::Kit's Movie Reviews::

 

This Month's Kit Flick:

Flirting With Disaster

Here’s a real sleeper from 1996. Starring a very young Ben Stiller, newly married, who decides for some vague reason to search for his birth mother. Think of the possibilities...

His case worker makes a few errors on exactly who mom might be. These miscalculations create massive complications, of course, and he ends up visiting several eccentric candidates who might be his mother.

Just picture Lily Tomlin, an ex-hippie with Alan Alda as her now husband, as one possibility. There’s also a hilarious subplot of the two gay FBI agents who get involved aiding Stiller in his search. The fine actor Richard Jenkins plays one of the agents (from the excellent The Visitor film and was up for best actor this year) and here, he is truly droll. Really an ingenious plot with wonderful actors, too, and laugh out loud lines.

I love movies.

Not all of them, of course, but the ones I love I treat the same way I treat my favorite books—I pick them up again, every year or so, and enjoy them once more. Movies have certainly influenced me. My protagonists, Margot and Max, are in the movie business. My real life daughter is an art director (as well as the cover artist for my stories). Her significant, Marc Greville, is a production director. I’ve had the thrill of being on location shoots, watching sets being created, taken inside tours of the studios, suffered with them when business is slow. And, most of all, listening, listening, to everything that is said around me. Gossip is great for the creative mind!

And movies are fascinating to watch being made. They are such complicated entities. All those people, hundreds of them, all working at their separate jobs, from writer to electrician, lighting director to editor to gaffer. Each group working toward one goal, a completed film.

When finally completed, I think there’s so much to look at while viewing a movie. I like to concentrate sometimes on just the actors, then there’s the production direction, or the music, or the editing or try not looking at the screen and just listen to the dialogue. Fascinating. A good movie is worth multiple viewings, just as a good book can be enjoyed over and over.

Each month I'll talk about some of my faves==all available on DVD. Enjoy!