Movies on the weekend

On Friday and Saturday I wrote a term paper. On Sunday I went on  movie bender. It seemed like I hadn't watched anything film like in a long time. Over the week I had fallen into a Craig Ferguson charm vortex- and had gone through every clip on YouTube. So I thought it might be time to watch something more substantial instead. And so I put myself through Chloe, Shame and A Dangerous Method.

Chloe was ok. I didn't know, until a friend told me after I had watched it that the lesbian bit was supposed to have been very exciting. It wasn't terribly thrilling in the movie. The whole thing seemed a little too much like Unfaithful. But this might be because all films about cheating seem kind of the same to me. If the plot was something other than unfaithful married person who feels bad and then dumb stuff happens I would take note.

As I did with A Dangerous Method. Which I liked very much- due in great part to Keira Knightley. We never get to see her being a doctor in her own right. First she is the patient, then the mistress, then the pregnant wife of someone else, while all along clearly far too intelligent and compelling to be just any one of these things at a time. I would have liked to see why she moved to child psychology. I would have liked to see that developed more than the elaborate bit about Otto Gross and his influence on Jung. Or if not more than equally.

Shame was great, except that the title made it seem a bit preachy, or gave it a bit of a judgmental context that the rest of the film doesn't really hold to. It didn't seem to be as much about shame; it seemed to be about compulsion and wretchedness, so the context provided by the title is not necessarily one I would have arrived at myself.

You could tell from about the 10th minute, from the way the music kept swelling higher and higher while all the man was doing was riding the subway, that this movie was going to be a long, torturous and self consciously so. I liked it. But I couldn't watch it again. I will be watching everything with Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender though.