I watched a couple of movies this weekend (so far).
The first was the latest installment in the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible franchise,
"Ghost Protocol." I think that of all of the MI movies this one was the best (with the first one coming in at number 2). It was directed by Brad Bird (He first came to my attention when he helmed Pixar's "The Incredibles") and he did a very good job.
The story and action were, respectively, improbable and ridiculous but that's what you expect in a MI movie so that's not a problem. There was lots of goofy high tech gadgets and which one was the goofiest is debatable. I would cast my vote for the magnetic gloves used to climb around on the outside of the world's tallest building in Dubai. The thing that I found funny about the gloves was that, okay...the gloves can stick to glass or concrete and allow you to climb up walls but what keeps your hands from sliding out of them as you climb?
The guy who played "Sawyer" in "Lost" (Josh Holloway) had a throwaway role at the beginning of the movie and that kinda sucked. Seems to me he could have been interesting if they had let him live more than two minutes on screen.
Other than that, though, it was a great way to burn a couple of hours.
Also clocking in at a couple of hours was a black and white Otto Preminger film starring Jimmie Stewart, Ben Gazzara and a very young George C. Scott,
"Anatomy of a Murder." This movie is as old as I am and it's largely a courtroom drama...sort of a Perry Mason for the big screen. I was trying to remember the other Otto Preminger movies I had seen and had to consult imdb.com It turns out that I had only seen one before this one, "In Harm's Way" which was kind of mediocre John Wayne WWII movie...more soap opera-ish than dramatic. "Anatomy of a Murder" is slightly better, in my opinion.
What makes it interesting for me, however, is the way that it documents the major changes in society that have occurred in the intervening years. The story is about an Army lieutenant (Gazzara) who kills a bar owner who had supposedly raped his wife. There are eye witnesses to the killing so the courtroom drama revolves around the defense attorney, played by Stewart. They decide to go for a temporary insanity defense but first they have to prove that his wife was, in fact, raped. The attitudes expressed about the wife being raped (how she was dressed and how she behaved...i.e. she was asking to be raped...plus the very casual attitude toward the crime of rape...the callousness displayed by pretty much everyone right in front of the victim) were startling to my 21st century mindset.
The case turns, just like a Perry Mason case, in the actual courtroom when the co-prosecuting attorney George C. Scott makes the obvious (to me, anyway) mistake of asking a witness a question that he does not already know the answer to. The audience is already set up and knows that he is making a colossal mistake and that really is a screw up in the making of the film...Preminger misses an opportunity to end the film in a surprise. It's a surprise for Scott but that's it.
So..."Anatomy of a Murder" was interesting for me as sort of a historical snap shot of they way things used to be. They try to play the courtroom procedure very, very straight and realistic which makes its historical significance all the more interesting. The story was anti-climatic and not particularly exciting so it will not be one I can recommend on that basis.