Robin Hood (The Silver Years?)

Okay, with all due respect from someone who used to harmlessly stalk Mr. Crowe (I can't get into it here)isn't he a bit old for this role? Or have we begun to accept a 40 and up Robin Hood since that awful mess Kevin Costner was in?

My favorite Robin Hood will always be Errol Flynn, young, light, handsome, wiry, quick and wise cracking. Of course he was the Robin Hood of my childhood so it's hard to let that image go. I'm not against reinvention of cinematic icons if that's what they are (I love what Ritchie did with Sherlock Holmes this year!) but on first look, this trailer simply feels like Ridley Scott's Maximus from "Gladiator" plopped into the story of Robin Hood and that's just scary.

Russell has the ability to really transform in his roles and I have marveled over his talents in the past but this just sort of feels like the old Grazer, Crowe, Scott, safe reunion. Boooring. I hope I'm proven wrong. I really do. But where movies are concerned, that doesn't happen often. For the most part I've been watching too long and too often, too closely at least at this genre and certainly at this particular teaming.

R.I.P. Patrick Swayze

My top three favorite Patrick Swayze movies

1.Ghost
2.Point Break
3.Dirty Dancing


My heart goes out to his wife.

Snow Cake

Why isn't Alan Rickman in more movies? Maybe that's not quite the point. Perhaps it's a good thing that his projects are so carefully chosen and independent rather than mainstream. It's just that whenever I see him give an incredible performance like this I always have to wonder why I haven't been watching him more.

I've loved him from the day I first saw him play Hans in "Diehard." Right up until he fell to his death from over a hundred stories up, Alan Rickman was giving the kind of solid performance rarely seen in a big budget action movie. And it didn't end there. There was his role as a ghost coming back to haunt his grieving widowed wife in "Truly Madly Deeply" and as Sinclair, a well to do British business man who suspects that his wife maybe be cheating on him with her brother in "Close My Eyes." And then of course there are the Harry Potter movies where he plays what I can only guess is a warlock? I wouldn't know. I've never seen or read anything about Harry Potter. Maybe I should.

Subtle, dry humored, intense, clever, irreverent and compassionate: Rickman has always been interesting to watch. I feel that being typecast as a villain has always given Alan's performances an air of nefariousness not entirely his own. Yet, ironically, he is also able to evoke some of the most genuinely tender moments in film I have ever seen.

In "Snow Cake" he plays a man running away from his past only to slam right into it again by way of a terrible car accident on his way to Winnipeg to meet a friend. Sigourney Weaver gives a brilliant performance as the autistic mother of the young girl he meets and knows briefly before she is killed in the car accident.

It's hard to peg Alan Rickman. Not super masculine or even speculatively effeminate, but somehow his comfort in his own skin as he gets older, his ease with awkwardness and his choice to take roles that challenge rather than merely entertain the viewer has always made him one of my favorite actors.

I saw him once at a taping of "Def Poetry Jam." He was filming the HBO movie "Something The Lord Made" with Mos Def who was hosting at the time. He was sitting in the upper tier right behind me so I had to turn and crane my neck to get a look when Mos introduced him. That was over five years ago. His hair was already graying and it looked fabulous. I would have been looking at him the whole time if I could have. : )

I've Loved You For So Long

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie I wanted t write about, hence the length of time that has passed since my last entry.

I haven’t always loved Kristen Scott Thomas, but I do love her. The first movie I ever saw her in was that silly lovable farce that Prince directed, “Under The Cherry Moon.” I thought her performance as a spoiled rich man’s daughter was really irritating and I only tolerated her on screen presence so that I could watch my idol, Prince. But now I realize that many of her faults in that movie can be attributed to having to perform opposite an insane, selfish, paranoid and egotistical asshole, my idol, Prince. I still love the guy. But I love Kristen even more. She is beautiful and gets even more beautiful as she grows older. She makes me think of a bird, a librarian, a school teacher, a bookish hermit and a lady of statuesque high class, a woman in a painting all in one. I believe one of her greatest assets is the wordless and mercurial expression she conveys through her pensive eyes. Her performance in “I’ve Loved You for So Long” is absolutely stunning.

It is a movie in French which I wanted so much to see in theaters, but it had such small distribution and I was never able to find an accessible theater, so I was thrilled when it finally went to DVD. I rented it on Netflix and watched it last night.

The film is about a woman, Juliette, coming to live temporarily with her younger sister her husband and two daughters after having been released from jail where she spent fifteen years for killing her son. Kristen gives a compelling heartbreakingly reserved and passionate portrayal of this woman struggling to start over, to trust again and to let herself feel anything at all. Elsa Zylberstein, an actress I’m not familiar with is also spectacular as Juliette’s sister Lea. Against her husband’s paranoia and society’s judgment, Lea is unswerving in her love for her older sister and in a faith that her crime involved much more than what is perceived.

There is one beautifully shot scene that I love of the two sisters in a public pool talking. It is one in a series which goes along with a threaded reference throughout the movie to water and its renewing power. But the most incredible scene is pure genius, something layered with discovery and revelation mixed with childhood fantasy and the tradition of storytelling. It’s riveting and pulls you in two different directions only to realize that the duality of the moment is really unified in one path.

I was also so charmed buy the two little Asian girls who played the Lea’s adopted daughters that I’m convinced when I have children I want them to learn French. Their language was like music! And Kristen’s French was superb for a non-native!
It’s a wrenching movie, with light and humorous moments but by no means a delightful romp. But I really appreciate directors who make movies which recognize the beauty in our everyday realities, in the tough issues and the awkward situations. “Once” was another movie which achieved this incredibly well and on a pittance of a budget. But that’s what I feel good movies are about; creativity, giving voice to the voiceless, and challenging our ideas about life as we think we know it.

I Watched The Watchmen

Just saw “The Watchmen” which I think was great by the way and noticed in a few of the preceding film previews the following categories: Gangster Violence and Pervasive Language. I couldn't imagine for the life of me what these categories meant. What happened to just plain old Violence or Swearing? I mean are there people who are not offended by all violence in particular and need to know exactly what kind of violence they will be viewing? MPAA is such a fucking crock of shit organization. I don’t even know where to begin. They really bug me. Maybe these categories have been around for a while and I just haven’t noticed them. If that’s the case then I apologize for my lateness it expressing how ridiculous I think it is.

As for the Watchmen, I will try to be simple in my review. I never did finish the graphic novel but I did read enough of it to see that that the movie followed it almost to the letter and I am really proud of that. I have to admit that while reading it I was hyper aware of the total lack of any Watchmen of color but what can you expect from characters who outwardly admit to having virtually Nazi like mentalities? I find that the movie dodged these issues way more overtly than the novel did. The novel, I am told, included a larger narrative of one of the only characters of color in the story, the shrink who sees Rorschach as a patient. But naturally that story was completely omitted from the movie. That pisses me off but rather than go on a tangent I will stick to what I really loved about the movie. Mostly that I felt it did not compromise (until the end of course) the novel’s sense of ironic darkness and pervasive global doom for easy, fluffy resolutions. Again I did not finish the novel and understand as an avid reader that a book, graphic novel or more traditional literature has a life of it’s own which cannot be replicated cinematically at least not often.

What you get from books, the ability to imagine, re-imagine and live within a story is almost always compromised when adapted for the screen. The part of your brain used to simulate actions, feeling, emotions and intellectual and emotional struggle is given over to what a director and cinematographer install for the viewer. The studio replaces your imagination with their own vision, which is fine, as long you still have your own imagination in tact. That takes a daily exercising of your own imagination though. I fear new generations may not be encouraged to do this very often if at all. But more on that later.

Let talk about Dr. Manhattan’s penis. No really, I’m gonna go there and say that I am really proud at how well they pulled that off. I mean I watched the movie in my favorite theater in Chelsea, Manhattan’s great gay Mecca and not one oooh or awe whenever the blue phallus was exposed. Dr. Manhattan was that well rounded, that classy, and with a character so grounded in intellect and logic that he drew virtually no attention to his dick when he was naked which was about 80% of the movie. Was that Billy Cruddup's actual penis? One may never know. Maybe it's entirely CGI. Technology has come so far. No pun intended. Okay lemme get off the dick.

The opening credits alone were amazing, disturbing and beautiful. The fact that they opened with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changing” didn’t hurt at all. I was delighted to hear, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Cohen as well although the use of “Hallelujah” during the obligatory sex scene was the least subtle segue of all the musical score use throughout the movie. Listening to “Unforgettable” sung by Nat King Cole while watching “The Comedian” get his ass handed to him was in a word, unforgettable. I will save the rest for those who wish to see the movie themselves. The moral and political discussions were satisfyingly handled although I don’t wish to discuss at length here what I feel might have been glossed over, simplified or omitted entirely.

It is unfortunate that we have come to accept the usual pattern in movies over the years that require exceptional scripts to wrap themselves up in the last thirty or so minutes like some 80’s episode of a “Murder She Wrote” mystery and “The Watchmen” is no exception to that. But I think there is more to “The Watchmen” to see than can be gathered in one viewing. And I will say this, and I haven’t it about a movie in a long time: I can’t wait to watch it again and again. The writing, the cinematography and the performance were compelling and held me really tightly. It was poetically brutal. That’s hard to pull off.

Atonement

I'm not crazy about Kiera Knightly but someone made me a copy of the movie and I just felt like watching something I hadn't seen already for a change. It's been in my apartment for months. As it turns out, at least in my opinion, Kiera and James McAvoy are not the actors who make this film watchable. The heart of Atonement is the character who does the atoning; Briony Tallis played pretty much to perfection by the three actresses who play her at the different phases of her life. The entire beautifully shot movie is basically her own partly fictional retelling of the events of one day when as an adolescent girl she mistakenly set into motion the false persecution of an innocent man. Personally, I think the whole thing could have been avoided through clear explanations of all the things she'd witnessed which lead up to her being convinced that something was going on which was not. But it was the 30s and I guess rich white British people in the 30s were very sexually repressed.

There was one small scene in particular which really moved me where Briony in her twenties and volunteering as a nurse in the Second World War finally finds her sister played by Knightly whose lover she had sent away by falsely accusing him
of rape. She finds her so she can apologize to her because she has just discovered after many years that she was completely wrong. Kieras's character Cecelia let's her into her apartment and offers her a cigarette, holding them out to her as if they were the last offering of friendship she could spare. Briony takes one as if she is accepting the last drops of kindness her sister feels she can give. And the way Briony holds the cigarette, you know she doesn't smoke, never has and doesn't care about smoking. But she takes it because her sister gave it to her and she knows she may never give her another thing again. The desperate need she has to be forgiven is made palpable just in the way she holds that cigarete.

"I'm a movie guy..."