lantana (ray lawrence, 2001)

I'm half asleep from the World Cup, and I'm trying to finish an essay on blogs, and I've still got a coupla papers to grade, but I also know the one thing that regularly gets reader response here are movie reviews, so:

Lantana is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I was a film major back in the 70s, even made a coupla little movies back then, and once in awhile a movie comes along where I think "If I made movies, they would hopefully be like this one." Lantana is one of those movies. It is nominally a mystery, but it's ultimately more a character study than it is anything else. The plot is a bit convoluted (although it's always clearly understandable) and some of the coincidences are a bit much. Beyond that, though, Lantana was to me a realist picture; I believed in the lives I was watching on the screen, agonized with those lives, recognized myself and others in the tiny details and un-heroic efforts of average people to cope with daily life.

P.S. How did I do on yesterday's World Cup picks? I got two right, while the third match turned out to be a draw. Here's tonight's predictions: Argentina over Nigeria (Argentina is my choice to win it all), Paraguay over South Africa, England over Sweden, and Spain over Slovenia.