Before Sunset, Godfather I, II, III

Before Sunset

Beautiful sequel to Before Sunrise. I started crying within the first minute. Well, not real crying. Manly crying, you know, where there's just a little dampness in the eyes. Still, the way they flashed back to the first movie and then how it became clear that things weren't what we thought made the opening very emotional (in a manly sense). The scene in the coffee shop was good. Watching the people in the background was fun.

I wish it had ended differently, but still a very worthwhile movie. It impressed me with how nice French people are. I had no idea. But then they did treat our paterfamila nicely, as well as the rest of the family that could make it over there for the festivities.

Shakespeare & Co Bookshop Paris, France

Godfather I, II, III

Well, we made it through all three. You'll be glad to know there's good news. Yes, the Al Pacino godfather finally quits smoking by the third installment. I hope that isn't going to ruin the surprise for anyone. He also quits killing people, maybe, but in the end it's really just a very long movie about regrets.

Best of Sicily - Road Map of Sicily

Dogma

Listen up everybody! I'm flying to Augusta for Thanksgiving. There might be a Scrabble game and probably no Wi-fi service. So unless we all get together and get Mom hooked up then you can expect frequent phone calls asking for an Internet search in order to verify a word. Wait, maybe I could just bring a Scrabble dictionary. It was nice of Tish to buy one last summer but it was also a lot of fun to call people and ask them to check a word for us. Keep your lines open.

 

Dogma

 

"I need you three to shuffle her loose the mortal coil..."

 

Ok, reading Hamlet last summer meant that I started seeing Hamlet in everything, hence my incredibly brillant connection with the Will Smith Hancock movie. Speaking of which, according to  the admissions officer at Macalester who is a friend of mine, the tank top t-shirt that Charlize Theron wears to bed and which says "Macalester" on the front is a big seller at the Macalester bookstore.

 

Now, I watched the Hamlet movie last night and this afternoon the elder resident teenager comes home with a borrowed copy of Dogma which contains the above reference from Hamlet. I may have laughed a little too hard in the first half then got tired of it for awhile then got back into it. One of the many fun parts of this movie are all the references to movies and one major play. It is a fun movie even though one critic said "in spite of all the gratuitous violence and bad language, it's still a fun movie."

 

It has a very similar theme to the Surrealist Spanish movie I reviewed last year called Milky Way. I liked that one a lot and this one in the same way. They both try very hard to criticize the Catholic Church but both come out saying some very deep spiritual things in the process and somehow showing the good things about Catholic spirituality. Alainis Morrisette plays a very provocative role. Provocative in the sense of really having to think about what it means.

 

What Dreams May Come

As long as we're on the subject of Hamlet, I'll mention this movie that we saw a few years ago. The title comes from Hamlet's suicidal "to be or not to be" musing. I thought it was a beautiful movie. Robin Williams, Annabelle Sciorra, and Cube Gooding Jr.. Heaven and hell. Incredibly sad but beautiful.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

 

Another Hamlet connection. A very strange movie but one I remember liking although it's been long enough that I really don't remember much except how interesting it was that a movie was made about what might have happened to two minor characters from a major play.

 

Here's a poem:

 

They All Want To Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers - O flowers,
     flowers slung by a dancing girl - in the saddest play the
     inkfish, Shakespeare, ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad
     and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and
     then to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words
     masking a heart that's breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
     particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.


Carl Sandburg a

Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation

 

I got this one after seeing The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. This movie is the one based on the stage production which was based on the true story of a man who pretended to be Poitier's son. Fascinating movie. Wonderfully purposeful overacting as a way to show how everybody is really pretending to be someone else. I found this interesting bit about the director on Wikipedia.

 

"John Guare, (the screenwriter and original playwriter for the stage play version), was born in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but now seems to be lapsed [1]. He was educated at Georgetown University, (BA, 1960), where in 1958 he contributed a song to an original musical revue entitled The Natives Are Restless and presented by the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society. The song humorously attributed the success of many famous people to the syllable “O” in their names."-- from Wikipedia. Now fifty years later we have an "O" on the brink of being presidentially famous.

The Taming of the Shrew (the 1966 Taylor/Burton version)

Check out this real Bosley Crowther review: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9504E2D71E3BE63ABC4153DFB566838C679EDE

Liz and Dick divorced after this movie if that makes any difference. I loved it. Great sets and costumes. Great overacting. And, as Bosley says, great cleavage. Well, I don't think he says "great." Liz as Kate is great. Interesting  trivia: Laurence Olivier played Kate when he was 15.

 

 

Hamlet

 

I'm on a Shakespeare kick since I started developing my own list of books to read before I die or get too tired to stay up past 8pm. I read almost half of his plays last summer (more daylight hours). This version of Hamlet was the 4-hour 1996 version  with Kenneth Branagh. Wonderful but really need to know the language. Very fast dialogue and hard to keep up but the staging and casting and everything else is wonderful. Look at the cast list. A note on IMDb says Robin Williams and Billy Crystal were not allowed on the set together as they would get everyone laughing too hard.

 

Housekeeping

 

I read the book when it was first published in 1980 then saw the movie in 1987. Loved them both. Now the author, Marilyn Robinson, has a new book out and is getting a lot of attention for it. I don't think the DVD for Housekeeping ever came out, but I thought I would mention it in case enough people request it on their DVD rental service.

 

 

Even more

OK, you can stop reading my drivel now. Just go the link below and watch me in video with my imaginary friend. I'm the guy. I think. Except I really disagree with him about Tropic Thunder and political correctness.

 

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=reelgeezers 

 

Bella

 

Beautiful (sorry, but somebody has to think it's a funny and highly intelligent way of showing that I know what Bella means) movie about love, family, regrets, atonement and  kitchen management. Shot in New York using mostly Spanish-speaking actors. It's significant that the three brothers have different accents which would only be noticeable to experts in the language or in using IMDb like me. The different accents signify the different relationship each brother has within the family.

 

Well-done movie and worth seeing even if it does have the blessing of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Charles Dobson of Focus on Family Spanking. I wonder what they thought of Juno? The bishops would like us to know that there is only one slightly objectional word in English and only one slightly more objectional word spoken in an obscure Spanish dialect. We liked it so much we saw it again right afterwards but still missed the bad words.

 

 

Times and Winds

 

Turkish movie made in 2006 but apparently timeless or least as far back as the revelation from Muhammad. Verrrrry slow dissertation on Turkish teenager angst and the effects of cardigan sweaters on wall-building skills. Beautiful musical score by Arvo Part and great scenery. The rest is pretty depressing. Fathers who abuse their sons, mothers who abuse their daughters, fathers who are also imans and call the village to prayer right after abusing their sons.

 

In the Time of the Butterflies

Lots of controversy over this movie: lack of Dominican actors, shot in Mexico instead of Dominican Republic, wrong emphasis, not what really happened because what really happened would not be able to be a TV movie (probably couldn't be filmed in the first place), Jennifer Lopez' husband should have had a better part, Jennifer Lopez' husband should have had a smaller part (at least his divorce prior to J-Lo was finalized in the Dominican Republic),  Salma Hayek was in it, etc, etc.

 

But if you don't know the story or the book then it's an incredible movie. Beautiful, devastatingly sad at the end. The book was too difficult for me to read after the seeing the movie and knowing what was going to happen. It starts off like it could be a book for teenage girls. The other incredible part is the year this took place. I never knew anything about it.

 

Salma Hayek produced one of my favorite movies, The Maldonado Miracle. It'll make you feel good.