Herman saw 20 movies this year. Eva saw 50. This includes the small screen. A "*" indicates a movie seen by both Herman and Eva

• *A Beautiful Mind Dir. Ron Howard. w/ Russell Crowe as John Nash and Jennifer Connolly as his wife Alicia. The movie paled next to the book by Sylvia Nasar. People who had not read the book liked the movie more. Best Picture Oscar. Herman agrees with the Academy. For me the segment on 60 Minutes with Nash and Alicia was a better follow-up to the book. The American Go Association experienced a surge of new memberships. I headed my Go Windows in Harvard Square this year with "Go is the Game John Nash Played in A Beautiful Mind."
• *Iris Directed by Richard Eyre, w/ Judi Dench as the elderly Iris, Kate Winslet as the young Iris, and Jim Broadbent as Iris’s husband John Bayley. Very faithful to the memoir by Bayley. Ebert thought this movie a downer, concentrating on the Altzheimer’s and missing the wonderful novelist. Roeper had his thumb up. I’m with Roeper. I thought the flashbacks to the courtship days brightened things up enough that the movie was not a downer. In any case it’s not so sad seeing someone live out her final illness, whatever that may be, cared for by a spouse of 40 years who is in turn supported by society—friends and social services including the nursing home where Iris spent her last weeks.
• *Last Orders. Dir. Fred Schepisi, w/ Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, & Helen Mirren. The finest funeral movie I’ve ever seen. Based on the deservedly prize-winning book by Graham Swift, which I also loved.
• *Enigma. Dir. Michael Apted. Screenwriter Tom Stoppard. w/ Kate Winslet. Someone named Cave was played by someone named Matthew McFaydayen. Unfortunately I did not notice anyone named Cave in the movie, I just noticed the credit. Jeremy Northrup was in it. Now he looks like the Mathhew McF. of British Go fame I know. Herman liked this movie a lot but my thumb is down. Too convoluted to follow. Too much cherchez la femme. Too much spy nonsense. Not enough math. And NO Alan Turing! The only pleasure I got was seeing England in the ’40’s. I thought about that being the way it was when Dad was there.
• *In the Bedroom This is to Camden Maine what Deep End was to Lake Tahoe. Attractive family with ordinary thorny problem that escalates to the sinister, and then the criminal. I liked the ordinary thorny problem part best. With Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Matt Fowler, Sissy Spacek as his wife Ruth, Nick Stahl as their son Frank, and Marissa Tomei as Frank’s older-woman girlfriend. Well done.
• *About a Boy Dirs. Paul and Chris Weitz. Based on a novel by Nick Hornby, w/ Hugh Grant as a man who does nothing and finds that an impediment to chatting up women. Toni Collette plays a single mom whose son Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) befriends H.G. Upbeat and amusing. The final two scenes need a re-write, though.
• *Ghost World (VCR) dir. Terry Zweigler. With Steve Buscemi, Thora Birch, Bob Bobolan, and Ilona Douglas. Very good portrait of an attractive, intelligent adolescent at loose ends the summer after graduating from High School. Enid makes fun of everyone. She lets good opportunities slip away. She has an interesting relationship with a middle-aged dork who is a record aficionado. Everybody is well-cast and well-written except for Enid’s best friend who is forgettable.
• *The Piano Teacher dir Michael Haneke, with Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, Annie Giradot as her mother, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer. In French, but set in Vienna. (Shouldn’t background noise such as TV chatter be in German? It was in French.) The Phoenix said "at least the movie is an improvement on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek." It gave the movie ** where **** is tops. The NYer called it a masterpiece. Walking home from this movie Herman remarked that "It was interesting, but I’m not going to recommend it to anyone." Until she goes off the deep end, Erika is a bit mean to her students but she is a good teacher and they respect her. I really enjoyed the musical scenes. The pressure cooker situation of the 40ish Conservatory professor living with her mother would have been more interesting to me if it had not escalated into the realm of mental illness. Ordinary problems in human relations are enough for me.
• *The Shipping News.You could see this instead of reading the acclaimed book by Annie Proulx and save a few hours, it was that faithful an adaptation. Director Lasse Halstrom. Set in Newfoundland.
• *Italian for Beginners. Danish woman director Lone Scherfig made this for under $1,000,000. The first Dogme film that’s fun. Herman thought it was "cute." I thought it better than that. It’s a window into the concerns and worries of unremarkable ordinary people. The characters all take Italian in an evening class.

• A Lesson Before Dying w/ Cicily Tyson. Bea, Dorothy and I watched this on Dorothy’s VCR the night before our book group discussed the book of the same title. Even though I had not had time to read the book, I was able to follow the whole discussion. In 1948, in Louisiana, an innocent black man, Jefferson, gets convicted of murder. His defense lawyer called him a hog. He is demoralized. The woman who raised Jefferson asks the schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, to make Jefferson know he’s a man so he can face the death penalty with dignity. This drama had content, atmosphere, setting and characters.
• Limbo starring Frances Quinn Donahy, my colleague at Cardinal Hinsley Comprehensive School 1973-75!! This was the best in a program of subtitled Gaelic shorts at the Harvard Film Archive. The lead reminded me of someone, and then, satisfyingly, I thought of whom, but it did not occur to me that it actually was Frances until the credits. Then I remembered that Frances had made a career change from teaching to acting.
• The Rookie Your standard sports movie, but based on a true story. I am honoring it with mention because it’s an example of a movie about people with ordinary problems (don’t get along with a parent, whether to change jobs, etc.). It’s a pleasure to watch a happy marriage too. I do not subscribe to the idea that all happy families are the same (so a bore??) I liked the fact that this 37 year old man had already paid his dues as a mature adult. I was willing to give him his second stab at pro sports. The Cirignano sisters and I enjoyed this one together. Jane, 88, is a big Red Sox fan.
• Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner Dir. Zacharias Kunuk with an all-Inuit cast. I would put this in the same genre as that terrific film Himalaya by Eric Valli I saw last year. It’s a very a privileged look at another culture and way of life, and there’s elemental human drama too. The soundtrack—drumming, native voices, birds—was just right as had been Bruno Coulais’ Tibetan-inspired soundtrack of monastic chanting and instruments in Himalaya. Atanarjuat was 2¾ hrs long. Personally I do not think you’d miss anything essential if you came in 15-30 minutes late. The good part started when Atanarjuat and Oki are vying for Atuan’s hand in marriage. (She was betrothed to Oki at birth by her father). There’s not one plastic thing in this movie. But those sun glasses with the slit openings are practically space-age looking! (Were they made of bone?). Bonus: A great idea for a Walrus costume.
• David Hockney: Secret Knowledge MFA. Hockney makes a case for his theory that the old masters used mirrors and later camera obscura and later still both to project images which they traced. It was kept a trade secret. Hockney re-creates the technology he imagines they used, and re-enacts with dioramas touched with humor. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says "Optics do not make marks," the only reference to the flak he’s taken for his theory. But theory aside, this movie also works as the best art history movie I’ve ever seen. It takes us on location to Brugges and Florence to look at the paintings with Hockney. 60 Minutes did a segment on this.
• Regret to Inform. 72 min. documentary about the women on all sides who lost loved ones in the Vietnam War (called "the American War" in Vietnam.) The director, Barbara Sonneborn, took questions after the screening at the Coolidge Corner Cinema. Vietnamese TV was going to screen it, but then they sent Sonneborn their heavily censored cut and she withdrew her permission. I asked what they cut, because to me Vietnam looked good in 1992 when she filmed on location, and the people were admirable.
• Family Fundamentals, about gay adult children of fundamentalist Christian families, was worth the trip to the MFA on its own, but the presence of director Arthur Dong doubled the value of the experience. He told how the movie had been received by the subjects, and what we missed when the Mormon bishop and his wife withdrew their permission to be filmed at the last minute. Their son returned to Utah for his grandmother’s wedding. A.D. "solved" the problem by using footage of the son preparing for his first trip home in 4 years, using the voices of his parents on his answering machine (or did he have an actor re-enact those? I forget). The son took us on a tour of the farm, reminiscing. We saw a distance shot of the wedding reception that did not include the parents. The director told us it was such a warm family they would have come across great in the film. Arthur is not a fundamentalist so he had a board of eminent advisors who were to whom he showed rushes, in an effort to accurately represent their position. Arthur, a self-described gay liberal, said "Liberals snicker a lot." They snickered during certain scenes at Sundance so he told what he added to damp that.
• Photos to Send. Dir. Deirdre Lynch was present at HFA. While studying the 1954 Dorthea Lange archive of photos of County Clare at the Oakland museum, Dierdre Lynch came across an envelope marked "Photos to send," and also names and addresses of the subjects. She was inspired to re-visit County Clare in 1997 to look up those people. She weaves in the Lange photos with her film of the subjects today. Interviews, soundtrack, editing, composition—it’s all good. My grandfather, Patrick Kilty, came from County Clare.