealthy patron (Steve Martin). Another film that bored the heck out of me; about the only scenes that held my interest were those involving Jason Schwartzman as Daines' spurned lover, and then only for his terrifically oddball performance. I disliked having Martin do the narration as well as star; the narrator voice is obviously not from the P.O.V of his character, so his pulling double duty was a bit distracting. I would have much rather seen the long-gestating film version of Martin's hilarious play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile", if for no other reason than to see if they somehow worked the "In Order of Appearance" gag into the script. But instead we got this; I have to wonder if the book is any better, but to be honest, this film in no way made me want to find out.