I blogged a while back about wanting to see Good Bye Lenin, and I finally managed to do so last night., so this is just a minor update. I’d recommend it: it is warm, funny, touching and humane and I managed the suspension of disbelief a lot better than I’d anticipated from contemplating the idea of the film. I was surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. I have the good fortune to have a small cinema at the end of my street (how long it will survive, I don’t know) and I’d been to see Veronica Guerin a couple of weeks earlier in the same place on the same night of the week and there had been just three of us watching. Odd that GBL should be so much more popular.
From the category archives:
Cinema
I see that Christopher Walken nearly walked out of the remake of The Stepford Wives because he was unhappy with changes in the script.
When the star of The Country Bears, Kangaroo Jack, Gigli, Jungle Juice, Joe Dirt, The Prophecy 1,2, and 3, Blast From the Past, and Mouse Hunt nearly leaves your movie because of the script, that’s got to hurt your feelings a little bit.
I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.
From a Guardian article bemoaning the decline of national cinematic traditions comes the following catalogue of national characteristics as revealed in film:
bq. The Japanese, haunted by feudal warlords and ancestral ghosts. The Italians, preoccupied with fascism, communism and huge family meals. The Spanish, grappling with catholicism, beggars and a taste for the surreal. The repressed, puritanical, Swedes. The French, who adored infidelity, bourgeois dinner parties and murders in provincial towns. The British, engaged in an interminable class struggle. The Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, evading the communist censors with sophisticated comedies and metaphorical allegories. And, of course, the Americans and their obsession with rugged individualism, the wild frontier and the “American dream”.
Over at the Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke has an highly entertaining post on the uses of the classic western in explaining Rousseau’s political philosophy:
bq. One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western….
I went to see Joel Schumacher’s Veronica Guerin on Saturday night, and left the cinema with mixed feeings. On the one hand I’d spent a reasonably enjoyable evening watching a moderately exciting film; on the other, I felt that justice really hadn’t been done to an important true story. The characterization was pretty weak and the whole thing had a made-for-TV feel about it (it wasn’t). Cate Blanchett as Guerin was all gloss and pressure and her portrayal of the journalist was very one-dimensional (driven obsessive with a side interest in football to give the appearance of depth). Ciaran Hinds as gangster-informer was a bit better, but most of the gangster characters were straight from central casting. The key moral dilemma of the story, Guerin’s choice to put her child at risk for the sake of her cause, was far too quickly and easily dealt with. There’s another film covering the same material – When the Sky Falls – I hope it is more convincing.
I’m teaching a freshman seminar on time travel at Brown this year, so I’ve been watching a lot of time travel movies as ‘preparation’. I always knew that many time travel movies don’t make a lot of sense on a bit of reflection. What surprised me on recent re-watchings was that some seemed unintelligible even on relatively generous assumptions.
Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:
“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”
I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.
And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had only one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…
BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.
Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:
“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”
I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.
And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had ony one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…
BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.
A bit more online content from Imprints: Norman Geras’s reaction to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. He concludes:
bq. The Holocaust and other calamitous experiences not only can be represented, they must be, whatever the difficulties. There will be those who err or fail in the way they do it. Others, though, will not, as The Pianist itself exemplifies. And if part of what is revealed in these efforts to represent the universe of pain and death is some surviving human value, so be it. Would the world be better without this, or for not being shown it? No, it would be then truly without hope, the hope that Polanski professes to have found in Szpilman’s story in spite of the enormity of the surrounding horror.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?
There’s been a lot of “talk”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26264-2003Jul22.html lately about Mel Gibson’s movie about the death of Jesus. The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/02/national/02GIBS.html?hp reports that Gibson has shown “The Passion” to:
bq. friendly audiences, but has refused to show it to his critics, including members of Jewish groups and biblical scholars. In Washington, it was shown to the Web gossip Matt Drudge, the columnists Cal Thomas and Peggy Noonan and the staffs of the Senate Republican Conference and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and others. In Colorado Springs, the capital of evangelical America, the film drew raves. A convention of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative Roman Catholic order of priests, saw a preview, as did Rush Limbaugh.
Why is it that no Jews seem to have seen this movie? (Do correct me here if I’m wrong.) Gibson’s people won’t show it to the “Anti-Defamation League”:http://www.adl.org/cgi-bin/MsmGo.exe?grab_id=10&EXTRA_ARG=&CFGNAME=MssFind%2Ecfg&host_id=42&page_id=12845568&query=mel+gibson&hiword=gibson+GIBSONS+mel+. The Times quotes the marketing director for the film as saying: “There is no way on God’s green earth . . . that any of those people will be invited to a screening. They have shown themselves to be dishonorable.” So the obvious question is: why doesn’t Gibson show the movie to some “honorable” Jews? Seems like he’s shown it to just about eveyone else.
bq. Update: I’m corrected already. “Matt Drudge”:http://www.msnbc.com/news/942575.asp is Jewish, and he liked the film. Somehow, that doesn’t allay my concerns.
From the NY Times review of 28 Days Later
bq. ”28 Days Later” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting.
Actually it’s not _entirely_ obvious that any shoplifting takes place, but we’d need another law and cinema post to work that out.
I went to see _Pirates of the Caribbean_ last night, and really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s as much fun as movies can get. Johnny Depp is a revelation as Captain Jack Sparrow, moving like a fey, drunken “Keith Richards”:http://romanticmovies.about.com/library/weekly/aa062903a.htm who hasn’t gotten his land-legs; Geoffrey Rush is nearly as good. The plot is hokum of course, something about cursed Aztec treasure and blood sacrifice, but you don’t notice while you’re watching; you just go along for the ride.
It seems to be Jane Austen day here at Crooked Timber, as the BBC brings news that Bend it Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha – announcing that Jane Austen must have been a Punjabi in a previous life – discusses her forthcoming Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice:
Chadha’s film, renamed Bride and Prejudice, stays faithful to Austen’s original story, although the Bennett family become the Bakshis, and Mr Darcy becomes a wealthy American. Aishwarya Rai takes the lead role in the film His unsavoury friend Mr Bingley is still an Englishman – in this case a barrister – and according to Gillies, who plays him, his character will be “more despicable”.
Ah, those national stereotypes …. a pity they couldn’t get Alan Rickman.