One thing that made my Los Angeles vacation unforgettable this year is spending some time watching movies (art films, surely) in comfortable and "audience-friendly" theaters. I got to see Meryl Streep as the forgotten British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (she won her seventh Golden Globe award for the role) and French actor Jean Dujardin as silent movie star George Valentin in last year's Cannes favorite (and Oscar-friendly film) The Artist under favorable conditions at AMC Independent Theaters (there were only 10 of us inside, frankly speaking).
Meanwhile, my Sunday date with Marilyn Monroe, uhmm, Michelle Williams in another Weinstein Company release (Harvey has an Oscar friendly crop in 2011 which includes The Iron Lady, The Artist, Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus) My Week with Marilyn was delightful. She was mesmerizing (a word which I very rarely use when reviewing or critiquing a movie or a performance) in the role of a lifetime. The British cast (led by Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier and Eddie Redmayne as apprentice Colin Clark who falls in love with the blonde) was engaging. However, the film was basically good in paper (great idea) but trite in execution (best seen as a short film or a documentary and not a feature film). Anyway, the audience seemed to like the film. (And I had to buy two bags at Macy's just to break my $100.00 bill and buy a ticket; it's worth the wait, and the money.)
I have two more films in the bag before returning to my homeland: Stephen Daldry's interesting adaptation of Jonathan Safran-Toer's 9/11-themed novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock), and Valerie Donzelli's official French entry to the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Awards La guerre est declaree (Declaration of War) (which I will all watch in New York during the weekend). For now, I should say that it was a wonderful (another rarely used adjective when writing about movies) vacation in the US. Here's to more trips to come!
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