Book + Movie List

Y Tu Mama Tambien
Tony Pisarenkov DVD 13 December 2002

Julio and Tenoch, two annoying, irresponsible and immature high school boys meet Luisa, an older woman trying to leave her cheating husband, and take her on a road trip to the beach. The film says absolutely nothing new. We don't need a Mexican filmmaker to tell us that teenage boys are obsessed with sex but get it all wrong most of the time, and the attempts to show the socio-economic problems of Mexican society are way undercooked and fall flat. The film barely starts on a tentative road to redemption from mediocrity in the final sex threesome and a bizzarre and chilling twist of Luisa's fate but ends before the interesting bits have a chance to gather steam. If you do decide to see it, try to get the unrated, unedited version -- lots of explicit sex make it mildly titillating.

Yellow Sky
Julie Gephart Basic cable 25 October 2003

A band of outlaws run across a “tomboy” woman and her grandfather living and mining gold in a ghost town. First Gregory Peck threatens to kill the woman if she doesn’t feed them. Then he jumps on her in the yard, knocks her to the ground, and starts kissing and pawing her before laughing (that scamp!) and saying he was just showing how useless it was to try to defend herself if he wanted to get rough. That’s obviously when she fell in love with him. Finally when they can’t find the stash of gold, he agrees to only steal HALF of it if they’ll tell them where it is, and she loves him more. Later, after much gunplay, he brings her a flowered hat, and they ride off together joyously. Because no matter how much a woman wears jeans and boots, deep down she’s always longing for that flowered hat.

Yojimbo
Ray Hunley Netflix DVD 06 April 2005

A yakisoba western from Akira Kurosawa. Storyline was later stolen for Sergio Leone's Clint Eastwood vehicle, A Fistful of Dollars. A wandering ronin comes into a small town, swaggers around, subdues two gang bosses by playing one against the other.

You Can Count on Me
Kristin Schrock VHS, Cassy's couch in Chicago 22 February 2003

A lovely indie pic about the relationship between a responsible sister and her screwy brother. And my new favorite southern redneck Josh Lucas (the husband from Sweet Home Alabama) shows up as a nasty, southern redneck. Go Josh! Nothing really gets resolved and its messy in that great independent movie way.

Young at Heart
Julie Gephart Basic cable 08 November 2003

The picture I’ve been carrying in my head all these years of Frank Sinatra turns out to be entirely fictional, as I couldn’t even pick out which character he was until he started singing. Boy, everybody sure did used to smoke.

Young At Heart (1954)
A Bennett TiVo'd from AMC a.m. 11 November 2003

Everyone in this film tells Doris Day what to do, so, in turn she tells Frank Sinatra what to do. Inexplicably he likes this enough to conceive a child with her--though the duo never share a single kiss onscreen. Somewhat Douglas Sirk-ian in its conception and execution. Important, life altering drama takes place regularly, but for the most part no one in the cast breaks a sweat. Also stars the Skipper (aka Alan Hale). Question: is Frank Sinatra the original 98-lb. weakling? His physical size in this picture raises the question of whether he thought he had been cast in a Holucaust drama.

Young Black Stallion
Mike Gadd IMAX at new Air & Space Museum- Dulles 22 January 2004

The IMAX format certainly helped but so did the length of 45 minutes. Nothing original about the movie itself, but the entire class of 6th grade girls seemed to enjoy it. This was part of a field trip and I think most of the parents would have rather been out on the display floor.

You're Never Too Young
Julie Gephart Basic cable 17 July 2004

No matter how many Jerry Lewis impersonations I’d seen, I was still unprepared for how aggressively irritating the real thing could be.