I hate missionaries.

The Movie: Hawaii, directed by George Roy Hill
Recommendation: Dee
Reason: "I hadn't seen it yet, and I wanted to see what the hell a movie made in 1966 could talk about for three hours."

Yes. You read that right. Three hours. What did I learn? Well, missionaries went to Hawaii and brought sickness, insanity and death with them. I could have probably told you that before I watched the movie. A quick look at imdb provided a few minutes of funny-apparently this is Bette Midler's big screen debut. She was a seasick passenger, which means she was likely visible for about five minutes, if even. In a case of perfect timing, the song from one of my favorite movie moments ever just kicked in ("You Don't Own Me", from the First Wives Club. And if you can't get down to a trio of the greatest feminist film icons of all time grooving to a really sweet classic song about belonging only to yourself...I just don't know, man.)

Okay, Bette and Diane and Goldie are gone now. Media Player has moved on to some Rent, and in the vein of musical theater and musicals in general, the leading lady of Hawaii is Julie Andrews. Julie Andrews is stunning. In this movie, she's sort of an afterthought, which made me pretty sad because goddamn Max von Sydow is an annoying overacting twat. HACK. I kept praying for Gene Hackman and Richard Harris to come back and beat him up repeatedly, and my prayers were answered! Yay! People kept one-punching him! Of course, mentioning the cast just wouldn't be right without cheering for the excellent Jocelyn LaGarde, who was downright awesome in her role as the leader of her people. In a group of people overacting (von Sydow), underacting (Andrews) and just not being onscreen long enough, dammit (Hackman), Jocelyn LaGarde really stole the show.

The visual style of the movie was evocative. I think the cinematographer managed to pull off some really excellent shots here and there, particularily in his views of the Hawaiians themselves. The color was really vivid when it should have been, though the visuals didn't really speak to me as much as they could have. Unfortunately, the pacing was...how shall we say...awful. The movie was SLOW. I think that's the real killer for me. It was so hard to stay awake. Mahalo, Hawaii, for at least including a shark attack.

-41/365 down, 324/365 to go