Nights in Rodanthe

Nights in Rodanthe

Reader Alert!

The following review is repeated directly from the matri-familia, Mom, who has actually seen the movie, as opposed to me, who has only checked out the facts on IMDb ( my motto: Movie Reviews you can trust, you just have to trust my version of the facts.)

In Mom's words:   "5-stars." "I loved it."

(warning:   a comment on IMDb calls this a "women's film"  which means I'll probably have to see it eventually) (I try to not let Linda see "women's" films with other women and especially not by herself; she can get all the wrong messages unless she has my presence there to remind her that things could always be worse.) (wait, that didn't come out the way I think I meant it)

Before Sunrise

Lovely "talkie" movie (kind of like My Dinner With Andre but with movement meaning they get up from the dinner table). A young woman and man meet on a train in Europe and spend the night walking around Vienna. I think they lay down at some point but I was really too engrossed in what they were saying. Ethan Hawke plays the man and a French actress plays the women. Like Casey Stengal said, "You can look it up" if you want to know her name. It's in English (American-English on Hawkes' part) but interesting use of other people speaking other languages without subtitles. There's a sequel we haven't seen yet but will try to soon. The title shouldn't be too hard to guess.

 

Diva

 

Absolutely one of the most gorgeous films I've seen in a long time. 1981 French film about an opera singer (a real American opera singer who had been asked to act in the movie after the producers saw her in an opera; beautiful voice and acting, you'll wish you could hear her live) who doesn't ever record herself. A young man is infatuated with her and secretly records a performance. The rest is incidental. The whole movie is about using all our senses to experience the movie. Even the sense of touch since we had to keep finding the remote everytime the phone would ring with one of the boys asking if they can stay out a little longer. Many of the scenes are staged like a work of art. Try watching it without subtitles so you can just sense what's going on. We watched it with half the subtitles since the bottom half of the subtitles was below the screen. We could easily figure out what was going on and it was much more of a sensory experience. A comment on IMDb said if you wanted to be hip in the '80's then this was one of the three movies you had to have seen. It's past the '80's now so the other two don't matter. Other comments said everything was realistic (from a French point of view) including how the man does the recording. Great scene of a philosopher and a jigsaw puzzle, also of him buttering a loaf of bread. The chase scene is supposed to be classic. If your subtitles don't work just remember what Casey Stengal said; not the one about how he was such a dangerous hitter that he got intentional walks during batting practice.

 

Cache

 

A 2005 French film with Juliette Binoche who was in The English Patient which I loved. This one had a very interesting plot, kind of like Atonement mixed in with The Battle for Algiers. Unfortunately, it really needed subtitles and they just weren't woking well in our DVD version. We missed most of the dialogue so quit after a bit.

 

My Dinner With Andre

 

I saw this in the theatre when it first came out in 1981. Since I mentioned it here I just thought I'd say, "5-stars; "I loved it."

 

 

The Shop Around the Corner

Classics time and this is a great one to spend time with. Funny, sweet, political, beautiful acting and casting.

We liked the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks You've Got Mail remake, too, but this is much better. We also liked the British TV comedy several years that was based on this movie, Are You Being Served?

Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart parry and marry while living out their solitary lives in a Budapest gift store.

Ralph, they don't actually get married, just engaged, assumedly.

Ok, but isn't it clever of me to use parry and marry in a sentence?

Nevermind. I give up. But where's the politics?

The movie takes place in 1938 in Budapest and the Depression is referred to several times while the lifestyle scenes show that people are trying desperately to ignore it. Not much of a statement, but still very interesting to see in 2008.

There are two fascinating coincidental uses of numbers in the film.

When the store owner (a very pleasant re-encounter with an actor who everyone grew up seeing at least once a year) gets out of the hospital after a nervous breakdown he goes to the front window of the shop. There is a close-up shot of the cash register showing the price 51.50 (in Hungarian money). Due to extensive and coincidental Internet research, I discovered that the California code for involuntary commitment for mental illness is numbered 5150.

The other numerical casting is the post office box number that Sullavan's character rents. The scene where her gloved hand reaches into the empty box is extraordinary. The box number, 237, is large and clear (also mentioned several times). It happens to be the same number as the hotel room used in Stanley Kubrick's movie, The Shining. Kubrick's choice of that number was mainly the result of needing a number in the 200's where the digits added up to 12 and of being a number that was not a real room number at the Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon which served as the backdrop but not the location for the movie.

Just as a quick aside,

Please.

I thought The Shining was an excellent film from many different angles. Scary movies aren't usually my choice but this is well worth it for film fanatics. And for political fanatics since Kubrick wanted to film it partly to draw attention to the genocide of native people.

The DVD of The Shop Around the Corner has a few special features. Unfortunately, no commentary, but there is an interesting short film called the Miracle of Sound, which is an old black and white MGM film that shows how sound was put on film. The opening scene has a very brief shot of a cotton field with a hand reaching out to pick the cotton (cotton was used to make celluloid). The hand, of course, belongs to an African-American and reminded me that I learned early in my teaching career to preview films that I ordered from the school district A-V department. A similar scene, yet much longer, was in a 16mm film of America the Beautiful that I showed to a class of 3rd graders in 1989. Teachable moments sometimes turn into long discussions.

And, of course, Mr. Political Correctness could not miss a chance like this to point out that 1940 Hollywood often billed the leading actress first over the actor (apparently due to chivalry), as in The Shop Around the Corner, while 1998 Hollywood billed Tom Hanks first in You've Got Mail (apparently due to Tom Hanks having greater appeal even over America's sweetheart and greatest fake orgasmic actress, Meg Ryan). Just an interesting note.

Thanks, Ralph. Apparently, you are due for a check-up.

Quickies

 

We saw Atonement last week. Just in time for Yom Kippur. I think I already used the dumb joke about the Jewish connection with the family's last name. Beautiful movie. We read the book a year or so ago. Well told story and well done movie. English accents are only a little hard to understand but since I now qualify for the senior discount at Piccadilly I'm having a harder time hearing anything. Getting my ears cleaned out helped a little.

 

Love in the Time of Cholera came in the mail recently. I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez' magical realism style of writing. I first read his short stories, then 100 Years of Solitude. Have not read Love in the time of Cholera but wanted to see the movie anyway. Beautiful movie. I loved the casting. Javier Barden was great and a pleasure to see him after not really liking No Country for Old Men. The commentary on the DVD that I watched later was very interesting mainly because the director, Mike Newell, has a great voice. Very soothing, especially for an Englishman. Even though he is mostly a TV director the movie wasn't all that bad. Pauline Kael had a good point in the 60's that it wasn't the major movies that television was hurting but the fact that television killed the B-movie which had been the training ground for directors. With television ending the B-movie market, directors were coming from television instead which is much more one-dimensional (at least at that time, supposedly). I'm not sure if Mike Newell's television background affected this movie but he did do Four Weddings and Funeral which had Hugh Grant. That's about as one-dimensional as you can get.

 

I forgot about seeing Mountain Patrol in Augusta last summer. Strangely beautiful movie about a true story in Tibet several years ago concerning the poaching of wild antelope and the attempts by local Tibetans to stop the poaching. Gorgeous scenery and great acting. I read quite a bit of viewer response to the movie and got very confused about who was really the bad guys and was the movie really Chinese propaganda to show how environmentally concerned they are by supporting the anti-poachers but really acting the other way. Or was it the other way around? Hard to tell from all the emotional responses. One news article did clarify that the scene of what was supposed to be 100's of skinned antelopes was really goats that was the normal diet for the villagers. They just lined up the carcasses for the movie. 

 

Saw the biopic about Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. All the jokes about the title apply. "I wasn't there either." "You had to be there." "There is no there, there" (Steinian philosophy). Compelling movie, nonetheless. The casting got most of the publicity. Cate Blanchett was good. Woody Guthrie has always been one of my heroes. The scene of the child actor playing Dylan and visiting Guthrie in the hospital was very moving. Interesting connection with my comment on the Mongolian Ping Pong movie about genocide practice in China. Guthrie had been recruited by the Columbia River (Oregon) Dam Company to write 26 songs commemorating the building of the dam and the resulting benefit of all the cheap electrical power. The other result of the dam being built was the total loss of the native American tribal way of life along the river. The tribes were moved inland to reservations and soon died off. The term used by other tribes in Oregon? Genocide.

 

We tried to watch The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir (1939). It's billed as the "greatest movie ever made" mainly for the cinematic artistry. Unfortunately, the subtitles were obscured by the background so we gave up. Too bad since I love Renoir's film, Boudru Saved From Drowning (nicely remade as Down and Out In Beverly Hills). Pauline Kael is credited with praising the film enough to give it a new life in the US in the 60's. It's well worth the trouble to find it. Subtitles aren't all that necessary as the acting is so expressive.

 

We saw Moon Over Parador awhile ago. Richard Dreyfuss stars who I always like. Very funny movie. Sweet story. Great acting all around. Dreyfuss' brother plays the dead dictator in the freezer.

 

Tried to see something called Mona Lisa but I thought I had ordered the Julia Roberts film (another Mike Newell direction) and instead got some incomprehensible English gangster movie with Bob Hoskins. No idea if it was any good. Damn those English accents.

 

OK, that's enough for now.

 

Thk gdnes. OMG! I thought you'd never stp.

 

Yes, and damn those text messages from outer space.

 

Mongolian Ping Pong

 

Alright, so it wasn't The Little Shop of Horrors Around the Corner which is what I was thinking. But if you join the Blockbuster movierentalsbymail (tell them I sent you) and type in Little Shop Around the Corner you not only get The Shop Around the Corner but you also get The Little Church Around the Corner which was a 1923 movie written by Olga Printzlau who wrote well over 60 movie scripts as well as several Broadway plays. They all sound good. I'd love to watch them sometime. I love really old movies mainly for the sense of getting a sense of the time. Some are hard to watch. I tried watching a silent movie last week written by and starring Harry Houdini, called Man From Beyond. Too hard to watch due to the incredibly annoying soundtrack but maybe if I played Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd at the same time it would be easier.

Anybody every try to watch the Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack?

One of the founding members of Pink Floyd was named Richard Wright. He died last month which was the same month as the birth of the writer Richard Wright who we last visited in the McCabe and Mrs. Miller review. His birthday is September 4th which alert siblings and grandmother will note is the birthday of the famous teen rebel with many causes and ping pong extraordinaire, Peter Berlin.
Well, on to an extraordinary movie, Mongolian Ping Pong.

Actually flimed in Inner Mongolia which apparently means it's really China. Who the hell knows anymore? Outer Mongolia is apparently the Chinese name for Mongolia while Inner Mongolia is in China and has a majority of ethnic Han Chinese population with enough real Mongolians left alive to act in this movie. Apparently genocide is a term that hasn't been translated yet. If you want to know anymore then look it up yourself on wikipedia.

What I do know and will gladly share is that Mongolian music (inner or outer) and the technique of throatsinging is absolutely beautiful and the practice probably goes back thousands of years. Sadly, silence goes back even further which means the soundtrack to this movie is mostly that. A little throatsinging at the beginning and end. Just enough to whet your whistle as they say in Texas which also has a history of throatsinging amongst cowboys on the range.

The silence is obviously a way to get us to appreciate the awesome landscape and vast stretches of more awesome landscape. Somewhere inbetween is a remake of The Gods Must Be Crazy but not as funny. Cuter, though. Cute kids. Cute horses. If you want anymore then watch it yourself.