Queenjulia's Film Recommendations

I like richly textured movies, don't enjoy too much graphic violence. I'd be comfortable watching any of the below with a child, say, over the age of 10, except for American Beauty and the beginning of Elling, but then, I'm not too concerned about kids seeing human bodies. I recently alphabetized this list. The alphabet is a wonderful thing.

Amelie: great music. Amelie is somewhat loopy, so you want her to succeed. She does. I've recently read articles about US garden gnomes going on trips, so there is a definite Amelie claque out there.

American Beauty has some great casting. The idea of beauty flitters around edgily.

The Aviator: Martin Scorsese's treatment of Howard Hughes. Turquoise and magenta colors predominated at the beginning, and there were scenes in red and green or blue and gold. The depiction of his increasingly severe obsessive-compulsive disorder was not only sad and scarey but also helped you see how OCD must have fueled his phenomenal success.

The Big Lebowski: The Coen Brothers are soooooooo good. This one is the forced mating of a Raymond Chandler novel and that guy down the hall in Mudd-Blaisdell dormitory when I was a freshman in 1973. Their love child? A bowling alley.

Black Cat, White Cat is tragic and goofy and heartwarming. The characters, the music, and the setting. Everything.

Charles and Ray Eames. They were designers. This documentary is patchy and slow but inspirational.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Okay, so maybe this Ang Lee isn't so very light handed. But it's good anyway.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. It's gotten so that I seek out any movie by Ang Lee. He has a light hand but doesn't miss anything.

Elling. Two guys try to get used to life outside the mental hospital. I watched it five times in one three-day period so I could absorb the Norwegian language, and liked it just as much the fifth time through. Ja.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Texture in spades. Loops, memory erasures, complementary lovers, and even a naked dancing geek.

Hero. A Chinese film with magic swordfights. The assassains and the Emperor generate different stories, each with their own dominant color. Some self-consciously spectacular scenes, like the one where they stalk each other through billows of green silk, or the one where the white-clad women fight to the death as autumn leaves swirl around them.

The Hudsucker Proxy satisfies my need for symmetry. The whole dang movie is symmetrical.

The King of Masks

is Chinese, about a little girl disguised as a boy who is bought by a man who needs a grandson to pass his secrets on to. Corny and memorable.

The Ladykillers, by the Coen brothers. Black comedy (get it?) with good gospel music and sepia smoke-swirled cinematography. Best line: "Leaf floats on water. Kill old lady."

Latcho Drom. Gypsies, good music.

Lost in Translation is partly about culture shock. I liked it for where it didn't go.

Miller's Crossing: Another Coen Brothers. Film noir with gangsters and a sociopathic giggler.

Nausicaa. Same as Spirited Away. Oh, to have a personal flight vehicle shaped like a dragonfly!

Office Space is a sort of a buddy movie. The sets are simple, the characters mostly flat, the jokes mostly lame. I've watched it five times and would be happy to see it five more times. Maybe it's the red Swingline stapler. Maybe it's the seventeen pieces of flair. I don't know.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Mythic, based on The Odyssey and set in the South of the 30's. You would think that yet another movie about racism and the romance of neatly mended poverty would be eye-rollingly irritating, but it isn't. Great music.

Pirates of the Caribbean has everything; skellingtons with fun special effects, female pirates, visual banquets, and light-hearted plot twists.

Shanghai Noon. A seriously silly movie. Everything about it is lame. I really like it.

The Shower. I'm beginning to like movies with a limited palette very much. This one is mostly in a Chinese bath house, with not too much of a plot. Drop everything else to see it, though.

Six String Samurai. A post-Apocalypse movie that's basically a vehicle for The Red Elvises to strut their stuff. The best line? Something like, "I ask you to kill the guitar player, and what do I get? Four dead bald guys. (pause) Say! Nice shoes!"

Spirited Away, like a lot of anime, has a strong young girl protagonist. If Carl Jung were a Japanese animator, he would have made this movie.

The Story of the Weeping Camel. A German documentary of Mongolian camel herds. One of the camels rejects her baby. They try everything we've tried with our sheep, and finally hit on playing the violin to it, which works. We never thought of that. It's rated PG because of "mild thematic content," but we couldn't figure out what. Maybe the two-year-old taking a bath?

Tank Girl is a female version of Six String Samurai. She's ballsy and sexy and blows anyone away who tries to take advantage of her. Helped by very badly made-up kangaroo geeks.

Topsy Turvy is about the making of "The Mikado." Rich reds, prim Edwardian ladies with character, a nutty father-in-law, bad oysters and stuffy tension between Gilbert and Sullivan. Best line is "the sword of Damocles hovering over the Savoy Theatre."