I Feel Pretty

     

     

     

     

I've been marketing the main site to some new audiences lately and inviting more eyes to check out my digs, so I've been busy making style and format upgrades. This process has involved buffing up my existing year indexes back to 1995 to fit the new frames-based layout of the overall site as well as adding brand-new indexes all the way back to 1984. Some of those movies are so far away from me now that it seems silly and indefensible to cling to grades I assigned more than 10 years ago. Thus, the movies are grouped in general categories: Top Ten (ranked), Fetching, Fair, Feh, and Flotsam. You'll also find (I hope) spiffy new graphics, easier navigation, and quick indexes of my own top five picks in the picture, directing, and acting races for each year. Let me know if anything seems particularly user-unfriendly.

Soon enough, I'll get on to telling you how I think No Country for Old Men has been terrifically written and terrifically directed but—here's the kicker—the styles of shooting and writing don't finally complement each other all that well. And how American Gangster is almost insistent on distinguishing itself as the least visually interesting picture Ridley Scott has ever helmed, though in its own watchably mediocre way, this may be preferable to the gratuitously fussy mise-en-scène of something like Matchstick Men. And how Lions for Lambs strains for 88 minutes to say something meaningful about The War and The Media and The Military and All Of It, and the best it scores is one spontaneous actorly aside about menopausal hot flashes. Thanks, Meryl, for tossing that in before going down with the rest of the ship. (And Goran, I know I still owe you some words about my problems with Atonement as a novel; more to follow in that Comments thread.)