PREFACE
This is the sporadically updated blog of reviews by Harriet, author of In the Aquarium: a londoner's life.
I have kept the reviews separate to enable them to be indexed and therefore more easily accessible (see listing below).
FAVE FILMS DEAD MAN What an idea, the man is dying for almost the entire length of the film, the music is fantastic, its black and white, ideology, mythology, funny, sad, Johnny Depp sex god...
THE DRAFTMAN'S CONTRACT The first Peter Greenaway film I saw and possibly the most accessible. Beautiful set, costumes, direction. Fantastic soundtrack.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE I knew exactly what was going on right up until the last 15 minutes and damn it but then I lost it.
NIGHT ON EARTH Jim Jarmusch made the only film with Winona Ryder worth watching and it had Beatrice Dalle (say no more)
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? Roar out loud with laughter and tunes that make you love country music. My sister had to sneak out of the cinema ahead of our dad and me cos she was so embarrassed at our laughing.
ORLANDO Quiet, passionate, time travel.
PITCH BLACK Bails and I watched this with its bleached scenery and its whoar factor star. We LOVED him, Mr Diesel take a bow.
RESERVOIR DOGS Tight Tarantino gang heist gone wrong. Great soundtrack. And there's something about Michael Madson, dancing just before cutting off the cop's ear...
ROMUALD ET JULIETTE Truely lovely romance comedy.
THREE COLOURS TRILOGY Blue, White and Red. I liked them all. Quiet stories, beautifully shot.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS Its a story told. And the first time I saw it I didn't get the twist until just before it happened.
It opens with the longest single shot I think I have ever watched. In these times of miniscule attention spans it felt very very long, almost wriggling in the seat fidgety long. The credits rolled, or rather were written across the screen. The only sound was of the birds twittering and the distant street noise as if we were indeed watching from an appartment. Beautiful french movie, with the beautiful actors. Dialogue. Some flashbacks, as the story slowly slowly unfolds. Some fear, feeling invaded, spied upon. The fear driving the main character to make some rash inappropriate decisions about who was watching them (they kept getting videos of their house and movements wrapped in drawings of murders). But because it was a very slow moving film, the speed of the suicide was shocking. You didn't grow to like any of the characters especially. On first coming out of the cinema we couldn't quite understand why we went to see the film but in retrospect I think the atmosphere and feelings of discomfort evoked were part of what it was all about. Didn't exactly enjoy it, but I think it was good.
In the first room is a film in an oval shape, reminiscent of a view through a telescope. The film is circular and sort of follows a walk around an island, on the walk we see a variety of characters dressed in costumes from a number of different ages, some clues are planted that make sense later. Other times we're not sure what is happening. It feels expectant, like we are waiting for something to happen (perhaps this is a throw back to how we watch movies - knowing that something will indeed happen at some point, and even though this is being presented as art we can't shake that off). It also looks like old maritine movies, and then like frontier movies, and then again there are the men with their paint buckets.
In the second room there are a number of huge screens on which overlapping images are shown, again all sorts of characters are evoked, different eras of film making, different actors in fact. The things that went through my head while watching were: Iggy Pop, wizard of oz witches, 70s horror (Carrie - almost about to throw up the cherry stones), demented 80s air hostesses, slap stick, costume dramas, Annie Get Your Gun, governesses, swarming, Hitchcock, those two old people with their pitchfork, etc. A million film references rolled into a collage.
So cinema is a language that we learn to read, perhaps, is what it is about?
Duncan Tucker, director Felicity Huffman as Bree (short for Sabrina), a pre-operation transsexual, awaiting the final operation to become a woman, gives a most amazing performance. From the minute she walks into view, I believed her to be a man, a man moving toward becoming a woman. I never once thought of her as a female playing a man. In my opinion Huffman well deserves the best-actress Oscar this year. Kevin Zegers as the teen-aged delinquent Toby also puts in a fine performance, to say nothing of the excellent supporting cast throughout.
Do notice Graham Greene, the native Canadian actor who plays Calvin, the sweet, gentle ex-con native American who gives Bree and Toby a much-needed boost on their journey across the United States. You may remember Greene from his Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves in 1990 or his Red Hawk in the TV version of Lonesome Dove, a work from the Larry McMurtry pen.
Truman Capote, born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans in 1924, was an amazingly gifted writer, but with a personality difficult to like. In his 1949 collection of short stories, A Tree of Night and other stories is 'Children on their birthdays', which has been called the best 20th-century short story ever written.
The film follows Capote as he researches his faction novel, In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s amazing portrayal of the wispy-voiced, limp-wristed Capote will most likely win this year’s best-actor Oscar to join his other best-actor awards this season. But for me the joy was watching Catherine Keener (whom you may remember from A Ballad of Jack and Rose or The 40-year-old Virgin) playing Harper Lee with gentleness and kindness.
Lee's only published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, came out during Capote’s research; Lee has said that the character of 'Dill' was based on Capote as a child.
The depiction in the film of Capote’s fundamental need to be special, while entertaining, is foremost, disturbing. He succeeded in capturing some of the glory of his earlier work, and had he left it there, he would not have died in 1984 cut off from the high society he adored.
Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen may not draw you to the box office, and while it wasn't a great movie, it had twists and turns (implausible though they were) enough to keep me occupied. Violent though.
Tarred with the irritating child acting of recent Harry Potter films and the latter Star Wars prequels I wasn't keen to see this adaptation of a book I thoroughly enjoyed as a youngster, however, I went, I kept an open mind and I was pleasantly suprised. The child actors were fine. Tilda Swinton was excellent as usual. The computer generated graphics blended in well (recently computer generated graphics have been getting on my nerves - anything can be done therefore nothing is suprising anymore - too much of a good thing). All in all I didn't feel like it had been messed up at all and not a gushy hermione in sight (thank god)!
The Hayward has hit and misses with its exhibitions - its a bold space which can swallow the works, however sometimes it is just perfect - loved the Richard Long exhibition they held here some years ago - the mixture of earth and built environment worked very well.
Anyway this modern building with large open spaces was fantastic for this retrospective of a artist who uses fluorescent light as his main material. There were pieces I'd only seen in books before and others new to me. Definite sense of development in his ideas. Some very beautiful things, others that had strange illusional qualities. The longer you looked the stronger the colours seemed to become. Very beautiful.
This film is a documentary showing how these ‘great guys’, as put by Dubya Bush, stole, cheated, and lined their own pockets while creating an energy crisis in California, wiping out the long-worked-for pensions of hundreds of blue-collar workers and stealing from ‘little old ladies’ in the Midwest. It was not the action of the top managers (some of whom finally came to trial last week), whom one has come to expect to be crooked, but the middle managers and the ‘little people’ within the company, the people like us who followed the example of their so-called superiors that was so very disturbing to me.
George Clooney has been nominated for the Oscar best-supporting actor award for his part as the career CIA officer. The interconnected story lines from the CIA operative, a rising oil broker (Matt Damon), a Gulf (I assumed Saudi) prince, a corporate lawyer, and an idealistic Pakistani teenager who falls for the message of a charismatic religious teacher weave together a story of fierce pursuit of wealth and power. For me the film showed the evil of big business and government working together to manipulate the world for their own good and to hell with everyone else.
A stomach-churning look at the 1950s’ paranoid fear of Communism and the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy witch-hunt. Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Fred Friendly (Clooney) challenged McCarthy, but at great personal sacrifice and loss to them both. A challenging, important film for the thinking audience, dove-tailing with the message from two other recent films which look at how business, abetted by the government, still control our lives.
