Watched: Orlando

This is another one that is probably beyond pretentious, but for a few important reasons I loved it (unlike some movies that rhyme with BONELY BOD BORBIVS) and it is my second favorite Sally Potter film (after The Tango Lesson). Reason one: Tilda Swinton. No movie featuring, let alone starring, the ethereal alien goddess bequeathed to us by some planet, far away, whose inhabitants all look like variations on a David Bowie prototype, can be truly bad. And Orlando is one of them.

Reason two: Orlando is probably one of the few things of Virginia Woolf's I honestly enjoyed reading. Not that I have read a great deal of her work, but unlike Mrs. Dalloway, which I appreciated for its stylistic and topical importance, or A Room of One's Own, which I could appreciate for its message, I enjoyed Orlando as much for its story and humor and style as for its place in history. But it does a really intriguing ambiguity about it; maybe her others have that and I missed it or didn't respond to it the same. In any case, I really enjoyed Orlando. The movie, I think, very effectively carries over that sense of ambiguity and humor.

Reason Three: Aesthetics. I've said it before; I can forgive a multitude of sins in a movie that looks pretty or interesting enough. Part of the reason why my favorites movies are ones like The Fountain, The Fall, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Very Long Engagement, Le Belle et La Bete, and Orlando is that they manage to combine beautiful, interesting aesthetics with warmth, humanity, story, and humor. (Slightly less so on the humor front in The Fountain although it still has a moment or too.) The other reason is yes, romance, although I'm not really a fan of your run-of-the-mill, overplotted Katherine Heighl/Kate Hudson/Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy. I'm more drawn to a movie that shows me a different kind of romance, something sad but sweet and not necessarily with a happy, and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after kind of ending. I want my cinematic romances to be like actual romance, in that they're organic and challenging and sweet in ways that don't involve making up rules on how to date people!

Reason 4: Chapters. The bibliophile in me loves a good, chaptered movie.

 Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I, most perfect casting besides Tilda?

 Third place goes to Billy Zane (a cool dude) whose character's name is BONTHROP SHELMERDINE. If that doesn't scream Victorian England, I don't know what does.

Seriously, though. I love this movie. It's beautiful, it's a cool story, it's funny, and it's only an hour and change long so it's just the perfect length, and doesn't wear out its welcome with all its gimmicks. And Tilda is a star, obviously. This is not the first thing I ever saw her in (that would be when I reviewed the movie Thumbsucker in high school, after which I was a fan for life) but this is probably one of my favorite performances from her.