Awhile ago we saw The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando. Funny to see bikers listening to jazz instead of rock & roll. Otherwise OK if pretty dated. They seem to want to insist, he's not really a bad boy.

Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), inspired by the 1958 mass murder spree of nineteen -year-old James Dean-fixated Charles Starkweather and his fourteen year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. I remember how much of a fuss critics made about this, but it seems fairly ordinary now. Despite being such an old movie, it hardly seemed dated at all to me--of course, it was set in the late 50's. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen seem ridiculously young. I don't mean to get in a big moral dudgeon, but Sheen's sociopath is pretty chilling. Maybe 30 years from now I'll see the new movie about the Columbine high school massacres.

So it seems strange that a lot reviewers took exception to how nasty the characters were in Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave (1994). I didn't get around to seeing it when it came out because I was afraid it might be too violent for me; that's also why I chickened out of seeing 28 Days Later (2002). I loved his Trainspotting (1996), though. Shallow Grave was alright.

I liked James Ivory's Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), with Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, even if it didn't seem to know if wanted to criticize Paul Newman's character or not, or rather it wanted to criticize him for being overly dry and practical, but didn't do a very good job of it. I probably should read the novels, but I doubt I'll get around to it.

We saw that the same weekend we saw Whit Stillman's Barcelona (1994), which offers an unusually sympathetic portrait of two of the characters--one working for a "corporation" and the other a US Navy, man, both of them in Spain. Still, the anti-Americanism is pretty much by the way--that's not really what the movie is about, so much as wry observations about life.

Not to harp on the subject, but Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) was quite anti-business, but it was nevertheless pretty enjoyable; the other week we tried to watch Great Dictator, The (1940), but found it pretty unwatchable.