Movie Reviews! Yes, Again...
The beauty of Netflix is that you can rent all sorts of random movies you've never even heard of, and it's awesome.


STAGE BEAUTY

Grade: B

I really liked this movie, and yet felt a little conflicted about it at the same time. I wasn't quite sure that I liked how it ended, but the ambiguity of the entire film actually worked.

In seventeenth century England, male actors play all the women's roles, and none do so well as Ned Kynaston, purported to be the most beautiful talented woman of the stage. When his dresser, Mariah, breaks the law and performs the very same role that Kynaston is famous for, Desdemona in Othello, it causes King Charles to reverse the decree: Women can now play women's roles. Out of a job, and forced to play a man's role or never act again, Ned is lost and confused. He enjoys being a woman, and feels that part of his identity is as a woman, and now Mariah has taken it all away. But when both of their careers are headed for disaster, Ned must play the Othello to her Desdemona. Together they strip away all of the artifice in their art form.

What follows is a story about breaking away from gender and gender roles, and defining sexuality as something fluid or not necessarily either/or. Ned himself has both male and female lovers, and enjoys cross-dressing. But his ideas about what a woman should be (and about how he as a woman should be) are all as artificial as the stylized, very overacted acting preformed during the period. I worried that at the end, it would be more of "ha, now look he's more of a man!" Luckily, it ends with Ned being more honest about who he is, whether that be as a man or otherwise. And it ends ambiguously, as his love for Mariah has grown so that he no longer knows his "role."


TWILIGHT

Grade: FAIL

This movie was horrible. Really, really horrible. After 30 minutes of this I wanted to turn it off. After an hour, I prayed that my brain would spontaneously combust. After the entire movie was over, I wondered if I could time travel and get two hours of my life back, or at the very least go back in time to light the disc on fire while singing all of the lyrics to "We Didn't Start the Fire" (and yes, I know all of them).

I will write a recap of what the movie is about, even if it didn't seem to actually go anywhere. Anyway, here it is. Bella is your typical angsty teen whose mommy loves her, but leaves her with her daddy in another state and town. Enter her vampire love interest with terrible makeup, a shade of lipstick that's something out of a hooker's purse, and hair that is a horrid mimicry of a pomp and makes him look four inches taller. For 50 minutes they angst about why they can't be together, he's a bit of a dick to her and she loves it and wants more. Finally, things start to get mildly interesting when her boyfriend Edward's vampire family tries to welcome her in. Enter a random group of vampires who are randomly killing super random people (did I say random enough?). For some reason I still can't identify, one of the other vampires wants to kill Bella. Her newly adopted vampire family tries their damndest to save her, and in the end, her vamp boyfriend kicks ass (about time) and takes names (about time he wasn't so Uber-Emo with all those almost-tears).

Now, I don't know about the book, so I won't go there. A lot of people love the books. I personally have not read them. But judging on the movie, it's probably not for me. And yes, I was at one point a thirteen-year-old girl obsessed with vampires. Now, luckily, not so much. I'd like to think that even then I wouldn't have liked this pile of steamed shit.


DRAGONWYK

Grade: B

This movie vaulted Vincent Price firmly into his acting career. Or so says IMDB. But I have to admit that I love Vincent Price, and I utterly adore his type of gothic movies. But here was a very young, very thin Vincent, in his 30s as opposed to the older Price of all his Edgar Allen Poe movies. Even then he looked imposing, and had a stage presence to match. His distinct voice wasn't quite as distinct, but damn if you didn't believe his character was as strong and intimidating as Price made him.

In nineteenth century America, there are still the haves and the have-nots. Miranda Wells is just a poor Connecticut farm girl with dreams of having more, so when her family receives a strange invitation from their very distant cousin, the rich Nicholas Van Ryn in his mansion of Dragonwyk, she is eager to leave behind her religiously overbearing father and simple life. Nicholas (Vincent Price) is everything a wealthy land owner should be--charming, handsome, and obliging of a young girl's whims. But something is amiss at Dragonwyk manor. The tenant farmers on Van Ryn land are ready to revolt as they are all but slaves in name, and are lead by the handsome young doctor who is eager to sweep Miranda away. Nicholas' wife is frail and clingy, their ten-year-old daughter hears voices, and the servants speak of a Van Ryn curse on those of the blood. What follows is very gothic romance--ghosts, curses, murder, insanity, obsession, and an old mansion.

What I liked about this was that you could understand why Miranda was so attracted to Nicholas, and even why she loved him. For a heroine of the time (and the movie was made in the 1940's), Miranda is oddly strong-willed and self-sufficient. Still interesting is the story of the tenant farmers, forced to work for the Van Ryns or leave the land they lived on for generations, because it didn't belong to them. But what really made the movie was Vincent Price. Without his charismatic portrayal, the movie would've been much poorer.