Movie night

More movies last night! Mondays and Tuesday evenings are long and quiet for me, and since I don't write well after dinnertime, I often spend those nights catching up on TV, watching new shows, or watching movies. Last night was movies.

First off was the 1984 film "Another Country."

It's one of those I've always meant to watch and just never did, about young British school boys in the 30s and the atmosphere of conformity and oppression that pervades. Rupert Everett plays a gay boy in love with Cary Elwes, and Colin Firth was a vocal communist amongst a group of young men struggling with the roles they're locked into.

They're all so young in it! Cary has that babyface prettiness he managed to hone a tad for Princess Bride. Colin was the most eerie one to watch, though. He's so very young, and yet, the voice that comes out of that young face still manages to sound like an over-educated fifty-year-old man. It was very disconcerting, lol. A good movie, though. A lot to say about the nature of what drives a man to make the choices he does, with some beautiful cinematography and compelling performances to boot.

Then Netflix decided to suggest "Seeking Justice" to me, a 2010 Nicolas Cage thriller.

I wasn't going to say yes. Cage has too strong a propensity to do awful little movies lately. But then I saw that Guy Pearce played the bad guy and the reviews online didn't completely suck so I decided to give it a go.

Cage is a high school English teacher in New Orleans, who, when his wife (January Jones) gets raped, is approached by Pearce, the leader of a vigilante group that metes out their own justice. All they ask in return is that somewhere down the line the favor is repaid. Cage agrees because he's out of his head with anger and worry about his wife, and the rapist is killed. Six months later, he gets called upon to kill someone himself. His conscience sets off a whole string of events which are over the top, yes, but managed to be twisty enough to keep me distracted from how quiet my house gets.

It's not great filmmaking by any stretch of the imagination, and the performances feel phoned-in much of the time. The script gets plain silly at times as well. But I didn't finish it feeling like I'd just completely wasted two hours of my life, and I got genuinely surprised by a twist or two, in spite of its lack of subtlety otherwise.