In celebration of this very amusing put-down of President Bush, here’s a bit of the master himself:
Tag: films
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In The Mood For Love
I watched In The Mood For Love on DVD yesterday. It’s an absolutely gorgeous movie, set in Hong Kong in the 60s. One of the cover blurbs says it’s ‘like Brief Encounter remade by Kubrick and Scorsese’; I’m not sure about the Kubrick/Scorsese thing, but the comparison to Brief Encounter is very apt. It’s a film about two people not quite having an illicit relationship, or at least not quite having a sexual relationship.
Apart from anything else, it just looks great. it has a real period feel—not than I’m in a position to judge the accuracy of the details. It’s full of colour, but mainly a subdued palette, all greens and oranges and browns, off-whites, soft blues. And nearly all the action takes place in confined spaces, in apartment blocks, offices, alleys, noodle shops, and in artificial light. And it looks cramped: looking through it to find some screen grabs, it was striking how often objects intrude in the foreground.
Maggie Cheung drifts through the film looking exquisite and fragile in a sequence of beautiful cheongsams, and Tony Leung is is also extremely watchable, if not quite so fabulously attired. It’s moody and atmospheric and generally a pleasure to watch.
A big-budget Hollywood version of Beowulf is obviously going to either be a travesty of the poem or commercial suicide.
When you hear that Angelina Jolie is embarrassed about her nude scenes in the movie, I think it’s pretty clear which one.
I saw this in the cinema the other day when I went to see Helvetica, and I thought it was worth sharing:
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Helvetica, the movie
I went to see Helvetica today. It is, as the name suggests, a documentary about the typeface, which is 50 years old this year.
I enjoyed it. My usual feeling with factual-type documentaries like this (as opposed to narrative-type documentaries like, say, Spellbound) is that they are very slow; that given the same amount of information in written form, you could take it in about ten times quicker. There was something of that in Helvetica, but it’s a visual subject, so it’s well-suited to film. It’s always good to see people talking enthusiastically about their particular area of expertise, and between them the interviewees and the film-makers did a good job of communicating what’s special about Helvetica and placing it in its historical context. It is undoubtedly a remarkably good typeface although the more I saw it over and over again on screen, the more it started looking a bit dated. Not so dated as to be unusable; it’s surely good enough to be a permanent part of the repertoire for hundreds of years. Just a bit tired.
I think you’d need some degree of interest in graphic design to enjoy the film, but you probably don’t need to be a die-hard type geek. My biggest complaint is actually with the cinema; they had the sound too loud and gave me a headache.
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The Seventh Seal
Well, I went to see The Seventh Seal. It was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon showing of a 50-year-old Swedish art film; presumably the cinema was full of vultures like myself.
Hel – sweet seal, originally uploaded by ella19.
I was disappointed to discover there were no seals in it, although there was quite a cute squirrel.
Really though, it was, as promised, a very good film. Two fairly random thoughts: if you’re going to plunder Europe’s medieval past for material, it’s so much better to end up with The Seventh Seal than Lord of the Rings. And although it did live up to Bergman’s reputation for being a bit grim, it didn’t feel gratuitously or affectedly grim.