Films Viewed (December 2008)

Role Models
Doubt
Please Vote for Me (excerpt)
Adaptation
Network
Ashes of Time- Redux
Lola Montes
A Christmas Tale
Raging Bull
Bombshell
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2012: Science or Superstition
Love in the Afternoon
Milk
The Reader
The Spirit
Baby Mama

Key
The Charles
The Senator/ The Rotunda
The Landmark Harbor East
Other (Tarantula Hill, Video Americain, MICA Brown Center, Suburban Multiplex)
Total: 16 features, 1 feature excerpt (13 in theaters)

Notes: This month offered a variety of screening experiences, from the mysteries of December 21st, 2012 on the west side to an otherwise unavailable Victor Fleming film in Falvey Hall. It is nice to have these added screening options in the city.

It is also clearly awards/top ten season, and the Oscar Bait is being trotted out all over town. Since these are films for which there is always provided a great deal of critical verbiage, I shall stay out if it for now.

Despite my strange ambivalence about lists, I overcame it enough to compose a "Top Ten Films I Saw in Theaters in Baltimore in 2008" list for The Mobtown Shank, to be published shortly. I shall quote myself from said list about some films of note from the past month:

"A brutal take on family dysfunction, A Christmas Tale is misleadingly titled. Two and half hours long and very French, the film somehow manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a group of the some of the meanest and messiest people put on screen in recent memory. Still, the viewing experience was ultimately a rewarding one, akin to getting through a weighty and satisfying tome."

"Shall we call this one the anti-Marley and Me? The Reader is a complex and brutal take on Holocaust guilt, statutory rape, and all kinds of dark Germanic mess. Kate Winslet is brilliant in the film. I am a long-standing fan of hers, so she could read the phone book and I would probably watch, but the praise for her performance is not mine alone. The film offers no easy answers, leaving the viewer in a confused melancholy, stumbling out into a world that seems somehow bleaker. Any film with that kind of power is clearly worth noting."

Otherwise, my usual routine remained unbroken. Up next, a great deal to say about another round of seismic shifts in the film exhibition landscape in Baltimore.