Category: review

MOVIE REVIEW: La Vie En Rose


Sunday evening, after I had finished watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I started watching this film. On the surface, they have some comparables. Both in French with subtitles, both with Oscar nominations, this one, deservedly, for actress Marion Cotillard, who I last saw in the previews for – but the actual film – A Good Year with Russell Crowe. Both also touch on going to a physical location of great spiritual significance, though while Diving Bell’s Bauby tends to dismiss it, it’s a more recurring theme here.

This is a more conventional biopic about chaunteuse Edith Piaf, starting off with her terrible childhood of illness and abandonment until she is literally pushed by her father to perform. Then we see the grown-up Edith move from street corner busker to the highest levels of stardom, only to be brought down by her addictions to alcohol and drugs, so that when (hardly a SPOILER ALERT) she dies at age 47, she looks about 20 years older.

The film is good, but it’s long. I started it Sunday night (saw 90 minutes) and finished it Monday morning (another 45 minutes), which is not a fair way to see it. The other problem I had is that Piaf, at times, reminded me of Judy Garland in the early 1960s, another child singer who had reached great fame but also great tragedy because of her addictions. In fact, Cotillard looks and acts at times remarkably like Judy Davis in the 2001 TV movie Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. I know this is MY hangup, but there it is.

See it for yourself and let me know what you think.

One last thing. The DVD EXTRAS involved all of less than eight minutes of Cotillard and writer/director Olivier Dahan talking about the process of getting the Piaf character; trés disappointing.

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.


Dizzyingly claustrophobic. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

Every year for the past several, our real estate agent has sent out a card to allow his patrons to watch a free movie at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a weekend near Valentine’s Day. That opportunity came up this past Sunday, and we took advantage, inviting a couple from church to the movies; he allows for up to six free passes to be used, plus $3 off per person at the concession stand on a $5 purchase. Unfortunately, one of our church friends, who we’d seen only an hour earlier, fell ill, so I called one of my work friends, and she called one of our former workmates, Maureen, and we all rendezvoused at the cinema. We had a babysitter for Lydia.

I was looking forward to seeing director Julian Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon, a French film with English subtitles, for a couple reasons. One was that many said that Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel based on his real-life experience of living in an almost totally paralyzed body, save for his left eye, was unfilmable, so I was curious what kind of screenplay Ronald Harwood could come up with. Mostly I was wondering how Schnabel, whose previous films Before Night Falls (2000) and Basquiat (1996) I had enjoyed, would tackle the story.

The first 10 minutes (15? 20? I wasn’t looking at a watch) was from inside Bauby’s left eye. It was blurry and narrow in scope, dizzyingly claustrophobic, as I said. If people got vertigo from seeing Cloverfield (which I have not seen), I can imagine they might also get the feeling here. Yet, as the perspective changes, as Bauby’s sense about his captivity changes, one starts feeling for the people around him, including his family, and even for Bauby himself, the Elle magazine editor who was a bit of of a lothario. I laughed out loud when he realized how beautiful his therapists were and how he was totally incapable of hitting on them, for instance.

As Bauby decides to write his book, using only that left eye, I was reminded of a comment in Salon magazine that said, in essence, that the movie has turned writer’s block into a very lousy excuse. One suggestion, however; don’t use your rudimentary high school French to try to figure out the words Bauby is trying to say, since the performers are spelling out the words in French, while the screen is spelling them out in English. Just go with the flow of the film.

Schnabel’s directing Oscar nomination is well deserved. Recommended.
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MOVIE REVIEW: No End In Sight


I believe I’ve been quite clear in my long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq. Yet, I also believed that if we were to go to war, we ought not have gone understaffed, based on everything I had read at the time. This documentary written and directed by Charles Ferguson, and narrated by Campbell Scott, lays out the case that the failure of the United States military policy after the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, far from being unforeseen, was utterly predictable. And there were high-ranking officials, many with military experience, telling the Bush administration that they were doing the occupation all wrong. These people included former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador to Iraq Barbara Bodine, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and, most notably, General Jay Garner, who was in charge of occupation of Iraq through May 2003.

No End In Sight, which I watched on DVD last week, lays out in painful detail the three main problems that took place. One was the failure by the US to provide security because they were understaffed when the looting of museums and other national treasures took place. The de-Ba’athification of Iraq showed serious loss of of the professional class, most of whom joined the Ba’ath party pretty much for the same reason managers joined the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, because that’s how to get and keep a job, not out of any ideological affinity. But perhaps the greatest blunder was to dismiss the Iraqi army; when the invading US Armed Forces told the army to go home, it did, but the entity, which predates the creation of the country of Iraq, was waiting for requests from the Americans to help rebuild Iraq, a call that failed to come. Thus, one created a situation with bunch of unemployed, angry people with guns that helped fuel the insurgency.

You may seethe to hear Donald Rumsfeld’s various pronouncements, one of which, early on, was that there WAS no insurgency. Many of these inept decisions were carried out by Paul Bremer, but it is not clear whether they were his initiatives, or that he was merely carrying out the wishes of chickenhawks such as Rummy, Dick Cheney, Paul Wofowitz and Doug Feith.

Ferguson filmed over 200 hours, and many of the extended interviews show up in the DVD extras, probably longer than the actual film.

However you feel about the Iraq war, its justification, or how it needs to be handled now, there’s little doubt that when you see this film, you’ll wonder how such early blunders were made, leading to many unnecessary Iraqi civilian and US military deaths.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Away From Her


It seems as though every ten years, I need to see an Oscar-worthy picture starting with the letter A starring Julie Christie. On Washington Birthday weekend 1998, it was Afterglow, with Nick Nolte at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. A couple of weeks ago, it was Away from Her on a DVD at home.

This is a story of a loving couple, Fiona and Grant, who both notice that she is forgetting more and more details about her life, and even where the frying pan goes. Ultimately, she goes to a facility, where her husband comes nearly every day trying to find his wife again. Unfortunately, not unlike the real-life situation of Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, Fiona grows an attachment with another man. How he deals with it, and why, plus the glimpses of their 40 years of marriage, are the real driving forces of this film.

Julie Christie’s Oscar nomination is well-deserved. Gordon Pinsent, a character actor who I’ve seen (Shipping News, e.g.), but don’t specifically remember, does a lot of the heavy lifting in this picture and is also excellent.

I listened to just a little of the EXTRAS tracking, but Julie Christie indicated that she got involved with this film because of the wonderful dialogue of actress Sarah Polley, and because of the friendship they had developed working on a previous film. Still, Julie wasn’t sure of Sarah’s directing abilities until they got on the set, where Christie realized how confident first-time director Polley was.

There were a couple of distractions. One is the use of a Neil Young song that has a very personal, another context for me. (The movie also uses k.d. lang’s version of Young’s Helpless; the movie was shot in Canada.)
The other was that, before even the previews, were a bunch of stars, including movie co-star Olympia Dukakis, charging the audience to become more aware of Alzheimer’s disease. Dick van Dyke, for instance, mentioned that he had a 50-year-old friend with the ailment. It was very sincere but put me in the mindset that this was going to be a made-for-TV overwrought drama, rather than the fine film it turned out to be.

MOVIE REVIEW: Ratatouille


In the mid 1980s, I lived in this apartment in Albany where there was a big field in the back. I suffered the most virulent mouse invasion I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t just mice in the low cabinets and along the floor boards. It was beasties in the upper cabinets. I remember putting a box of elbow macaroni on top of the refrigerator and discovered that a live mouse was still in it. Ultimately I set traps, usually four each night for about three weeks before the mouse hotline alerted its fellow travelers that this was not a safe house to be in.

The very premise of a movie about a rodent, a RAT, no less, preparing food was, to say the least, unappealing to me. Still, I went to the parlor of my church a couple Tuesdays ago, and saw Ratatouille with eight other adults, and no children. In fact, I may have been the youngest one there. I was totally captivated by this film. Among other things, there are scenes that are laugh-out-loud hysterical.

Establishing Remy as a sympathetic iconoclast foodie allows the rest of the story to flow, from Remy finding the once-famed Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris to saving the young man Linguini from culinary disaster to what follows. There is a frantic wonder in that early kitchen scene that was breathtaking. If the movie isn’t quite up to that level throughout, it’s still high on my list of favorite films for the year.

This is yet another PIXAR success. In addition to the wonderful writing and direction of Brad Bird, and luscious artwork, I loved the voice actors, including Patton Oswalt as Remy and Lou Romano as Linguini, plus Ian Holm, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Will Arnett, and Peter O’Toole as the food critic Anton Ego.

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