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WeeWillie
Reviews
Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)
An estrogen-filled look at the private FDR
This quiet little gem deserves so much better than its rating here, but do not see it if you are young or if you need your movies inundated with the obvious.
Through the eyes of distant cousin Daisy (played beautifully by Laura Linney) it gives us a glimpse of the private life of FDR (Bill Murray). In the hands of director Roger Michell, Murray, far from his natural role as an annoying buffoon, skillfully reveals FDR's palpable vulnerability, his flaws, and his considerable charm, even if he is a-swim in estrogen in the shape of the strong-willed women around him (his mother, his wife and his mistresses).
The story centres on the weekend when the stammering English King Albert (well acted by Sam West) and his Queen come to America to ask for help in the war against Germany. This minor clash of cultures is the source of some gentle humor in the film, but it provides an excellent foil to show off FDR's quite remarkable charm and ability to reach people.
Not expecting to enjoy this film (for I dislike everything else where Murray is a major player), I was very pleasantly surprised indeed. Quite apart from anything else, it has some excellent cinematography.
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
A crackling good story about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Clever, quirky, romantic, colorful, good story, good action, and violent at times - "Slumdog Millionaire" has it all, and I am sorely tempted to give it a 10/10. It also sports a lively sense of the absurd - although this is latent and based on the unfolding of events! The movie is set in India, with protagonist Jamil as an unlikely candidate in the Indian version of "So You Want To Be A Millionaire". The gameshow is used to signpost the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" on Jamil's life and on his relationship with his love, Latika.
As far as I can see, the movie puts no foot wrong, and it doesn't hurt that the various incarnations of the seductive Latika are absolutely sizzling, all sporting to the nines that exotic beauty that the Indians do so very well!
This movie crackles, and I recommend it for anyone with a pulse!
Se, jie (2007)
Sizzling hot but slow moving thriller
NOTICE: I do touch on the plot, but not so as to spoil the movie...
This long and sensuous movie set in 1942 Shanghai during the Japanese occupation is centered on a beautiful and elegant young woman Wong Chia Chi (played by newcomer Wei Tang) who - with her platonic friend Kuang Yu Min (played by Chinese male hottie Lee-Hom Wang) - is a willing participant in a group of 6 young actor friends who, caught up in a frenzy of nationalism, hatch a naïve plot to kill a powerful and secluded Chinese traitor Mr. Yee (played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai).
As you might expect, Wong's part in this plot is to seduce Mr. Yee, and so, this story becomes a sizzling but dark story of a very dangerous affair of lust in the period in Chinese history where revolution is in the air but does not yet have China in its grip. In China's repressed sexual climate, the relationship between Kuang and Wong - for, of course, from the first he loves this dazzling girl is a sub-plot that stirs in a real sense of pathos. An ominous pall even a sense of dread - hangs over the entire story, and there is no hint of how it is to end.
The story is certainly a thriller and, under Director Ang Lee, it is a gorgeous movie, punctuated with those breathtakingly understated Chinese dresses and perhaps the hottest sex scenes you have ever seen in the movies, but it proceeds at an agonizingly slow pace and is steeped in the Chinese way. As such it will be controversial for Western audiences, but for me, I see this as adding to Ang Lee's mystique as a movie-making magician.
L'emploi du temps (2001)
Utter drivel, and a sheer waste of time
This movie was an inutterable waste of time.
It putatively focuses on one man's breakdown after he loses his job and on his attempt to live a life that is a whole tissue of lies for his family, friends and acquaintances. But, oh my, it was a story very poorly told!
After this, even a French Canadian film would seem interesting. I stuck with this movie because of an ingrained belief that nothing could labour so painstakingly and ohhhh soooo long to achieve so very little.
The interminable preoccupation with the trivial was the earmark of every scene, both in the camera work and the dialogue, with the result that the entire movie is a dreary, colourless and monotonous descent into the insignificant.
If this movie had any redeeming features, they escaped me completely. I am absolutely aghast at the positive reviews of some of my viewer-colleagues, who really must get a life.
After this, I do not feel that even "In The Cut" was all that bad a movie! Save yourself two hours of boredom, draw your chair into the corner, and contemplate the paint on your wall instead!
The Station Agent (2003)
Charming story of three lonely people meeting in an allegorical railroad station
This is a very neat little movie that combines human pathos and comedy in a way that is rather matter-of-fact, alluring and very absorbing to watch, in spite of its slow progress and low-key approach.
Our hero of the piece is train-enthusiast Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) - a dwarf who places great store on being left alone - and it is through his eyes that the story is told. He leaves his home in New York city after unexpectedly inheriting a quiet rural property that has on it some left-overs of the heyday of the railroad, including an abandoned rail station in which he takes up residence.
Into his new retired life's orbit sail two unlikely characters, a garrulous food stand vendor (Bobby Cannavale), and a chaotic middle-aged but pretty artist with a past (Patricia Clarkson), and in time we see that they are as numbingly lonely as McBride himself.
In spite of his earnest and pointed efforts, McBride is unable to hold these people at bay, eventually forced into a reluctant acceptance of them in his life. Indeed, in keeping with the title of the movie, he gradually becomes the unwilling leader or focus-figure among them, for he has a strength and self-sufficiency the others lack.
Each of their lives is touched by others in the movie, but this only serves to illustrate how completely they have ceased to identify with the rest of the world.
This is a clever allegory of people meeting on a railway platform, where they have nothing in common except that they are there to catch the train. There is little danger of the story leaving you bored, for the main characters are interesting and charming, and in time you will like them all three.
I highly recommend this elegant little film, for it is the sort of gem that comes along but rarely.
In the Cut (2003)
Very poor film that is filthy, unsatisfying and irritating.
This is the kind of film that tends to attract corny comment about artistic courage and truth. Bunkum! On the one hand it is an irritating, filthy and unsatisfying film; on the other, it is a story very poorly told.
In this would-be gritty thriller, Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a dysfunctional New York English teacher who has an affair with pithy police homicide inspector Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) against the backdrop of a series of grisly murders.
Meg Ryan, stepping far outside her usually perky and squeaky-clean on-screen persona, delivers this sexy and harsh role well in what can unfortunately only be described as a lost cause. So much of the movie - often meandering far afield of its obvious and banal plot - fails utterly both as a mystery and a thriller. It is inundated with expletives and rude observation more reminiscent of internet porn than a movie with a story to tell. Indeed, as it progresses it can hardly wait for the next opportunity to get in a piece of crude mundanity!
If the cinematic technique used throughout the movie is an attempt to use the screen as an impressionistic canvas, it does not succeed. Even as a good paint job should not betray the implement that applied the paint, so too, should cinematic technique not divert the viewer's attention away from the movie itself. However, here much of the viewer's preoccupation with the film will be spent fretting over the camera work, as its use of hand-held cameras and endless close-ups that generate jerky or out-of-focus imagery is exceedingly irritating - rather like nails scraping on a blackboard - and unsatisfying to watch.
It is rare indeed to see a film that has as few redeeming features as this one. If director Jane Campion is attempting to make some sort of feminist point with this crude and filthy piece of work, she fails to do so. I see many movies, and do not require a diet of sweetness and light, but watching this film is akin to rooting around in someone's toilet psyche, and in a way that is neither clever nor interesting.
This movie is at its best when it is not seen, Meg Ryan or no!
Danger Man (1960)
Stark, simple, absorbing, and full of impact.
A low key, but absorbing, TV series of half-hour episodes, it is the first of three putatively related series, the latter two being (a) Secret Agent Man (hour long episodes), and (c) The Prisoner.
In the series, our protagonist John Drake (played by Patrick McGoohan) is an English spy - elegant, skilled, sophisticated, and never at a loss. He breezes through his weekly problem, and we enjoy every second of the short ride!
In my opinion, the series was the undisputed master of its era, and I loved its whimsy, its thoughtfulness, and good plot lines, simply and starkly delivered. The later Harry Palmer movies (with Michael Caine - for example, The Ipcress File) was reminiscent of this same style - austere story line, strongly built around its main character, employing few cinematic effects, yet full of impact.
It has been years since I have seen this series, but it it is still one I remember very fondly.
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)
Charming film, but Amelie's childish world needs more juice to fill its running time satisfactorily.
This little film opens with that all that engaging quirkiness that the French have made particularly their own, and I settled down fully prepared to enjoy myself. In the film the title character is a naïve young woman who marches to a decidedly different drummer, and we follow her as she unfurls her petals to the world around her. Her schtick is to single out people she happens upon, and then to intervene gently and charmingly in their lives in order to better their lot.
However, in spite of some clever humor, and the intoxicating Audrey Tautou who plays the innocent and fey Amélie to perfection after 45 minutes or so I felt a twinge of boredom which gradually blossomed in insistence, so that I found myself looking more and more at my watch while awaiting an end to the increasingly annoying world of Amélie's childish shenanigans. To my mind Amélie's observations are more appropriate to a 10-year-old than a young adult (howsoever eccentric and naïve).
Accordingly, while this is a pleasant movie generally, it has insufficient bumpf to fill its running time in a satisfying way, and, after a promising opening, the film ended leaving me with a mild sense of disappointment.
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966)
The movie that defined the spaghetti western, well-told and full of juice.
The last of the three `spaghetti westerns' - and the movie that defined the genre - `The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' is a genius blend of five items: a visionary director Sergio Leone, heart-stopping music by Ennio Morricone, and three marvelous actors: Clint Eastwood (the `Good'), Lee van Cleef (the `Bad') and Eli Wallach (the `Ugly'). I have seen it again and again over the years.
Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, circumstance throws the title characters onto the canvas as competitors in a race to find a dead man's gold, where each of the three exhibits the traits of his character suggested by the title. To be sure, the plot is a good story, and (egad!) many viewers will dwell on the obvious allegory on human nature suggested by the title. However, while mildly interesting, these are only useful as a yarn with which to weave the story, for it is in its thoughtful telling that this movie rivets us, finds its greatness, and which raises it far beyond not only all other westerns, but also most movies of any kind.
It has an extraordinary knack of moving its principal characters around in a little and self-centred stage while surrounding cataclysmic events - heralding the noisy and violent birth of no less than the most powerful nation on earth - are noticed more or less as a nuisance! At one point the audience and the characters are compellingly called to a momentary sense of the bigger picture in a gorgeous pull-back from a camera close-up to a wide-angle pan of an vast makeshift graveyard - a kind of `hey, you lot, look at what has been going on in the meantime'!
You can virtually smell the dust, heat and sweat that permeates this movie, and the cunning use of wind effects and lighting are much combined with solo-subject, no-dialogue cinematography to intensify the mood, or to show the wild loneliness, the potential, and raw immensity of this new country! And when The Ugly is afraid, the movie forces you to feel the stink of his fear over his ever-present treachery!
The movie has many moments that set it apart from the mundane, but, steeped in the film's extraordinary theme, the drawn-out ocular bi-play between our three protagonists near the end is surely a film masterpiece.
Do not expect often to see the match of this wonderful movie, for I'm afraid the consummate skill required is not available in abundance!
Pane e tulipani (2000)
Gorgeous rendition of the oft-told story of flying to romance from the world of humdrum routine
Venice is the setting for our middle-aged protagonist Rosalba Barletta (played by the utterly captivating Licia Maglietta) to escape the clutches of her life of every-day tedious boredom.
Stir in a flower shop, a likable curmudgeon, a plumbing detective, a masseuse, a wistfully poetic landlord, a hangman's noose, a recurring accordion, and a pinch of mystery, and we have the next delightful entry in that well-known story about fleeing mundanity that includes little gems like "Shall We Dance" and "Montenegro".
This film, in Italian (I saw it with English subtitles), and steeped in Italian romance, is a story told with an engaging simplicity and a complete absence of moralizing.
I daresay there is someone, somewhere, who wouldn't like this little film, but surely not someone you'd care to meet!