Bandits
M and I saw Bandits the other night. Excellent movie: very funny dialogue and situations, interesting story and structure, good acting, thoroughly charming, regularly surprising. One of the things that I liked about it was that it turned out to be, if you'll pardon the term, interstitial: a nice blend of several genres (none of them sf), but I didn't realize what a couple of its genres were until pretty late in the movie. Maybe it's just that I was so caught up in it that I wasn't thinking about where it was going, or maybe it's genuinely unpredictable; dunno. But the result is that I can't talk much about what I liked about it without giving away big chunks of plot. (Some of which are given away by the plot outline on IMDB, the back cover of the DVD box, etc, so maybe it really is just me not paying attention. But the point is, I probably liked this a bit more than I would've if I'd known more about it going into it.) But I can mention that I spent a lot of time laughing out loud, and that (although it gets a little slow in places) the semi-nonlinear structure is mostly handled really well.
Unfortunately, I can't necessarily recommend the movie to everyone, 'cause apparently a lot of people didn't like it at all. It appears not to have done terribly well at the box office, despite the three fairly big-name actors (Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett) (I'm not normally fond of Blanchett, but she does a good job here, and all three prove that they're remarkably versatile) and the fairly big-name director (Barry Levinson, who directed Diner and Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man, among other things). I had never heard of it before Karen recommended it in early 2002. The reviews at IMDB are extremely mixed, and the average rating, while not awful, isn't especially high.
But I like an awful lot about this, the writing perhaps even more than anything else. (Though some of the funniest bits sounded like they might've been ad-libbed; hard to tell.) I found out while poking around on the web that the original plan was to make a film of Elmore Leonard's novel Bandits, but the producers instead decided to bring in a writer named Harley Peyton—whose previous claim to fame was having written the very odd Less Than Zero and a bunch of Twin Peaks episodes—to write a new movie, very loosely based on real-life bank robbers Terry Lee Conner and Joe Dougherty.
So anyway, Karen retains her perfect record in recommending movies to me. She and Rob both seem to have my movie tastes pegged—they don't always share those tastes, but they're really good at predicting whether I'll like a given movie.
