Not very good in logging the recent films:

Memento : great film, noirish mystery played backwards as the main character has no short term memory.

Shrek : a fine animated comedy that pokes fun at all kinds of old fairy tales while turning the tale of the prince who rescues the princess upside down. Saw this with Janet. Must remember that she does not like animation.

Swordfish : an okay summer cyber-thriller, lots of action, twisty plot and an bunch of characters none of whom you get attached to. John Travolta comes out better on this one than Battlefield Earth! Could he do worse? At least I was able to escape the heat and humidity here last week.

Shadow of the Vampire : got this on DVD because it has some of my favorite actors (Malkovitch, Dafoe), it plays on German Expressionist cinema (Nosferatu) and has a suitably wacky story of film about film and the nature of obsession. A lovely film.

Vertical Limit : a video rental thankfully. nothing really outstanding here. the whole thing is strangely flat and uninteresting. the characters never evolve in a meaningful way. the tension seems to disappear.

Gigi : another DVD purchase and a great musical. times have changed. there is a funny wiff of pedophilia here by our standards and male/female relations are rather different now. definitely of a time. but Gigi is charming and the music is great.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? : I love the Coen Brothers and this is a romping good film with a great performance by George Clooney, et. al. The music is fantastic, southern hillbilly, root, blues. Definitely a must have CD to track down.

Finding Forrester : Sean Connery stars in this knockoff of Good Will Hunting. Light entertainment. BUT a note to myself: get the soundtrack for the closing credit track by the Hawaiian ukelele player. Who was this guy??? Amazing.

MOULIN ROUGE

Saw this last night with Paddy Tynan. She and I never agree on anything related to movies. Her taste is suspect, too oriented to chick-flick manipulation. But we agreed that Moulin Rouge was pretty cool - if perhaps a bit over-the-top. There certainly aren't many movies with the frenetic visual style of this Baz Luhrmann directed film, a sort of cross between Terry Gilliam's Munchausen, La Boheme, and Oliver Stone. An epilepsy warning will probably be necessary with all the flashing red. Red satin and corsetry will definitely be the fashion of the fall and winter of 2001. (Satine) Nicole Kidman, the consumptive courtesan falls in love with the bohemian writer (Christian) Ewan McGregor but the whole thing is doomed both by bad stars and almost thwarted by the rapacious, capitalist Duke (conservative money that thinks that money buys all and equals power). Kidman is radiantly beautiful, the perfect Mimi or Violette.

The Romantics prove (I think) that Love and Beauty are greater ideals than Money in the end. Yeah, whatever. She dies, he crys. This is all of opera condensed into one film.

The music is a potpourri, the oh-so pomo trait of sampling just about every significant love tune of the 19th and 20th century working to twang on just about any demographic's atrophied heart-strings. The Roxane tango is a wicked literal interpretation. Not a musical in any classic tradition but one in tune with the aphoristically inclined and ADD infused times.

Moulin Rouge is a fantasy of the highest order that takes an archetypal story and paints it anew. Ms. Tynan redeemed her taste by agreeing.