Blackthorn 2011
102 minutes After my brother and
I saw the Butch Cassidy artifacts in the Montrose museum, we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid again;
then we gave this a try. It’s about 20
years after the big shootout and Cassidy, played by Sam Shepherd, is living on
a small ranch in Bolivia with a local woman, whom he loves. He decides he needs to visit his daughter in
the US and sets off. He gets tangled up
with a con man and it all ends badly, although he survives and rides off toward
the mountains. Along the way Sundance
shows up as some sort of local official.
They are no longer best buds.
When it was over we looked at each other and said “Why didn’t you say
something?”
.
Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid. 1969 110 minutes
This was just as good as it was the first time. Newman was at his magnetic best. Redford not so much, but that was the
character he was playing.
.
The Recruit 2003
114 minutes Colin Farrell is
recruited for the CIA by Al Pacino and assigned to training at the Farm. From the beginning he’s manipulated by
Pacino, who’s running an operation that will let him walk away with some
serious money. That’s a spoiler, and I wouldn’t
have put it in if it hadn’t been obvious from the start. This one is a great ride. Lots of tradecraft.
.
Saving Mr. Banks 2013
125 minutes Tom Hanks is Walt
Disney trying to get the rights to Mary
Poppins from its curmudgeonly author, P.L. Travers, played curmudgeonly by
Emma Thompson. It turns out that the eight
books were influenced by Travers’s childhood experiences in Australia, including
loss of her father, Travers Robert Goff, to alcoholism. Travers’s childhood is shown in flashbacks,
in between Disney’s efforts to get her to agree to his vision of Mary Poppins. This may be a first – a film about making a
great movie that’s even better than its subject. Hanks and Thompson are magic, and there’s
that Colin Farrell again as the charming but sometimes abusive Goff.
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Tony Takitani 2004
75 minutes I got this from
Netflix because it was based on a story by Haruki Murakami, an author I really
admire. I can’t really recommend
it. Watching it you might think this is
some weird Japanese thing as unintelligible as Noh Drama, but my Japanese spouse
was as baffled as I was. Tony was an
only child raised by housekeepers – his mother died early and his father was
always on the road playing his trombone.
Because of his western first name, Tony really had no friends growing up
and became a loner as an adult until he met and married Eiko. It was his first experience with love and he
was happy until Eiko’s insatiable desire to buy more and more clothes began to wear
on their relationship. Then she died. He sinks back into loneliness. There’s one interesting effect that I had
never seen before except that red dress in “Schindler’s List.” The film is shot in almost black and white –
sometimes there’s a hint of color. I’d
have to watch it again to see if the color paralleled Tony’s moods.
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Winter’s Tale 2014
118 minutes This is a fairy
tale. Colin Farrell plays Peter Lake, a
thief who breaks into the home of a beautiful redheaded consumptive girl and
falls in love with her. Unfortunately Lake
is on the outs with Pearly, the local crime boss who trained him, because he
decided to go into the theft business on his own. Pearly, played by Russell Crowe, just happens
to be a devil who reports to Lucifer, Will Smith. Pearly tries to snatch the girl to draw Lake
in, but instead Lake rides in on his white guardian angel horse and snatches
her away and takes her to refuge in the country. Lucifer arranges to have her poisoned, and Lake
returns to NYC. He and his horse meet up
with Pearly on the Brooklyn Bridge. Lake
tells his horse to fly away. Pearly
smacks him in the head four times and throws him into the river. It is 1916.
Lake survives but has amnesia and wonders around New York for the next
hundred years. Then there is another
redhead and it all begins again with Pearly.
Fortunately the horse is there to help out with flying and all that. I had mixed feelings about this, but decided
it was O.K. to enjoy a fairy tale.
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Zulu Dawn 1979
113 minutes Movie making has
come a long way since 1979. Despite
having a cast of outstanding actors, the action seems wooden and the little
bits and pieces of human interest have become clichés. On the other hand I was blown away by the director’s
ability to move huge groups of people around through the invasion of the Zulu
lands in 1879 and the battle that followed.
The Zulu won, but it didn’t end well for anyone. Sometime I must look up what happened to Lord
Chelmsford, the arrogant British commander played by Peter O’Toole, who thought
he was going to chastise the Zulu and instead got his forces massacred.
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