Thursday, November 29, 2007

The Queen



Portraying a time, the significance and magnitude of which may have been difficult to appreciate once in the thick of it, The Queen is more about the media than it is about the British Royal family.
The weird thing about this is that it`s a historical drama with pretty much all of the main players still alive and in the public eye. Moreover, these characters who nobody knows, yet everybody has a rough grasp on, are played exactly the way we expect them to be – The Queen Mum is a loveable old granny who comes from harder times, Prince Phillip, a boorish bigot who loves killing things, Charles, a paranoid spoiled child with his eye on the future, Tony Blair (spot on performance by Michael Sheen), a fresh face with a winning smile and Alistair Campbell, a propaganda thug…and absolutely brilliant for the worst possible reasons.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

2001 : A Space Odyssey



Slow, subtle, graceful and intense, Clarke and Kubrick's vision is perfect. I have nothing more to say.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Notes on a Scandal



The best elements here are the performances of the three leads, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy. As for the story, after a promising start, the sudden appearance of the actual plot (which had little to do with the promising start) and one or two breathtaking scenes, it peeters off into melodrama and a feeble "nutter-will-strike-again" ending. Worth watching, but not getting very excited about.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy



I see little point in writing a review for each of these, as they aren't really sequels. Love it or loath it (I love it), Peter Jackson has to be saluted for taking an unfilmable book and making three pretty good films out of it. They aren't perfect by any means - continuity errors can be spotted by all but the sleepiest of viewers, and some scenes take you back to the days of blue screen photography, where characters sporting a huge black line around their bodies stand in front of a projected landscape, but once a cinematic experience can unequivocally place you in the world of pages, imagination will die.