Four Weddings and a Funeral

Four Weddings and a Funeral was made in 1994.  It has been around so long and is so familiar that I had a feeling I might have seen it already, but I finally was convinced that I had not, and Netflix kept recommending it, so I watched it.

I have always liked Hugh Grant as a comedic actor, and I'm also a sucker for romantic comedies, so somehow, with those good elements going for it, I think I expected to be let down by this movie.  Instead I was surprised at how much I liked it.

The story is nothing too unusual.  Boy meets girl, boy and girl are very attracted to each other, but there's a problem; otherwise the movie would be over quite quickly.  In this case, she lives in America, and he lives in England, and the second time they meet, she is engaged to someone else.

Pretty standard stuff.  What you hope for then, since the plot itself is pretty familiar, is that the humor is well written, the laugh lines are funny.  This movie delivers that and more -- the dialogue is very clever, the cast is great, the characters are delightful, and there are some more somber scenes (yes, the funeral is one) that are genuinely touching.  Through it all, Grant is at his very best, wisecracking in his understated style, and deliberately mistranslating for his deaf brother in some of the funnier moments of the film.

So just in case anyone besides me has not yet seen this film, I would definitely suggest that you do so.

Ghost World

Ghost World is billed as a comedy, and I have seen reviews that insisted that parts of it are hilarious, but I really don't remember it as being funny.  Not that it tries to be funny and fails, but it is a dark comedy, really more of a quirky drama.

One quick note:  I have never been one to grasp symbolism very well, and there is a symbol in the movie.  I don't know what the bus means.  Death? I doubt it.  The chance to leave it all behind and start a new life?  More likely, but who knows?  Not me.

This movie was made in 2001 and stars Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi.  I like the cast; otherwise I doubt I would have chosen to watch this movie given the plot description.

The story is about two girls just graduating from high school.  Both are extremely cynical and oh so wise, taking note of all the shortcomings of everyone around them and rejecting any sort of ordinary trajectory for their lives.  However, Rebecca (Johansson) begins to adjust to life after high school by accepting responsibility, getting a job and an apartment, while Enid (Birch) continues to see it all as too stupid for her, and the friends begin to drift apart.  At the same time, the girls play a joke on a man who posts in the want ads (Buscemi), and Enid finds herself involved with this much older man who, like her, finds other people strange and hard to relate to.

If I were a teenage girl, I would have probably liked this movie better.  As it is, it's not a bad movie, but there's not enough there for me to recommend it.

Gloomy Sunday

Much like Black Book, which I wrote about a few posts back, Gloomy Sunday is a European foreign-language film about Nazi occupation.  The same actor even plays a German officer in each film, although he is less prominent in this one.  This time the occupied country is Hungary (the story takes place in Budapest) and the language is German.  The original title, which you can see to the left, translates to A Song of Love and Death.

There is a song, and the song is one unavoidable, though slight, flaw in a generally entertaining movie.  The song is called Gloomy Sunday, this time a true translation of the German title.  When this song is played, people stop what they are doing and are entranced.  The sadness of the music affects them; numerous people supposedly hear the song on the radio and commit suicide while it plays.  The problem is, we hear the song, and while it's pretty... I just think you have to suspend your disbelief a bit to accept that, to the people in the movie at least, it is incredibly powerful.

Ok, disbelief suspended, and we can enjoy our film.  It is the story of two men and a woman.  Laszlo is the Jewish owner of a restaurant in Budapest before the Nazis rise to prominence.  Ilona is his beautiful waitress and lover.  He hires Andras to play piano in his restaurant, and it is Andras who writes the soon-to-be famous song, and who also becomes Ilona's lover.  But it's not that kind of tragic love triangle; the three of them seem like they will make it work just fine.

The trouble comes with a third admirer of Ilona, a German customer named Wieck, on holiday, who later returns as a Colonel in the occupying army, and Laszlo's Jewishness becomes a problem.  Although Colonel Wieck sees Laszlo as a friend based on their prior acquaintance (Laszlo actually saves his life) and tries to help him, his friendship only goes so far.  Despite having some influence with Wieck, Laszlo finds himself ever closer to being rounded up and sent away with the other Hungarian Jews.

The film works because we learn enough about these characters to care about them and feel their pain as they try to save Laszlo from "going up the chimney," as Herr Wieck so delicately puts it.  And beyond that, I would only recommend that you see the movie.