In our home, we value a good movie, whether it’s on the big screen or on our big screen. Miyazake is a winner (at least with three of the four of us), foreign films are making a comeback as everyone in our family has started to read subtitles quickly enough not to be frustrated, we’re making our way through inappropriate PG-rated 80s movies, and no one turns down a good or not-so-good adventure or action flick (The Fast and the Furious, anyone?).
Here in Italy’s Alto Adige, one thing we’ve found is that, since German and Italian are spoken by nearly everyone, English rarely is, as it would be a third language for most people. Despite the fact that the university around the block actually attracts students from across Europe, Asia, and northern Africa, for whom English is the common language, movies are very rarely shown in English in Bolzano. The multi-movie Cineplexx usually has one English movie night on the last Tuesday of the month, at 8:30 on a school night; and the Filmclub, which is nearby and very nice, with velvety, steeply-canted seating, shows arthouse and Oscar-nominated movies, which are nearly always in Italian or German. The other night, however, I found that they were screening The Dawn Wall in English with German subtitles. That prompted these haiku mini-reviews of movies I’ve seen in the past few months, most of which I sneaked in while I was in the States for Christmas, but a few of which I found on Netflix here in Italy or watched on the flights back to the States.
Blackkklansman
Black cop, white bigot?
Adam Driver is a charm
Spike nails relevance
Mary Poppins Returns
Uppity Poppins
costumed magnificently
proper cameos
The Favourite
Cattiness, love, pride
achingly-portrayed Queen Anne
seventeen bunnies
A Star is Born
Musical romance
fame, love, envy, alcohol
and Andrew Dice Clay?!
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Multiracial teen
jaw-dropping animation
lots of Spider-friends
Bohemian Rhapsody
Homage to a friend
Freddie struts, swaggers, sings, soars
shared songwriting, cats
The Wife
Sad state-of-affairs
surround a Nobel Prize win
eventual hope
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Neeson, Franco, Waits
six vignettes artfully filmed
disturbing plot twists
The Dawn Wall
Tommy Caldwell climbs
Kev Jorgeson displays grit
port-a-ledge coffee
Sometimes it’s good to flex underdeveloped muscles, in this case my haiku muscle. Thanks for enduring!
Note: For a while, the last line of the last haiku was “pooping in a bag.” However, I think to anyone who hasn’t pooped in a bag, that line is all that lingers—and I also didn’t want readers to think that the only thing about which Kevin Jorgeson displayed grit was pooping in a bag. That original line does, however, fit the haiku model a bit better, with a surprise or understanding at the end. Ah, the challenging editorial decisions that come with a personal blog that 11 people might read….