Django Unchained 2012
165 minutes Starting with the
opening titles of this Quinton Tarantino film you feel like it’s 1960 and you are seeing a spaghetti
western. There’s even a song by Enzio
Morricone in there somewhere. A German
bounty hunter played by Cristoph Waltz buys Django’s freedom from slavery on
condition that he help him find three bad guys who have prices on their heads. Django (Jamie Foxx) is more than willing, but
in return he wants the bounty hunter’s help in freeing his wife. There’s lots of blood, including that of
Leonardo DiCaprio who plays a particularly vicious slave owner. If you like Tarantino, you’ll like this film;
if not you’ll hate it.
Funny Face 1957
103 minutes Recently I saw a
profile of Audrey Hepburn on PBS, and I wanted to have a look at one of her
films to check my memory. The PBS
profile was great, but Funny Face was
not. Musicals always require some suspension
of belief, but his whole thing felt contrived and artificial. Fred Astaire did several routines, and they
all seemed pale, reworked versions of things I had seen before and
enjoyed. Even Audrey Hepburn didn’t seem
as charming as I remember her from other films.
Hitchcock 2012
98 minutes “Call me ‘Hitch,’
and hold the cock.” Hitchcock was a
real character, just as we always suspected.
This film is the story of the making of Psycho and of Hitchcock’s recognition after 30 years of marriage of
the importance of his collaboration with his wife, Alma Reville. It would be hard to find a stronger pair to
play the Hitchcocks, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, and it is their
chemistry that makes this film. Psycho is considered one of the great
movies of all time, but it almost didn’t get made. Paramount refused to finance it, because
everyone hated the book, but they agreed to distribute it for 40% of the
profits, if Hitchcock could find a way to get it made. Hitchcock seems to be the only one who could
see the possibilities for a great film.
He raised the money, partly by mortgaging his house, and the rest is
film history. And Scarlett Johansson is
Janet Leigh.
Holy Motors 2012
115 minutes The Netflex notes
call this a “surreal drama. Surreal it
is, but if there is drama, it is in the loosest sense. Over 24 hours a man is driven from place to
place in a long white limo. He has his
makeup mirror in the back seat, and he plays 11 different roles before his day
is done. He switches from man to woman,
impoverished to affluent, young to old, assassin to family man. The eleven scenes are mainly meant to shock
and they do. The best scene is the last,
when the limo is parked with about a dozen of its own kind in an enormous
garage. When the humans are gone they
talk among themselves and flash their tail lights at each other. Bunuel defined surreal film for me; this film doesn't make the cut . You could
read a book.
The Life of Pi 2012
127 minutes Many reviews
describe Pi as a boy, but “teenager” or “young adult” would serve better. Pi’s family is moving its zoo animals from India to
Canada on a Japanese freighter. The ship
encounters a typhoon somewhere east of the Philippines and sinks. Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, a
hyena, an orangutan, and a zebra with a broken leg. No other boats are in sight after the storm
has passed. Soon only Pi and the tiger
are left. His efforts to save both
himself and the tiger are ingenious. Pi
stays out of the tiger’s reach by building a raft for himself and tethering it
to the lifeboat. He manages to feed the tiger by catching fish, but both of
them grow weaker and by the time the boat washes up on a beach in Mexico, the
tiger is no longer a threat to Pi. The
tiger disappears into the jungle and Pi is taken to a hospital by some people
who find him on the beach. When a pair of Japanese investigators comes to
interview Pi in the hospital, he tells them his story, and tells them that it
was his efforts to save the tiger that gave him the will to live until he was
rescued. They can’t believe it so he
tells them another story. We have seen
the story with the tiger and want to accept it.
Maybe what makes this a great film is that we are left in doubt.
Mirror Mirror 2012
105 minutes Julia Roberts is
perfect as the wicked queen, and no Snow White was ever cuter that Lily
Collins. The script ventures far away
from any version of the Grimm fairy tale that I have seen or read and it’s all
for the better. No more Sleepy, Dopey,
Doc et al, and they’re bandits instead
of miners. It’s great fun, and I’ll
suggest it to my grand children when they are a little older. As a bonus you get Nathan Lane as a
sycophantic courtier.
Passione 2010
127 minutes People stand around
in the streets of Naples singing. I got
bored and used the fast forward a lot.
One vignette was interesting.
Street musicians were reenacting a tribute to a saint that has been
around since c. 1300.
World Without End 2012 8 episodes
This mini-series is a sequel to Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. It’s
the 14th C, 200 years after the cathedral was built, and life is not
very pleasant. A young avaricious monk gets
to be prior of the monastery after his ambitious mother has poisoned the
competition. He does his best to make
life unbearable for everyone in town. King
Edward II has been deposed by his wife Isabella and seems to have been murdered
in prison. His son reigns as Edward III,
not a bad guy. He does invade France and
launch the Hundred Years War, and when he brings his troops back to England he
also brings the rats that carry the plague.
It’s a pretty good series and in the end the two principal commoners
around whom the story revolves may live happily ever after, if anyone could be
happy in that unfortunate century.
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