JAWS WAS NEVER MY SCENE AND I DON'T LIKE STAR WARS

Another month, another round of movie recommendatons in my role as clerk at Trilogy Video. Since last month I indulged my tastes as a pretentious teenage girl, this month I go back to my genre side to indulge in some crime, both in a serious and a not so serious fashion:

The Original Audrey.

* Big Deal on Madonna Street, starring Marcello Mastroianni in Mario Monicelli's 1958 send-up of Italian neorealism and heist films; also featuring a small role with a very young, very gorgeous Claudia Cardinale.

* How To Steal a Million, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in another caper comedy, this time centered on art theft. I love Audrey's fashion in this one. Touches of mod. Dir: William Wyler.

* Infernal Affairs, a modern Hong Kong crime thriller all knotted up with twists and turns, starring Andy Lau and the always-handsome Tony Leung.

* Memories of Murder, Jooh-ho Bong's 2003 Korean riff on the city-cop-meets-country-cop story. A serial killer investigation infused with gallows humor. If it were made in the '70s, they'd have cast Pacino and Hackman. (Available on import DVD only, though I believe it may also be doing the rounds of theatres as The New Yorker did a capsule review of it this week.)

* Mississippi Mermaid, a Francois Truffaut potboiler with Catherine Deneuve as an innocent-eyed femme fatale and Jean-Paul Belmondo as her dupe. Based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich.

The New Audrey.

By the way, I didn't end up doing a Can You Picture That? column for July, largely due to the time woes detailed elsewhere on this blog. My intention had been to compare the visions of war in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement and Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, but I never got the opportunity to watch the Fuller film again. Both of those are highly recommended, though.

Current Soundtrack: Petula Clark, The Very Best of...

Current Mood: desirous

golightly@confessions123.com * The Website * Live Journal Syndication

[to leave comments, click on the time-stamp below, then scroll down on the new page] – All text (c) 2005 Jamie S. Rich