All that and a bag of popcorn

About once a month, my older daughter and I have a movie night sleepover, and last night was it. She picked up the movies, the hot wings, her dogs and her jammies, and I got off work a couple of hours early, so we were able to pull off a triple-feature moviethon and still get to sleep at a decent hour.

We couldn’t wait to see Memoirs of a Geisha because we both loved the book, so we watched it first. The beautiful Japanese scenery and costumes, along with a simple love story, might have been fine for someone who didn’t expect more than that, but we were both disappointed. The book was so rich and substantive, the characters so well detailed, that we couldn’t read it fast enough and then hated for it to end. The movie, on the other hand, seemed to drag on way too long. So, two thumbs up for the book, two thumbs down for the movie.

We didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the other two films, so we used the “hold-‘em-behind-your-back-and-shuffle-‘em-back-and-forth” method of choosing which one to watch next. The winner was
Good Night, and Good Luck. This was a much better movie, and it was interesting, not to mention enlightening, to see the parallels between 1950s government thinking and what’s happening in this country today. Kinda scary until you stop and think that we survived it then and got our nation back to a better place, so maybe there's hope for us yet. (We just can't vote for more of the same.)

The last–and best–movie of the evening was Capote, which was a masterpiece of a character study of the author, Truman Capote. Like faithful reader and new online friend Patsy commented recently, I, too, remember reading in the newspapers about the murders in Kansas that became the subject of Capote’s In Cold Blood. I read the book when it first came out and saw the movie, too (which starred Robert Blake before we knew how creepy he really was). What I never knew until we watched Capote was how the experience of writing that book changed his life. If you’re into action films or chick flicks, this won’t be your cup of tea, but if you can sit still and you like something thought provoking, this one will stay with you for a long, long time.

On a final note of this unsolicited movie review, I can’t say enough good things about Philip Seymour Hoffman, who starred in the role of Truman Capote. He’s been in so many movies that my daughter and I have joked about it for several years. One of us will ask, “Who’s in that movie?” and the other will answer with a list that always ends in “...and Philip Seymour Hoffman.” He hasn’t been blessed with leading-man looks, which may be why he’s had time to hone his talent in supporting actor roles, but I think he’s brilliant! It’s about time a movie came along that allowed him to shine.