Category: Culture

Hol­ly­wood Video has this great coupon giz­mo going on where you can rent up to three new releas­es for the full five days at 99 cents each. last night i rent­ed In the Cut, Lost in Trans­la­tion, and Solaris for 5 days and a measly $3.21. with­out this won­der­ful coupon [a pile of which i have at my apart­ment] rent­ing one of these films would have cost me $3.79 plus tax. adding to this cool­ness is the fact that if i get In the Cut back to Hol­ly­wood Video before mid­night tonight [actu­al­ly i returned it this morn­ing] i gain $1 dol­lar of cred­it on my next pur­chase. this might not sound like hot shit to some of you, but when you are poor and like to watch as many movies as i do then it is ver’ ver’ nice.

In the Cut is only the sec­ond Jane Cam­pi­on film I have seen [the first one being The Piano]. I liked the fem­i­nism of The Piano, but not of In the Cut. Every man seemed a rapist, every look direct­ed toward Meg Ryan was a vio­la­tion. It is hard to tell if any man is a good man until the very end. I’d have to watch The Piano and In the Cut again, and next to each oth­er to tell for sure, but I think Cam­pi­on might just be rehash­ing the same old thing again and again. [I think she had it right in The Piano except for the very end of the film.]

It seems like only men care about look­ing in In the Cut. Meg Ryan and Jen­nifer Jason Leigh only seem to care about ‘get­ting a dick inside [them].’ The cam­era makes both male and female bod­ies into beau­ti­ful things. In fact, the cam­era makes every­thing it sees into a beau­ti­ful thing. I’ve got no com­plaints in that respect. Cam­pi­on knows how to pick her peo­ple. There is a lot of hand held, long lens, shal­low depth of field, blurred focus stuff going on that I think is sup­posed to reflect the uncer­tain­ty of the thriller genre. But for me it also seems to say, ‘I don’t know how to answer the ques­tions I’m ask­ing.’ Of course, Cam­pi­on’s point could be that the ques­tions can’t be answered.

As a thriller [they don’t do much for me] it remind­ed me of any Scoo­by Doo episode. The vil­lain could be any of sev­er­al char­ac­ters and ends up being one you nev­er real­ly expect­ed. It was well done in the sense that I nev­er knew who it could be until I found out who it was. Its worth a watch, if just for how pret­ty it is to look at. I’d like to talk it over with my film the­o­ry pro­fes­sor. I might send her an email ask­ing if she has seen it. Kevin Bacon is in the film too.

Tonight I watch Solaris.