Best decision ever: ordering Netflix. Olivia and I are sharing an account just for the summer (or so we keep telling ourselves) and it has been a GREAT investment. I didn't realize how much I missed movie nights and popcorn! In college, renting movies is just a hassle, especially when the local rental place goes out of business, haha...but Netflix is the best; I can watch recent movies PLUS all the old movies I ever wanted to see, and on instant watch if I really want to. So far our selections seem to have consisted mostly of biographical dramas pertaining to the 60s and 70s (thanks to me), and happy-go-lucky musicals from the 40s and 50s (Olivia's picks). Sometimes we have double-features, in which the two movies couldn't be more different, haha.
Some of the movies I've gotten recently:
Changeling - I wanted to watch this because it takes place in 1920s Los Angeles, and after reading about it I was really interested. It's the true story of a mother whose son went missing, and although the police claimed to have found him, it was actually the wrong boy but they refused to admit it. That's all I knew about the movie, but there's actually wayyyy more to it than that (SPOILERS AHEAD)...there was this deranged man living in the desert who would kidnap and kill young boys around LA, who was believed to have done so with Christine Collins' son. The movie went into detail about this, re-enacting the scenes where he killed several boys with a hatchet. Also, the LAPD didn't believe Mrs. Collins when she said the boy they'd given her was not her son, and sent her to a mental hospital where she was led to believe that she was crazy. The whole movie made me really distraught, haha...and the fact that it really happened is all the more disturbing. Anyway, it was way more suspenseful and gruesome than I expected, but morbidly interesting nonetheless.
The Last Detail - A 1973 Jack Nicholson movie that I'm amazed no one ever talks about. I loooooved it, but I'm sure that's mostly just because I loooooove Jack Nicholson. It's another one of those movies where it's not so much about plot (which basically consisted of three Navy guys "boozing, brawling, and fornicating" their way to Portsmouth before one of them has to go to jail), but rather a character study. A lot of Jack's movies, especially the earlier ones, are like that...Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...they're memorable for their characters and not necessarily plot or cinematography. And those are some of my favorite movies. Anyway, conclusion about this movie: Jack Nicholson is a badass...what else is new?
Milk - This is the most recent movie I've watched, and I thought it was REALLY good. It was about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in San Francisco in the 1970s. He was assassinated after less than a year in office, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by fellow city supervisor Dan White. It was fascinating to me because my parents lived in San Francisco throughout the whole campaign, election, and gay rights movement. My mom knew many men who marched in the protests, and two of our closest family friends worked for the city at that time. One of them was in the building and heard the gunshots that killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Crazy. The movie itself was really good...I seem to be on a real 70s kick anyway, so it was cool to see how San Francisco looked when my parents lived there.
I was also going to get Zodiac, which is another true-story-in-San-Francisco movie. It's about this guy called the Zodiac killer, who murdered innocent people and then left letters and cryptic messages for the newspapers and police throughout the late 60s and 70s. My parents were also there for that, which must've been really creepy. But I don't know if I'll get it; judging from Changeling I seem to be really disturbed by true story crimes and mysteries, haha.
Later today we're going to see Public Enemies (one of the perks of working at Universal: free movie screenings!) and I might write about that one too. We'll see. Ahhh I love summer.