Cougar's Favorite Videos--
a tip sheet with thumbnail reviews
(or search at Amazon.com)
Newer entries
appear first in the sections below.
Lifestyle/Crime | Social
History | The Arts | Classics
| Out There
Thumbnail Reviews of the Cougar's Favorite Videos:
Love
and Relationship
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Love/Relationship
The
Ice Storm
A fine study of layered sexuality and its repressions in 70's
suburbia. Hard to keep all the characters straight--husbands and
wives, adolescent brothers and sisters and puppy-lovers...but
this ambiguity has meaning.
The
Marrying Man
Alec Baldwin as a playboy who marries the same night club singer
four times...always driven by his "hot" attraction for her to
act on those feelings, despite engagement to another woman (twice),
the fact that she's a gangster's girl (twice), and the failure
each time (the first three, anyway).
Sliding
Doors
British comedy with a great twist: a split plot following parallel
fates from a single variable at a point in time: whether she makes
it through that closing subway door or not. Sometimes things are
going to end up the same no matter what you do: yes, even in relationships.
Stealing
Beauty
Classy Bertolucci film about a beautiful girl's coming of age,
among the company of an inbred cast of eccentric expatriates living
in a villa in the Italian countryside.
Something
Wild
Quirky escapade by woman looking for kicks and a suburban executive
type who's taken for a ride. Trouble comes in the form of the
woman's hubby fresh from the joint. One of those weird and wonderful
combinations of comic tension, like Pulp Fiction.
Magnolia
A classic treatment of different peoples' lives, which touch each
other only peripherally yet are closely woven in core themes centering
around forgiveness and reconciliation. Quirky and brilliant. Excellent
casting, dialogue and situational emotion. See this film!
Shadowlands
...A true and sensitive story of C.S.
Lewis, portrayed richly by Anthony Hopkins. Lewis wrote and taught
and lectured about love and life and pain, but until he met an
American divorcee he wasn't able to experience firsthand the fullness
of these universals. When he finally does so he connects not only
with her son, but with his own buried childhood, the source of
magic in his books.
Like
Water for Chocolate
...Well-constructed plot based on the
novel of a woman made loveless by her oppressive family tradition:
but love, and the fantastic power of desire, will not be kept
down.
City
of Angels
...An angel tries out the human experiment
in order to experience love. Pain comes along for the ride.
A
Dangerous Woman
...Disturbing character not quite ready
for the world--or for love--but her ending is upbeat, a beginning
Calendar
...A quirky, award-winning documentary-style
film about a calendar-photographer, the woman he brings to Armenia
to translate for him, the loss of her and the repetitive courtship
of others.
The
Horse Whisperer (DVD)
...A great, captivating movie with four
strong plots interwoven, each centered on a main character: a
horse, a girl, a woman, a cowboy. Most stories are built on one
or two: this one weaves all four beautifully. The only drawback
is the retrospective predictability of its outcome; but the strength
in the plot is that we don’t believe in that outcome until it
happens.
Paris, Texas
...Offbeat story working off the tension
of a silent desert wanderer, to rediscover his past, and to bring
resolution through the reunion of his son and his wife. Cannes
award winner; great photography.
Scent
of a Woman
...starring Al Pacino as a classic jerk
we are forced to love in the end
The
Joy Luck Club
...a classic of family patterns, with
heartbreaking Chinese cultural scenes throughout
Shirley
Valentine
...An English housewife takes off for
Greece to find a new life: and succeeds. This is a down-to-earth,
English-witty, non-Hollywood tour of midlife crisis and redemption.
The
Matchmaker
...A light-hearted version of life in
the down-and-dirty British outlands. This movie I believe was
supposed to be funny, but wasn’t. Lacking that, there was nothing
left to recommend it.
Looking
for Mr. Goodbar
...Another seventies tragedy, with the
obligatory murder at the end merely punctuating a sad and relentless
tale of a young woman drifting through life in San Francisco.
This movie is made with style, however, its whole essence imbued
with this scent of despair, this inescapable oppression, this
noise and glitter and abuse. In this case, the movie far outdoes
the book in carrying out the portrayal of a doomed life.
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