Cerebral and Anti-cerebral

With no baseball on Friday night, I managed to watch a pair of movies that had initially slipped through the cracks when they were originally released.

First, PBS aired the documentary Wordplay, which looks at crossword puzzles and the people addicted to them. Being a puzzler myself, I found a lot of the content to be fascinating. I also got caught up in the "drama" of the crossword tournament finals that served as the climax of the film. Whether intentional or not, I thought the film clearly created some heroes and villains amongst those participating in the tournament, which made it even more thrilling to watch how it would play out. My only complaint about the film is that I wish it would have either completely focused on the tournament or on those obsessed with doing crossword puzzles. Watching segments involving celebrities like Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton talk about their love for crosswords interspersed throughout the events of the tournament made it seem like they didn't have enough content to do a full movie on one aspect or the other.

Then after watching such an intelligent and provocative film, I went to the other side of the spectrum and watched Michael Bay's The Island. A quick backstory before talking about the film. I had a mild interest in this film when it came out in 2005. I ended up ordering it on demand after it came out on DVD and recorded it on DVD. After recording it, I tried on two or three different occassions to watch it and fell asleep each time about twenty minutes in. So I finally made it through the whole thing this time only to learn that there had been some problem with my cable when I recorded it and it didn't show the last 10 minutes of the film. Had the film been better, I would have been pissed. As it was, this was a disappointing failure. The first half hour of the film makes it seem like this is going to be an interesting science fiction film that is going to make some statements on our current culture as well. But after that, the film devolves into a silly, noisy chase film involving characters that we don't really care enough about. Given how the film was going, I didn't need to see the last 10 minutes to figure out where it was going. Thumbs down for me on this one.