3 posts tagged “film”

Over at Ellie's blog I recently mentioned the Helsinki scene from Jim Jarmusch's film Night on Earth, and, thanks to YouTube, I thought I'd share it more broadly.  He's one of my favourite directors and, at the risk of sounding like a complete wanker, I'll say that he's the only non-Finn I've ever seen who "gets it" about them. 

Now I should also say that while the whole thing is sprinkled with a wonderfully touching sense of pathos, part 2 has a particularly sad story that is quite affecting, especially if you're at all sensitive about premature births.  Stay with it if you can though.  Enjoy.

Another link to a review of a film I have not yet seen, as I am clearly lacking in imagination and failing to give you, the audience, the blogging riches you so obviously deserve.  The latest Bond film considered at the New Yorker -

I cannot prove it, but I suspect that God may have designed Craig during a slightly ham-fisted attempt at woodworking. His head is a rough cube, sawed and sanded, with the blue eyes hammered in like nail heads. He could beat a man’s brains out with his brow. That suits the Bond of “Casino Royale,” who has only lately acquired his license to kill, and, like a kid who’s just passed his driving test, is eager to step on the gas.

Daniel Mendelsohn at the New York Review of Books on Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette -

It's easy to see how Sofia Coppola, with her artistic interest in the emotional lives of troubled young women forced to choose between inner impulses and external obligations, would have been moved by the sympathetic presentation of the Queen's hapless life in Fraser's somewhat revisionist biography, and would choose it as the subject of her next film—a period film about a subject very much alive for this particular filmmaker. And, it would seem, very much alive to the general public, as suggested not only by the ongoing stream of biographies, novels, films, and documentaries about Antoinette, but by the intense emotional reaction to her most recent avatar, Princess Di: another clueless, well-intentioned teenager married off into a cynical court who found distraction first in spendthrift excess and devotion to fashion, and then in motherhood and an attempt to find some serious and private satisfaction in a life that had to be lived in the public eye; another woman, heedless and foolish at first, who seemed to achieve some real distinction as a person only at the time of her death, in shockingly violent circumstances, in her late thirties.