Carm and I watched Amadeus the other night. I’ve seen it before, way back when it came out. But it was like seeing it for the first time watching it with Carmina. Her knowledge of Mozart’s music, and specifically his operas, made a lot of things more clear to me. For instance near the end of the movie there’s a wild opera going on and she pointed out to me that it was a parody of all of his operas…a kind of tribute to him. He appreciated it, but his wife didn’t. I never picked up that it was a parody so that was all lost on me.

One of the things I really appreciated was how they used modern speech in the movie. It made it very accessible, without really being too jarring. It was almost like a translation. You know the characters wouldn’t have used that particular phrase, but they would’ve said something with a similar meaning.

The costumes and of course the soundtrack were amazing. It took me a long while to place Elizabeth Berridge, who played Constanze Mozart; she played the ugly, awkward lady cop on The John Larroquette Show! She was gorgeous in Amadeus!

One other important fact I took away from watching the movie with Carm is that it isn’t true. Certain facts were true; Mozart was terrible with money, he was married to Constanze and they were very much in love, and Salieri was the Court Composer at the time. But there’s no historical evidence of any of the scheming or the malice that Salieri had for Mozart in the film.

It was a great movie in 1984, and its a great movie today. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It really benefits from a home theater system, though. The soundtrack is so….massive.

So I watched Lilo & Stitch today, and I actually found it somewhat refreshing, for a Disney animated movie. Lilo was a screwed up little kid, and today there are so many screwed up little kids in the world that it was nice, for once, to not see the perfect child as a star. And even her sister…her tummy had a bit of extra weight on it and she really shouldn’t have been wearing navel-baring shirts. So in a way the movie rang very true to me.

Stitch had some neat animations, but as is so often the case, the CGI animation and the hand drawn animation really didn’t blend well. The basic story has been done to death but there were enough fun twists and angles to it that it made it quite enjoyable. Some of the voices seemed wrong…Lilo’s sister sounded more Hispanic than Hawaiian to my ears, but then I’ve never been to Hawaii.

All in all though, a fun film. Nothing amazing…just a decent rental for a rainy day.

Last night we watched Balzac: A Life of Passion starring Gerard Depardieu as 19th Century author Honore de Balzac. Turned out this wasn’t a movie but a 2-part mini-series which, I assume, originally broadcast on French television. As such it was about 3 hours long. Now for someone as flighty as me, 3 hours of sub-titles can be quite a challenge, but I found myself completely captivated.

The film is aptly titled in that it was more or less a straight-forward biography. Balzac was a driven writer but in many ways his life was rather uneventful. He wrote, he loved, he died. He was a schemer whose schemes invariably fell apart, and we see this aspect of him, portrayed in a bittersweetly amusing way.

But my point is, if you’re looking for action and adventure, this isn’t the place to find it. But from the point of view of trying to understand who this man was, and what the times were like when he lived, its wonderful. I was particularly struck by the age of many of the characters. At the start, Balzac has a mistress much older than he is. And by then end both he and the woman he loves have aged quite a bit. Obviously the film was based on real events so they couldn’t very well make Balzac and Eve 20-year-old lovers, but still it was refreshing to see a story in which people over the age of 30 still fall in love and desire one another.

One of Balzac’s life-long friends was Victor Hugo (played here by Gert Voss) and I was intrigued by him as well. Also we get the briefest sketches of Eve Hanska and I’d love to learn more about her. We get these intriguing glimpses of a curious blend of devout religious beliefs and an almost pagan superstitionism. I want to know more!

The sets and costumes were wonderful. The sets weren’t really lavish, but rather than show huge swathes of Europe in the early-mid 1800’s they focused on a limited number of locales but did them very well. But the clothes did seem lavish and, to my layman’s eyes, quite authentic.

I must be honest and admit that I’d never heard of Honore de Balzac before seeing the film. Now I’m quite interested in him, and intend to pick up a biography written not too long ago, as well as a few of his books. I’m finding these films about authors (saw Henry and June not too long ago) to be quite inspiring.

A Short Biography of Balzac

Carmina and I saw Cyrano de Bergerac (a few posts down) together, and afterwards we talked about it a bit, and then later she sent me this email. Seemed worth sharing with the world. 🙂

—–
I was thinking about Cyrano de Bergerac tonight, and about Roxane, and
about how I called her a ditz during the movie. The book I was reading
today, Embroiderer’s Story, traced the history of the British
embroidery tradition from the time of Elizabeth I through the 20th
century, and related the relationship of the craft to the state of
women’s lives in all those periods. (There -IS- a point to this, I
swear. It’s just going to take me a bit of work to explain to you how
it’s all related!)
Continue reading “Guest Post on Cyrano”

Tonight’s movie selection was 1990’s version of Cyrano de Bergerac starring G�rard Depardieu as Cyrano, the delicious Anne Brochet as Roxane, and Vincent Perez as Christian.

What a great production. Now I’ve got to confess that I never read the original play by Edmond Rostand so I didn’t know the whole story. I knew about Cyrano speaking for Christian to Roxane, whom he loved, and that he had a big nose and all that rot. So the first half of the film was reasonably familiar ground. But the second half (after they go off to war) was all new to me and a wonderful tale.

Well worth watching, if you haven’t seen it.

Spent a lazy afternoon today watching Bubba Ho-Tep, the Bruce Campbell flic that just hit DVD.

Very silly movie. Campbell plays Elvis Presley, who is alive and semi-well and living in a nursing home. Ossie Davis plays a fellow who thinks he’s JFK. (Elvis: “Jack, you know Kennedy was a white man, right?” Jack: “That’s shows the genius of their plan! They dyed me!!”) Well it turns out an ancient egyptian pharoh has come back from the dead and is feeding on the souls of the old folks at the home, so the two old boys decide to put a stop to it.

Cheesy effects, a silly premise…its a just-plain-weird movie. Sadly it wasn’t great. It was really slow to get going, and a lot of Elvis’s problems give the film an R rating that could’ve easily been PG with a few minor script changes (I thought).

Still a kindof fun mindless Saturday matinee kind of flick.

I think this is the last in my ‘finale’ posts. 🙂

[SPOILERS for ST: Enterprise season finale follow!!]
Continue reading “Star Trek: Enterprise Season Finale”

[WARNING: Smallville season finale spoilers incoming!]
Continue reading “Smallville Season Finale”

So last night I finally watched the end of Angel.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

I’ve had a real love/hate relationship with the show. When it was serious, I’ve really enjoyed it. When it was dumb, well, who really needs more dumb TV? Lorne, for instance, was awful. From day 1 to the ending, the character was just what he was… a big dumb pun (Green Lorne, get it? Lorne Greene? … in case you never made that connection).

But when the show went dark, I thought it was pretty good. And I will miss it.

The biggest surprise to me, in the ending arc, was how well Amy Acker did in jumping from Fred to Illeria (spelling?) and back. And she was pretty hot when she was blue, too, but that’s a post for another blog.

As for the very last episode…I thought it was ok. Its…savage, when a cast is killed off in the final episode of a series. It feels like a betrayel. Remember the last show of Blake’s 7? They all died and it was just like… “Shit, how could you do this to us fans?”

So Angel’s “They probably die but maybe not” ending seemed like a decent balance, though it was odd how it was juxtaposed with Wesley’s death. OTOH, the latter wasn’t as awful as the way Anya’s death was played so ‘lightly’ at the end of BTVS.

But was it stellar? No. Was it satisfying? Again, no. I’ll miss Angel, even though a lot of the acting was bad, and so too were a lot of the episodes. But my Season Pass list on Tivo is getting mighty thin these days and with no shows from the Buffyverse on…well, I’m just feeling a bit blue.