Whippersnappers

If you'll excuse the absence after a personally topsy-turvy week, I'll ease myself back in with a quick post on three movies I watched over the weekend:

• Saw 127 Hours, making Black Swan the only of the Best Picture nominees I have yet to see. 127 Hours is, simply, a phenomenal movie. Beautiful camera work, exhilarating plot, great acting, very inspiring. "The scene" is very short and, for the most part, not that graphic. Loved it.


• Mystery Team was a film at Sundance a couple of years ago, made by a comedy troupe from NYU that starred Donald Glover. The movie deals with three eighteen-year-olds who were one the Encyclopedia Browns of their neighborhood and are now called upon to solve a murder. Glover got the part on Community because of his work in this film and he more or less plays the same type of character. If you like the good portion of NBC's Thursday night shows -- and if you don't, how could you possibly read this blog -- you should like this movie.


• With Sidney Lumet passing on Saturday, I took the opportunity to revisit his most famous movie, Network. Brilliant acting turns by Peter Finch, William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, and an Oscar-winning script highlight this look at the dirty business of television. People say that this plot, dealing with a faltering new division that turns its broadcast into entertainment to make money, prophesied the current state of TV news. That may be true, but I was also taken by how the movie proves that people will always overreact and think that their current situation is unique. The movie, made in 1976 (and how about the fact that four of the five Best Picture nominees in 1967 were this one, Rocky, All The President's Men, and Taxi Driver), has parts where Holden as the old-guard news producer rails about the younger generation and how they don't care about newspapers and will believe that anything on TV is real. Sound familiar? There is nothing new under the sun.