When Aimee goes out of town for any significant length of time, I take the opportunity to catch up on watching (or rewatching) movies that she has vetoed, usually for being depressing or strange.
I call it the Aimee’s Better Judgment Film Festival.
This year’s slate included:
Michael Clayton (B+)
Aimee’s Veto: “Looks mafia-related.”
I love a good legal (or, in this case, legal-adjacent) drama, and this was a fine upstanding representative of the genre. There feels like there’s a missing three minutes right before the climax of the film that reminded me of a magician going “Ta-da!” but having forgotten to put the woman in the box before sawing it in half.
The Caine Mutiny (A)
Aimee’s Veto: “Nice utter absence of strong female characters except for the hectoring mother.”
This is a rewatch of one of my favorite movies that Aimee has expressed no interest in seeing despite my careful description of a flippant novelist winding up an idealistic executive officer into seizing command from a paranoid ship captain…culminating in a COURT MARTIAL.
I say again…a COURT MARTIAL…with Jose Ferrer at the defense table.
Sneakers (A)
Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “Yeah, we should see that again sometime when there are no more Korean zombie movies.”
When I saw this charming digital heist movie decades ago, I remember being vaguely upset about some technical inaccuracy that made me feel superior for noticing it. This time, I found myself enchanted by the brilliant cast and neat hacker derring-do, so that previous Will can go fuck himself.
Fun fact: in the mid to late 1980s, the Yamaha corporation really put the squeeze on Hollywood to include one of their soprano saxophones in every soundtrack, regardless of suitability. Bloodbath on Cielo Drive? Squeak away. Nuclear blast on the horizon? Let’s chipper this shit up with a woodwind.
If AI is good for anything, it’s to save us from the saxophone scourge.
True Colors (A)
Aimee’s Veto: “Oh, yeah, the one with the white guys fighting over who will perpetuate the patriarchy.”
If you’re an idealistic young man contemplating law school but worried about “selling out,” this movie will have a certain resonance with you like it did for me back when it came out. Smarmy perceptive con artist John Cusack squares off against patrician noblesse-oblige James Spader, applying their law degrees in Washington with very different objectives.
It’s astonishing to imagine that the political scandal that brings John Cusack down in this movie is almost textbook electioneering today.
Still have a soft spot for this movie, even though some music director had to say, “Wait! Don’t forget the fucking soprano saxophone! Yamaha owes me a Waverunner.”
Money Monster (B)
Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “Ugh. A movie about money?”
In this mind-blowing fantasy film, a television investment personality of the Jim Cramer mold gently adjusts his narcissism to help a man who takes him hostage live on camera. Together with a TV producer, they figure out the plot behind a massive Wall Street investment fraud, or as we like to call it, “every weekday.”
The fantasy comes in, of course, when justice is actually achieved.
The Girl in the Picture (B)
Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “That case sounds vaguely familiar after twenty years together watching true crime with dinner every night.”
Franklin Floyd, going for some kind of morbid EGOT of sexual predation, kidnaps a young girl, raises her as a daughter, sexually abuses her, forces her into sex work, kills her friend from the strip club, kills her, kidnaps her son at gunpoint from school, and then kills him, too.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, that must have been a hard pitch meeting,” let me reassure you by adding that this is a true crime documentary.
Don’t Look Up (B+)
Aimee’s Veto: “Too depressingly true.”
You could have a whole festival just of movies that are too painfully true: this one, Idiocracy, Bob Roberts, Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove. While the credits rolled, I sat sort of stunned and sad but also fatalistically bemused by America, which I assume is what it feels like to be French.
To Die For (A)
Aimee’s (Non) Veto: “Goddamn it, you should have waited for me.”
I’ll always love this movie for so many things, but especially its final shot of Ileana Douglas ice skating on the pond. Nicole Kidman’s performance is gloriously deranged, and Joaquin Phoenix plays the teenager she manipulates with an almost heart-breaking sincerity.
Luckily in the thirty-one years since this movie’s release, we’ve all taken the lesson about mistaking attention for love and notoriety for significance.
This quote especially is thankfully obsolete in our enlightened times:
Suzanne used to say that you’re not really anybody in America unless you’re on TV… ’cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if there’s nobody watching? So when people are watching, it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, everybody would be better people. But, if everybody was on TV all the time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to watch, and that’s where I get confused.
