The rare occasion when one wonders what movie the Times critic saw. Having just watched Lust, Caution across three nights, I have to say that I was bewitched by several subtle, rich performances and gripped by the terrible (if unsurprising) cat's paw plot. I was pleased to discover that I am not alone.
Guy Ritchie continues to take risks far beyond his abilities and therefore achieve only well beyond his talents.
She's a charming interview for the New York Times.
I remember being baffled when my mother talked about things that "might be considered dated," as she put it. Such items included Penrod and Sam, which my father recommended cautiously (nothing actually happens in the book, ever, I think); or even Sesame Street, ultimately.
A Passage To India is really, really, REALLY dated. I have a trip to Mumbai coming up, and I thought, say, I haven't got time to do a full investigation of proper movies, but it would certainly make sense to try Passage, which i had considered seeing in 1984 but then changed my mind. More than 20 years, David Lean, Alec Guiness, and so forth.
OH LORD HAVE MERCY.
The acting is in turn execrable and subtle (shout-outs to Dame Peggy) and the staging intensely obvious. The editing -- which which we can apparently blame Lean -- is obvious to the point of conspicuousness. The themes are grit-ground by now.
It fascinates me how some things date -- Passage, say -- and some do not. (Eraserhead springs to mind.) I read things I wrote a year ago, or five years ago, and am appalled sometimes by stylistic or logical failures. A close friend of mine once opined that Netscape ruled the browser market; Microsoft had lost, and forever.
Ah well. On to Bollywood. Now taking recommendations for movies of Mumbai.
There are worlds of criticism a person can write about Hollywood, right? Portrayals and stereotypes and Pauly Shore. The list goes on.
Add one more: Blood Diamond's background bird calls are egregiously bad. In a fairly good movie (with some banal dialogue here and there), the bird calls in the background are so wretchedly chosen as to be as jarring as that scene in Bang The Drum Slowly when the boom mike boings all over the top of the frame.
Throughout, they dub in a black-throated green warbler, which lives in eastern America (and which happens to sing my favorite bird call, so it stood out). Now, I heard it a few times, and I thought what an arrogant you-know-what I am, to be thinking I know better than people making a movie. What are the chances, right? There's probably a black-throated-green soundalike in Sierra Leone, I figured, some sort of ill-tempered parrot that decided to mimic the little warbler.
That was when I heard the Eastern Wood Pewee.
For those of you who think me pedantic? It's like calling a Corvette a T-Bird. (My son is 6; we crossed in front of a T-Bird yesterday and he said, "Look! Dad! A T-bird! HOW COOL IS THAT?") It's like pointing to a gyrating Little Richard and saying, "Look at Elvis go!" It is very, very wrong to play American bird calls in the soundtrack of an African movie.
OK, sorry. Back to your regularly scheduled clicking.
If nothing else, the French understand movies. Cream, butter, sculpture, lily ponds: OK. But above all else. the French can make a stinking movie. They had a head start, and they refuse to give up the ground they gained. I strongly, strongly recommend Army of Shadows. Dismal vistas, miserable interiors, acting so nuanced that it demands reading glasses. But the %&^*&s understand plot and story.
