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GK's Favorite Movies

February 13, 2003 |

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I'm just curious to know if you are a movie fan and also what movie(s) you
particularly enjoyed. I'd like to know if you choose them by subject or by the cast.
Thank you.

Darlene

Darlene, I choose movies according to which ones my wife wants to see. That's the long and the short of it. She likes romantic comedies and historical dramas and she hates juvenile comedy and she abhors movies in which people are impaled on sticks or their brains are blown out. I don't mind romantic comedies, but most of them are so cunning and contrived, like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," which I whole-heartedly despised. I was the only one who did. I sat in the theater and hated every single person I saw on screen and wanted to impale them on sticks, especially the writer of the movie. I thought, "Be careful lest you commit similar sins with Lake Wobegon." On the other hand, I liked "About Schmidt" a lot, though most people I know did not. It was a funny movie and we saw it at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis, one of the last of the old big screen theaters, and the place was packed and that's how to see a comedy, with other happy people, not sitting in some surburban multiplex with a couple of disgruntled teenagers. I like small odd movies with a lot of texture, as we in the popcorn business say. Long passages when people seem to be living their lives up on screen and you don't feel the director jerking your string. "Gosford Park" was a great movie, that way. And a movie a few months back about sisters living in L.A. Lovely. Can't remember the story but it was engrossing.

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