1. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
Totally depressing documentary about children of prostitutes in India. It was interesting but not particularly well made, and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, like I'd kind of prefer a more hard news approach to this topic than a character-driven doc about a handful of people. It focused primarily on the struggle to get some of these kids out of that environment and into a good school, with limited success, and in that respect it reminded me a lot of Boys Of Baraka, which is a pretty scary parallel when you think about it.

2. City Of God
Another incredibly disheartening movie about kids born into poverty and violence (for some reason J.G. always manages to find these and puts them on our queue), except a dramatization of a true story instead of a straight doc. Really well written and beautifully shot, though.

3. Fantastic Four
Considering that it's been barely a decade since the first failed attempt at a FF feature film, you'd think they'd be really careful not to make the same mistake twice. Nobody ever really seemed excited about this, though, and maybe that just has to do with the fact that people don't really care about the Fantastic Four as much as the X-Men and whatnot. J.G. thought it was terrible but I actually enjoyed it, or at least it surpassed my meager expectations. A Dr. Doom vehicle would probably be cooler than a sequel, though.

4. March of the Penguins
It was nice to finally see this, although it is kind of weird that something not all that different from the kind of stuff the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet produce all the time became a runaway box office hit. What I didn't really expect was how well they impress upon you the incredible struggle the penguins go to just to live and breed. I mean, wasn't this a big family film? How did kids get through all the stuff about eggs cracking and being frozen and the parents nearly starving themselves without bursting into tears? I mean, J.G. was kind of traumatized just watching it. I did like that they didn't gloss over it and gave you the brutal facts, though.

5. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, season 1
J.G. left her Netflix account open on a computer at work recently, so her co-workers sneaked a disc of the first season of this into our queue as a joke. Although I was initially a little disappointed that it wasn't that crazy Dolph Lundgren movie, we decided to watch it anyway, which was a pretty weird way to kill a Saturday night. I watched the show a bit when I was really young, but it was never as interesting to me as, say, Transformers, so my memories of it are all pretty vague. I'm pretty sure even as a kid I could tell it was a really dull, poorly made show, though. Watching this did help me realize how much The Monarch from The Venture Bros. is an eerily accurate Skeletor impression, though.

6. The Wire, season 1
As my Wire fanaticism reaches a fever pitch in anticipation of season 4's premiere next month, I've started renting the old seasons on DVD. I'd watched most of the previous seasons on HBO in order over the past year, but I know I missed a few episodes here and there, so it's good to finally fill in the holes, and listen to the commentary tracks, which haven't contained any big revelations yet, but have all sorts of interesting trivia and minutiae. I just wish more of the episodes had commentary tracks. BTW, the members of the cast that were at that Sound Garden signing, along with David Simon, were Herc, Proposition Joe, Slim Charles, and I think one of the young kids that's going to be a major character in the public school storyline this season.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 at 11:39 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.