11 posts tagged “netflix”
The movie certainly fails to convey the historical context that the book provides but to be fair that's not what Coppola sets out to do. This is not a period piece. What the movie does show is how very young Marie Antoinette is when she enters France and how strict the court rules are. She can't even reach for a handkerchief without breaking etiquette. The movies does a good job of showing how lacking any avenue of expression Marie Antoinette, like many young girls, parties and shops because there is very little that she is allowed to do - and politics have no interest to her so she doesn't bother to understand it. Marie Antoinette and her companions party and shop so extravagantly and spend so little time on anything of substance that it's no wonder the country is in trouble when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette become monarchs. And because the movie only captures the bubble that Marie Antoinette inhabits, we see precious little of the rest of France (the mob's arrival at Versailles is quite sudden and almost cartoonish). There are various deliberate anachronisms throughout the movie to link it to the partying of Marie Antoinette's day with reckless young celebrities today but it's not sufficiently compelling to justify two hours. The sets were pretty since the film was shot in Versailles, and Kirsten Dunst performs well with the little material she has to work with but it just wasn't enough. The party is over by the movie's end, but I just can't help but think that the film could have had something - anything - more to say.
Vox Gripe: There's a new ad on the sidebar when I try to compose a new entry. It's very distracting because it flashes constantly and sometimes it moves and interferes with my mouse. It gets especially confusing when I try to add an item from my library into the draft. And No, I do not want to know who in Petaluma has a crush on me. It's terrible but I suppose the price one pays for a free blog. I don't recall the ads being this annoying and hope it's not the start of a trend.
Anyway, I had meant to write about Office Space, which is one of those movies that a lot of my friends would quote or refer to but which I had never gotten around to seeing. The movie is a bit dated now in terms of pacing although not in terms of the sentiments and work situations. I remember seeing the fax machine scene on television close to when it was released and finding it hilarious but the movie is much more muted by today's standards. I still enjoyed it though.
The ad in the sidebar is still moving around and flashing at me. Very annoying. It works as an ad, I suppose, because I keep staring at it but I get very disgruntled when I look at it, which is probably not what they intended.
The documentary also delves into the life of the hijacker, which serves as a vehicle to show the lives of street kids in Brazil, children who are abandoned, beaten, forgotten, and what kind of lives they lead and what they do to survive. We get truly awful glimpses of what the prisons are like coupled with convincing stories of police abuse - although who knows how much anyone in the documentary was really telling the truth. Although it might be easy to dismiss a movie which proffers a sob story for a man who was undoubtedly a violent criminal, the documentary does not try to redeem him. His story forms the basis for showing the conditions the street kids live in, how they get there, what they wish for, the inhumane way that society and specifically the police treat them, and the precarious and often violent prospects before them. It makes a powerful statement regarding how poverty and neglect lead to violence. The refusal to acknowledge the conditions and the abuse suffered by the street kids leads to further violence as these kids become adults. Obvious statements but the documentary shows in a very real way how sick and awful people can be to one another and how it can turn to violence. The documentary is disturbing because it shows a very ugly side to human nature and not just on the part of the hijacker.
Although this is a great documentary, it is however not something I would recommend watching with your spouse on a Friday night. M agrees that this is a good movie, but he needed some time to himself before he would talk to me again.
We are slowly working through our Netflix queue, and Signs came in. I know that I'm the one responsible for putting it in the queue, but I think I added it to the queue years ago, shortly after it came out....
Premise: Crop circles appear at a small Pennsylvania farm and around the world. Is it aliens or a hoax?
There's a lot I liked about the movie. I thought Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix were good and I liked the imagery. I liked that the characters run away when they sense something scary and hostile is lurking nearby, but the story became more silly as the events unfolded and the ending especially so. Anyway, when the alien invasion comes, I'll be sure to ask all the new young parents around me to please keep their baby monitors handy.
I couldn't find a trailer, so here is a clip I found on YouTube.
It seems that all I have been doing outside of work is eat and watch really, really bad movies and TV. So far, most of what I've watched has been bad in that hackneyed, clichéd guilty pleasure sort of way.
Borat was just bad.
I've heard people describe the scenes from the movie, which is what piqued my interest, but it's a movie more fun to talk about than watch. The only interesting thing about it was that it showed how people in America do and say things that are as ridiculous and provincial as Borat himself. But overall, the humor was pretty scatological. The movie went for the most tasteless joke that Cohen could go for without getting beat up. The harder someone tried to be polite the more likely he was to destroy property, call someone retarded or ugly, or whip out a bag of feces. It was just rather crass.
There were some really funny bits though. I liked the Pamela Anderson storyline and the bear. I thought the wrestling scene went on a bit long though and I wish I could forget some of the images....
D was the one who brought over the movie as it was her Netflix pick. She had an even stronger reaction than me, mostly because of the nudity. After we finished watching it, she didn't want to touch the DVD.
Last night, we saw The Night Watch. It's Russian. It has vampires. It's urban fantasy. It's fun.
For some puzzling reason, the intro and conclusion are in English although the rest of the movie is in Russian. The DVD gives you the option of watching the rest of the movie dubbed in English but the dubbing doesn't work very well.
Things pick up once the scene shifts to modern Moscow. I liked the kitchen scene. I loved the colors and the style. The movie is not too slick. It would have been nice to have slightly more exposition, such as why Anton was called on to perform certain tasks, but I liked the owl and the boy. There were a lot of nice touches, including a homage to a well known tv show.
I think I'll watch the sequel The Day Watch in the theaters. Same actors, bigger budget, and hopefully as fun.
I'm not finding myself very interested in the movies in theaters now. Netflix is good.
Last night, we watched The Dresser, which was a movie that was recommended to me a long time ago by my high school drama teacher. It's been a movie that I've wanted to see but haven't hunted down really, but the magic of the Netflix queue sent it to my doorstep.
The movie is about a dresser, or personal assistant, of a Shakespearean actor during the London bombings as they try to put together a performance of King Lear. Mostly, the movie is about the dresser's relationship with the aging lead actor and star of the company who is only known as Sir and whose mind is beginning to fail. And since it's set in the midst of a theater company, the movie touches on the expected themes of the magic of the theater, how people are inspired or touched by the transformation that takes place on stage, how what happens on stage is fed by what happens to the actors offstage, and how the theater troupe in their small way is trying to keep a little bit of culture and civilization alive even as the city is bombed and burned to the ground.
There are a lot of thespian roars and whimpers throughout the movie, but I liked the dialogue and Albert Finney must have had fun. I really liked Tom Courtenay's performance as he cajoled, berated, loved, and hated Sir while propelling Sir and thus the show forward. Most of all, the movie made me sad and the sadness stuck with me last night because I kept thinking of Sir and his dresser.
