The Man in the Moon -- 1991 -- PG-13

So last night I finally got to sit down and watch another movie, and this time, it was off my wife's Netflix list. This was Reese Witherspoon's first film, and according to some trivia, she went out for a casting call in Nashville to be an extra and landed the lead. Not bad for your first outing.

The story follows a 14 year old girl who runs into a 17 year old boy who just moved in next door. The age difference creates a lot of great tension between the two as she is enfatutated and he considers her a kid. This tension is heightened, of course, when he meets her older sister who is preparing to leave for college.

The plot was fairly well constructed with only a couple of strange moves and hiccups. The narrative expects you to make a lot of assumptions as to what is going on and what went on. For example, the boy in question meets the older sister and leaves just as dad is getting home. Well, he has to rush back off and moments later, the boy comes back as the sister is waiting on the porch. Plotwise, this was weird, because you wonder why he came back so soon after leaving, but you can assume she called him, which explains why she would be waiting.

Also, it felt like some of the sequences were cut short. Dani and Court at the market, for example, was a great opportunity for character development between the two, but we never got it. There were times at the pond where they could have talked, and we moved on. Court and the older sister only had four scenes together before we hit another big event, and their scenes had very little in the way of length or development. We know she cared about her sister's feelings, but what led her to change that stand and go out with him?

Character is really the weakest point of the film, primarily because it expects the same kind of assumptions about the characters that the plot expects. There is very little onscreen development between any of the characters. The leads, Dani and Court, get the most screen time, but most of the film is devoted to moving the plot along as opposed to developing its myriad of characters. It's good that the focus on the leads was maintained,. but we needed a little of the other characters and their interactions as well as more development of the leads in who they really are.

This was a movie with a lot of great potential in it, and my wife just loved it. To completely enjoy it, you have to be willing to read between the lines and get into the emotional side of it. I think it could have been better with only a few more minutes spent on the relationships here and there, but even so, like I said, it's not bad.

My wife had gotten some real clunkers from Netflix lately, and I was very happy she got one that she enjoyed.

The Silence of the Lambs -- 1991 -- R

Ah, the timeless story of love and friendship of two people from different worlds that surpasses not only the age factor, but even the plexiglass divider that keeps him from eating his capters... Ok, so that's a little warped, but not entirely inaccurate about one of the character plots of this classic flick that took several Oscars in 91, including Best Picture.

The actual plot involves Clarice Starling as a wet-behind-the-ears FBI newbie with degrees in psychology and criminology (sweet combination, I might add) who is charged by an FBI superior to talk to the notorious killer psychiatrist, Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lector. Their aim is to see if Lector would help them in tracking down a current killer that has been dubbed "Buffalo Bill" who recently kidnapped a senator's daughter -- you know, if you're related to someone powerful, you get priority in investigations...

Anyway, Lector and Clarice develop an interesting relationship where he respects her, and she lets her guard down with them. This relationship is actually the focus of the film as opposed to the Buffalo Bill side, which is just a track to roll their relationship on. This made the film work a whole lot better than it would have if the investigation was the centerpiece. It also filled out their characters aand made them both very real during the course of the film. She maintained her relative innocence (though a bit wiser for the wear), and he was nothing short of disturbing and a bit frightening as one who had no qualms about doing anything to anyone.

Of course, we did have this whole Buffalo Bill plot where some freak was kidnapping girls, slicing bits of their skin off, and then dumping the bodies. The full brunt of this storyline is as disturbing as Lector's character when you know everything about it. I'll leave the mystery intact if you're one of those people who has missed it thus far.

This was a film well deserving of its Oscar. It's a very good watch with an intriguing storyline and some great characters. Not one of those waste of time films.

Thelma and Louise -- 1991 -- R

Another classic among classics would be the iconic film helmed by Ridley Scott, who directed Alien so many years before as well as a slew of others, naturally. This is one of those that I'd been meaning to see for quite some time, just because it is so well known and has the iconic scene of the overhead view of the car driving across the desert tailed by a slew of cops. This is the movie where that came from.

The plot deals with a neglected housewife and worn out waitress going on a short weekend vacation to the cabin of someone who is about to lose it to his ex-wife. On the way, they stop over at a nightclub where the housewife is nearly raped, but instead of that act, the rapist gets his just desserts when he's shot by the waitress. They freak out and feel like they can't go to the police because they'll be tried for murder since some might think the housewife was just asking for that kind of treatement.

Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, the pair makes their way across 4 states going from having just a problem to creating a veritable crime spree in order to try and make it to Mexico to escape not only their original crime of murder, but the subsequent crimes they commit as a result of their circumstances.

This is one of those movies where one event lends itself to the next. All the while, you consider "if only this hadn't happened, then...", knowing that if they'd only decided a different path, they would not be in the trouble they're in. Naturally, their decisions are influenced by their perception of their situation, and that's really the key. We know that their situation is not as dire as they make it out to be, but their view of the world drives their decisions every time, and it makes for a very pleasant watch of a film.

With a theme of friendship, bonding, and driving through to the end together, the end was an inevitability. I will say that knowing how it ended spoiled the experience a bit more for me than knowing the ending of Citizen Kane. Since I knew where it was going to end, it became partly a matter of waiting for it to be setup and go instead of following the movie watching it unfold, but one can hardly follow movies as closely as I do without eventually stumbling across the ending to Thelma and Louise, or least hearing about it.

There was one single plot weakness, however. They left home to go to this cabin in the mountains on a vacation, right? They stopped at a bar to have a time of it. No one knew them there, and it took an eternity to track them down after the murder was over. What set the cops on their trail was that they never reached the cabin. My immediate thought on "what to do next" was to go to the cabin as if you never stopped. That way, when the cops investigate, they find that you followed your original plan, and they look elsewhere. Sure, they wouldn't have experienced their growth, but I'll always find that to be more logicla than running.

The only scene(s) that really got to me were in the hotels. If any part of the movie ran as predictable and even annoying, it was those scenes. In the first hotel, Louise goes on about "figuring out what to do," and it didn't take long before I want the scene to be over. Add to this the long discussions between Louise and her man, along with the highly predictable subplot of the J.D. character that they picked up. Now, I love J.D.'s how-to speech, but overall, that part didn't measure up to the rest of the film.

The title characters were superb, which is what makes this movie as good as it is, even with the slow section. Even the supporting characters were fairly well put together which served to engage us into the film as a whole. They had both moving and funny moments throughout.

So this is a work I can definitely see why it continues to make the lists of the best movies of all time. It's not the greatest, but it can stand with the upper echelon without a doubt. A very enjoyable and memorable experience.