Because Netflix can be both wonderfully surprising and remarkably disappointing, I'm going to happily sift through various genres and new releases to find the movies worth watching. Hopefully I'll get some recommendations in return.
Tonight, in honor of the dark and stormy night we're having in Chicago, I'm going to go through some of the Thrillers available.
This is an odd, but very satisfying modern murder mystery featuring Charlotte Rampling as a hard-working mystery writer getting some rest and relaxation in Southern France at the home of her publisher. This plan is complicated when the publisher's daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) ends up crashing at the house as well. It starts as a funny confrontation between a young, sexually adventurous French girl and an old, staid Englishwoman; the carefree Mediterannean French and the hardworking English who own all of the big estates (those being the stereotypes played with here). This is a thriller though and the story takes off once the real-life murder mystery develops at this fiction writer's retreat. The movie is quirky, but a winner: well acted, compellingly plotted, and frequently fun and sexy.
What a fantastic movie! Chinatown was Roman Polanski's first Hollywood film after the death of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson's gang and it is a twisted picture. Conceived as a mystery with a happy ending in the screenplay, Polanski altered the ending into a far more painful conclusion. It's a great story about early Los Angeles, a great tragic love story, and a heartbreaking story about family, greed, and desire.
Before there was The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception, Christopher Nolan was directing smaller, but no less fascinating mind-bending thrillers like Insomnia and Memento. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a sensitive revenge seeker, who, we piece together as the movie settles in, has lost the ability to form new memories, which is making it difficult for him to find his wife's killer. The movie begins as an exhilarating puzzle as we seek to figure out things along with Leonard, but, as we begin to put together the mystery while he still can't, it becomes a terrifying character sketch of a deeply lost individual. Fascinating throughout.
There's quite a few more goods ones that I've seen in the Thriller list, and I'll go through some of my other recommendations next week hopefully. In the meantime, I'm going to watch a movie starring an actor no one expected to have a mid-life renaissance, Mathew McConaughey, in The Lincoln Lawyer. If he is half as good as he was in Magic Mike, I think I'll really enjoy it. I'm serious.
Feel free to suggest any movies back.
Thanks,
Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment