Dr. Strangelove 3.0
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 1 hour and 35 min.
Synopsis: A British officer on an exchange program in an American military office is faced with the problem of dealing with the after-effects of a trigger-happy superior. Russia's existence, and the world's, teeters in the balance.
Opinion: How rottentomatoes.com misdirected me with this film. A biting Cold War satire where I clearly missed all the jokes.
Verdict: 3.0/10.0 It is obvious that this movie makes sense to some people.
The Lady Vanishes 7.0
The Lady Vanishes (1939), 1 hour, 39 min. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Stars Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave
Synopsis: Lovely young Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), who is staying with two friends at a ski resort hotel filled to maximum capacity due to an unexpected avalanche, is incensed to hear an incessant stomping coming from the room upstairs; she commiserates over the racket with a friendly old English lady living next door who wants the noise to stop so she can hear the serenading musician outside the window. (A few minutes later, we see this musician being strangled to death by a mysterious pair of hands. Until then, it seems highly likely that this film is going to develop into a bad comedy.) Unable to sleep, Iris finally bribes a hotel manager to deal with the problem. It turns out that the culprit is Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a clarinet player trying to record folk dances for posterity--he has hired a bevy of dancing peasants to help him with his task. When Gilbert goes downstairs to see the woman who caused him to be evicted, the two clash so spectacularly that there is no doubt they shall meet again, and soon.
The next morning, Iris is hit on the head at the train station by a flowerpot pushed from a shadowy windowsill as she hurries to over to assist cute old lady from the night before with her luggage. Walking on the train, she loses consciousness and wakes to find the old lady beaming at her from the seat across from her. The two have tea together, and the old lady introduces herself as Mrs. Froy. This burgeoning friendship takes a turn for the ominous when Iris wakes to find that Mrs. Froy is nowhere to be found; going around to various stewards and passengers, she is confused to discover when they all say they have not seen a woman matching her description. Discovering Gilbert at the rear of the train, she enlists his help to solve the mysterious disappearance of a harmless old lady.
Opinion: Hitchcock is always dependable for a good movie. Although the first twenty minutes of the movie seem to drag on in a confusing mix of characters, secondary plots, and indecipherable dialogue, the film picks up quickly and more than makes up for lost momentum after Mrs. Froy disappears. Gilbert and Iris are a likeable pair (though the eventual direction of their relationship is perfectly clear from the first time they meet) and Mrs. Froy is like everyone's ideal of a quirky but loveable grandmother. Though some of the suspenseful moments may seem trite or standard to a modern-day viewer, the plot contains several unexpected turns that make for an interesting and exciting experience.
Verdict: 7.0/10.0 Other than the slightly tedious story lines attempting to explain the motivations of the actions of secondary characters (who have colorful but caricatured lives),
The Lady Vanishes is a very well-made movie.
Wit 6.8
Wit, HBO movie (2001), based on the play by Margaret Edson.
Stars Emma Thompson as Professor Vivian Bearing.
Professor Vivian Bearing, renowned to colleagues for her scholarship and to students for the rigor of her course on 17th century poetry and her complete unwillingness to negotiate deadlines, discovers that she has terminal ovarian cancer and learns some things about humanity through her endless rounds of chemotherapy, medication, and interactions with hospital personnel. It's hard to criticize this kind of movie, one which strives for unflinching honesty on the subjects of death and disease, since it's like denouncing spinach, but I didn't enjoy the movie because it encroached upon the territory of documentaries and teen flicks, relying on a narrator who addresses the camera as if the audience were in the scene. Didactic, yes, but the lessons on life that it serves ultimately feel antibacterialized and untouchable.
Verdict: 6.8
An Ideal Husband 6.5
An Ideal Husband (1999), 97 minutes. Rated PG-13. Based on the play by Oscar Wilde.
stars
Jeremy Northam as Sir Robert Chiltern
Cate Blanchett as Lady Gertrude Chiltern
Rupert Everett as Lord Arthur Goring
Minnie Driver as Miss Mabel Chiltern
Julianne Moore as Mrs. Laura Chevely
A light suspense that blends social satire and household drama to mixed effect. Plus, Jeremy Northam sports an unforgiveably awful mustache.
Verdict: 6.5/10.0
*Guns and Talks 7.4
Guns and Talks, Korean movie (2001), 120 min.
stars Shin Hyun-June, Shin Ha-kyun, Won Bin, and Jeong Jae-Yeong as four assassins, and
Jeong Jin-Yeong as the detective hot on their tails.
The title of this movie suggests a taut thriller bursting with highly trained killers dressed completely in black, intimidating defense systems, high-tech gadgets, hair-raising getaways, and unexpected plot shockers. At least, it was under such an impression that my brother agreed to join me for an evening of sibling bonding. Little did we know...
Guns and Talks is a movie that exists in a little trans-genre world all its own. Bookmarked by two complex jobs, the middle of the film is a floating series of vignettes stretched over the merest thread of plot: it's there, but barely. The four men are far from sophisticated, gaping with unbrushed hair at the beautiful anchorwoman on news every morning with a slackjawed air of idiocy that isn't entirely absent from their public personas: intimidation is definitely
not anyone's middle name. One is a former marathoner who falls very awkwardly in love with a pregnant woman targeted for a hit. Another doesn't really have any distinguishing traits other than being the one entrusted with the gun on missions, and, as a friend pointed out, bearing a slight physical resemblance to Michael Jackson. The youngest, played by Won Bin, waits for the day when he'll be allowed by the leader--his brother-- to shoot a gun, and in the meantime is in charge of girly tasks like procuring food. His train of thought serves as our narrative guide through the film, and he bumbles through that with the same mixed success that he goes through life: a scene dips into the absurd when he, in complete earnestness, gives a melodramatic soliloquy on love. Quirky details round out the comedic undertones of the movie: a runner fails to catch up with the car he is chasing when a red traffic light brings him to a screeching halt. Whenever poised on the edge of fitting into a mold--say, that of drama or suspense--
Guns and Talks extricates itself so smoothly that in the end one is not sure how to take the movie; it is amazing to me how this film neatly tied off plot lines while floating and billowing delightfully into unforgettably funny moments. Definitely strange, but also enjoyable.
Verdict: 7.4/10.0 Some slight inconsistencies in the assassination plots, but nothing seriously undermining.
Lunch Poems, by Frank O'Hara 2.0
Lunch Poems, by Frank O'Hara. Number of pages: far too many.
Since every review I have read on Frank O'Hara mentions his cause of death, I suppose I should too. Frank O'Hara died tragically in his early 40s when he was hit by a dune buggy while on a beach at night.
Frank O’Hara possesses one of those clichéd things, the soul of a poet, and it is evident in the passing thoughts and tossed-out phrases of his poems, in the unmistakable joy he takes in narratives that sometimes make no sense. He writes in the last stanza of “Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir,”
it is because of you so I can watch you smile longer
that’s what the Spring is and the elbow of noon walks
where did you go who did you see the children proclaim
and they too gradually fill the sepulchre with dolls
and the sepulchre jumps and jounces and turns pink
with wrath
While his unpunctuated rhetoric is filled with many strong images in this poem, primarily his words seem to be there because the sound of them struck his fancy; he likes the idea of “the elbow of noon” walking, and so he jots it down, smiling to himself, expecting me to smile with him and forget that the poem has the aimless crawl of a mindless insect walking over all sorts of things.
At his most difficult to follow, such as in “Hotel Particulier” or “St. Paul and All That”, O’Hara chats mock-solemnly of his midday musings in continuously enjambed lines with terse, off-aligned phrases thrown in as if he is speaking between sudden sharp inhalations of air, narrating in one breath this real time, whimsically haphazard sensory show of his life. This may be endearing in children of a certain age, but with O’Hara’s tone and vocabulary, the rambling, boyish impetuosity of thought ceases to enrapture, and grates instead of charms.
Verdict: 2.0 I should have left the book in the recycling bin when I accidentally dropped it there.
Boku dake no Madonna (...and I love you) 6.3
Boku dake no Madonna (2003). translates as "My Madonna," but I think the official English title is "...and I Love You"
stars
Hideaki Takizawa as Kyoichi Suzuki, architecture student
Kyoko Hasegawa as Surumi Kataoka, object of Kyoichi's affections
Hitomi Shimatani as Keiko Imamura, most beautiful girl at school
Ogata Naoto as Yoshitaka Honda, object of Surumi's affections
Koutaro Koizumi as Takashi Nakano, Kyoichi's best friend
Manami Konishi as Rie Shimada, Mr. Honda's fiancee
Summary: Kyoichi Suzuki (Hideaki Takizawa) is having a very bad life. At school, the resident glamour queen Keiko Imamura (singer Hitomi Shimatani) dumps him because his good looks just don't make up for his lackluster personality. At home, his domineering mother and sisters make him obey their every whim while his quiet, submissive father hides with a newspaper. Unable to take it any more, he moves out into an apartment complex, only to find that his neighbors, in addition to being really bizarre, are under orders from his mother to keep an eye on him. Said neighbors include a short would-be novelist who steals the best things from Kyoichi's care packages, an extremely tall man who stares but does not talk, and romance-starved Shizue, owner and bartender of the "S" bar.
His existence, which currently consists of architecture classes and a late-night security guard shift, is indeed pretty dull, although things get more exciting when he discovers that a mysterious young woman climbs in through his window, sleeps in his bed, and raids his refrigerator while he is gone. Speculations as to her identity and aims abound from best friend Takashi (Koutaro Koizumi, son of the Japanese prime minister), neighbors, and fellow security guard; the slightly timid Kyoichi finally decides to solve things once and for all by hiding underneath his bed and catching her breaking in. Unfortunately for him, Surumi (Kyoko Hagesawa) is one of those cheerful free spirit types; he is the one who is totally embarrassed when she finds him cowering under his own bed. When he finally works up the courage to ask this lovely woman to explain her behavior, she tells him that she needs to use his window to observe the apartment of Mr. Honda, who once promised to marry her but is now engaged to someone else. So begins one of those strange and wonderful relationships that fiction is so fond of.
Kyoichi, feeling sorry for her and cowed by her confidence, gives her a spare key, stocks his fridge for her, leaves her little notes, and generally lets her boss him around. Surumi convinces him to spy on Mr. Honda and his fiancee Miss Shimada for her, putting him in many awkward situations, especially after he, Takashi, and Keiko are all hired as summer interns Mr. Honda's architectural firm. Annoyed that the boring Kyoichi has managed to replace her so quickly, Keiko decides to get him back, and is surprised when Surumi, who thinks of Kyoichi as endearing in a purely platonic sense, encourages her efforts. However, it gradually becomes clear that Surumi isn't telling the whole truth about her past, and things become more complicated for Kyoichi as he has to balance all the feminine attention being lavished on him with his schoolwork and his prying neighbors, all the while dealing with his attraction to the older Surumi and fighting his growing respect for Mr. Honda and Miss Shimada out of loyalty to her.
Drama Reduction: When ultimately faced with the choice, will Kyoichi go for Keiko, the girl he's always secretly dreamed of--who is starting to like him, or Surumi, who is cheerful on the surface and yet contains deep wellsprings of sadness--but in any case thinks of him only as a younger brother? Who
is Surumi, really? And is Kyoichi's neighbor actually mute, or will he speak at an opportune moment?
Opinion: The success of the drama rests on the shoulders of Hideaki Takizawa. Unfortunately, like Keiko says, his Kyoichi is handsome but not much else. While he isn't too bad from scene to scene, the most disappointing is his inability to portray the crucial personal development into maturity; although another character remarks near the end of the drama that he has become an adult, the change isn't that obvious. Hitomi Shimatani and Manami Konishi probably give the strongest performances in the series as Keiko and Miss Shimada, respectively, both effectively conveying depth and integrity of character. In contrast, Surumi is difficult to relate with for the first few episodes, and her random happiness feels contrived, although she does improve over time--her convincingness as a character seems to correlate inversely with the state of her gaeity.
Other than Keiko, Miss Shimada, and Mr. Honda, the supporting characters seem to be caricatures for comic effect, and they are all overacted accordingly. However, to speak favorably of the series, although it is bursting at the seams with secondary story lines, most of them are integrated smoothly into the main narrative, though it is a little much when
everyone (and I don't use the term lightly) is paired up at the end.
Verdict: 6.3/10.0 The acting isn't spectacular, and neither is the story, but there are several good moments.
Pygmalion, by Bernard Shaw 7.8
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts, by Bernard Shaw (1912)
Summary: Basically the same as that of "My Fair Lady," the movie adaptation also written by Bernard Shaw. Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle is picked up as a project by phonetics researcher Henry Higgins and his financial supporter Colonel Pickering. Higgins intends to train her to speak as the nobility does and pass her off as a duchess in six months as a testament to his abilities; Eliza agrees because she dreams of owning her own flower shop, something only "ladies" can do.
Comments: As a dramatist, Bernard Shaw is kind of unusual in his highly specific stage directions that cannot easily be acted on stage; in that sense the experience of reading his plays differs significantly from the watching. The dialogue doesn't have the bite of
Man and Superman, but as a story the play is more fluid and significantly less bizarre. The ending, which takes place in an extended, chatty epilogue, is different from the one I remembered from the movie.
Verdict: 7.8/10.0 Not his best, but still very entertaining.
Hotelier 5.7
Hotelier, Korean Drama (MBC 2001)
(Tae-jun, Yoon-hee, Jin-young, Frank/Dong-hyuk. DVD cover image.)
stars
Song Yun-ah..................Suh Jin-young, Manager at Hotel Seoul
Kim Seung-woo.............Han Tae-jun, General Manager of Hotel Seoul
Bae Yong-joon...............Frank Shin/Shin Dong-hyuk, Korean-American M & A expert
Song Hae-gyo................Kim Yoon-hee, daughter of rival CEO Kim
other characters:
Park Jung-chul.............Choi Young-jae, son of Hotel Seoul CEO Choi
Yoon Yu-jung................Madam Choi, widow of CEO Choi
Kim Nah-rae.................Jenny, Korean-American adoptee whose guardian is Han Tae-jun
Leo Park, Frank Shin's lawyer and cohort
Manager Lee at Hotel Seoul, Manager of Housekeeping who wears blood-red lipstick, insults Jin-young, and pines away for Tae-jun.
Manager Oh at Hotel Seoul, mean man who threatens people, concocts sketchy plans, and alters the finance books.
Head Chef Loo, venerable father figure and tyrant of the kitchen
Manager Yoo, lackey of Manager Oh
Plot Summary: After beloved the venerated CEO Choi passes away, Hotel Seoul is in trouble. Madam Choi takes over her husband's position, but has little experience in the business, while son Young-jae is a good-hearted but immature, fun-seeking young man, and the wealthy and unethical CEO Kim has his sights set on acquiring Hotel Seoul at all costs. For this, he hires a renowned Mergers and Acquisitions expert from the U.S., Frank Shin (who goes by Shin Dong Hyuk after he arrives in Korea). At the same time, in the attempt to save their beloved Hotel Seoul, Madam Choi sends Manager Suh Jin-young to Las Vegas to convince Han Tae-jun, who left three years ago after being framed in a scandal, to return as General Manager of the hotel. Jin-young is hesistant, since she and Tae-jun have an unresolved relationship, but eventually agrees.
In a stroke of literary convenience, Frank Shin is currently negotiating the acquisition of a major hotel in Las Vegas, and he notices Jin-young one day in the hotel restaurant when she chews the waiter out for serving her bad food and spilling coffee on her silk scarf. Admiring her fearlessness, he sends a silk scarf up to her room, signed "Frank." Jin-young finally tracks down Tae-jun, who tells her that he is doing well in Las Vegas and doesn't want to return to Korea. Not believing him, she follows Tae-jun to the Outback Steakhouse, where he serves as a minimum-wage dishwasher. She is heartbroken, but resolute, and shows up at his house the next day, only to be shocked when a young woman opens the door. She marches away, speechless in anger and feeling betrayed, but Tae-jun explains that the girl is Jenny, the adopted daughter of a good friend of his who recently passed away; he is now her guardian. After Tae-jun and drug-abusing Jenny clash with a gun-wielding gang she owes money to, Tae-jun, Jenny, and Jin-young decide to go to LA (and eventually to return to Korea). Tae-jun and Jin-young get into a fat argument on the trip, and Jin-young demands to be let out of the car. After she screams a bit more, Tae-jun obliges, much to her shock, leaving her standing in the Californian desert. Although he feels bad soon after and makes a screeching u-turn to pick her up, she has already caught a ride in a limo with none other than the sunglasses-wearing, cool-as-a-cucumber Frank Shin and his short, garrulous lawyer Leo Park. Frank Shin discovers that this mysterious lady he keeps meeting works as a manager for the hotel he has been hired to acquire, while Jin-young discovers that he is the one who sent her the scarf, and they part as friends with definite potential.
Back in Korea, the stakes grow increasingly higher as loyalties and alliances shift and blur. Choi Young-jae falls in love with Kim Yoon-hee, not knowing that their fathers are sworn rivals, while Yoon-hee falls in love with Tae-jun, who comes to her rescue at several opportune moments. Additionally, Jenny becomes an assistant cook in the hotel restaurant, Yoon-hee starts working as a waitress despite her father's fury, and Young-jae becomes a bellboy who constantly runs Jenny over as he is rushing earnestly to the heroic rescue of Yoon-hee from some dramatic danger or another. Then, Frank Shin books a VIP suite at Hotel Seoul to heighten romantic tensions; the camera inevitably focuses on him taking a manly drink of water and wiping the sweat off his brow after his morning run. Abandoned as a child and sent to the U.S. for a better life, Frank has always ranked work as the most important thing in his life, but begins to question the value of his immense wealth as he starts to feel his loneliness in the world (cue the theme song). To rectify this situation, he comes up with a variety of ploys for spending time with the increasingly enamored Jin-young, while Tae-jun looks on uncomfortably, fends off the advances of Yoon-hee, and attempts to navigate Hotel Seoul through the treacherous waters of business deals and double-dealing hotel managers.
Drama Reduction: Will Jin-young return to her first love, Tae-jun, or fall for the generous gifts (300 roses, expensive jewelry) and smooth-talking ways of Frank Shin? Can Tae-jun lead Hotel Seoul to financial safety, or will CEO Kim achieve his depraved ends? Will Yoon-hee's domineering father squash her dream of becoming a hotelier? Can Frank Shin ever make amends with his past? Finally, how can the tangled relationships of
Hotelier be resolved, resulting in the fewest broken hearts?
Opinion: I don't know whether it was a problem of acting or writing, or a combination of both, but other than Tae-jun and Young-jae, I didn't find any of the other characters compelling or believable. For a woman supposedly torn between two loves, Jin-young does an admirable job of continually snubbing and yelling at one while crying like a helpless woman in front of the other, pretty much acting herself into the inevitable conclusion. In terms of chemistry, her relationship with Frank Shin takes the term "weak bond" to a new extreme, though Tae-jun's encounters with Yoon-hee are pretty flat as well. The most unbearable part of this drama is its major failure in its attempt to create lifelike characters who navigate between clear-cut stereotypes of good and evil and struggle with their consciences and ambitions; instead, the characters waver between the extremes of stereotypes like stock characters who can't find their footing. For example, CEO Kim's otherwise shady and inhuman henchman offers a few pieces of unsolicited wisdom on childrearing that I think are designed to redeem his overall loathsomeness. However, he is nothing compared to the massive inconsistency of Frank Shin. Unfortunately, in this drama Bae Yong-joon has the emotive capacity of a finger puppet and wholly alienated me in his labored transition between work-driven M & A expert and man willing to give up all for love. (
This man is the idol of middle aged women all over Asia?) Additionally, his willingness to lump Jin-young and the hotel together into a high-stakes "game" against Tae-jun didn't do much to win me over. In the end,
Hotelier is not completely predictable, but also not particularly outstanding.
Verdict: 5.7/10.0
Smoothness of the cinematography makes up slightly for having one hit and three misses in the four lead roles. I am deeply dissatisfied with the script.
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro 6.5
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 336 pages.
Reasons I read this book:
1. As I said, despite it's many problems,
Never Let Me Go was still comparatively good, so...
2. I wanted to see if Ishiguro used to be better, plus...
3. Someone had put it on display at the library, making it inevitable.
Brief Summary:
Christopher Banks was born and raised in Shanghai in the early 1900s, living in the International Settlement with his parents and spending his days with best friend, Akira, whose family is from Japan. When his parents disappear without a trace, one after the other, the 10-year-old Christopher is sent to England to continue his schooling and his life. However, he can never forget Shanghai or the mysterious events that transpired there, and after establishing a reputation as a famous detective he returns to put the long-unsolved case(s) to rest.
(Sounds like a mystery novel, but due to the literary aspirations of the work, it is more of a reflective memoir of one man as he tries to make sense of his childhood.)
Reasons why the book is disappointing:
1. Although Ishiguro has set the frame for an extremely compelling story (orphan driven to resolve the mysterious disappearance of parents in an exotic locale, set against the backdrop of escalating British-Chinese-Japanese conflict in China during the 1930s), he does little with it, so the book is more potential than product.
2. As with
Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro relies heavily on phrases like
a. "Although it did not seem important at the time, in retrospect I have come to realize the significance of that event."
b. "I cannot say for certain that [x] indeed said those very words that night, as I was very young at that time, but the conversation undoubtedly left a deep impression on me."
c. "Even then something about the encounter struck me as significant, although it would not become clear to me for many years."
This dependence is unspeakably annoying, as it implies that either Ishiguro lacks the confidence that his novel will speak for itself or that he believes the reader is dumb enough as to require literary hand-holding through the plot. Either way, it's overkill. And to add insult upon injury, nothing is quite as exciting or important as foreshadowed.
3. A good majority of the novel is given over to Banks' remembrances of his childhood (see #2), but when the remainder of the novel attempts to bring this story to a close (What happened to his parents? What happened to Akira?), it does so with blatant orchestrations, which are so obviously designed to leave the reader with a sense of loss and disappointment that they do a deep disservice to the underlying quality of the novel.
4. Despite Ishiguro's efforts otherwise, none of the adult characters are very evocative or compelling. They do not inspire a sense of tragedy, merely disgust.
5. Banks' closing reflections are really lame.
VERDICT ON THE BOOK: 6.5/10.0 He expends such visible amounts of effort in setting things up in
When We Were Orphans that the finale is a huge letdown. The novel is the work of an impressive portraitist who left his grid lines on.
VERDICT ON ISHIGURO: While Ishiguro's stories are different from book to book, the flawed narrative style is not. It is frustratingly easy to see how any of his works could have been amazing rather than just nearly so. His shortcoming is not in conception or literary skill, but in execution, and that, I think, should be the for a novelist easiest to overcome.
*The Grass Harp, by Truman Capote 8.0
The Grass Harp, by Truman Capote. 181 pages.
The first Capote I have read,
The Grass Harp is almost like a children's book but not quite so simple in its themes. The plot, when summarized, sounds almost absurd: a boy named Collin is sent to live with his aunts Verena and Dolly after his parents die. Verena is ridiculously rich and incredibly miserly, Dolly is impossibly shy (she "folded like the petals of shy-lady fern" when people approached), loves nature, and lives in a room where everything is "painted an outlandish pink". In a little backyard cottage lives Catherine Creek, a black woman who is Dolly's best friend. She has no teeth and puts cotton wads in her mouth; Collin and Dolly are the only ones who can understand her when she talks. When Verena threatens to mass-produce Dolly's homemade dropsy medicine (made with a secret recipe given her by gypsies), Dolly, Catherine, and Collin pack some fried chicken and run away to their tree house (which is actually a tree raft, because it has neither roof nor walls. As Collin says, "it was a ship...to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream.") Verena is incensed, and does everything in her power to make them get down, and along the way the three tree-housers come in contact with a variety of weird and wonderful characters.
VERDICT: 8.0/10.0 A lyrical, often funny book.
(The last paragraph, however, is kind of corny.)
*How to Steal a Million 8.0
How to Steal a Million (1966), directed by William Wyler
stars Audrey Hepburn as Nicole Bonnet
Peter O'Toole as Simon (something)
INTRODUCTION: As in
Roman Holiday, also directed by William Wyler, Audrey Hepburn plays the aristocrat against the working class fellow (Peter O'Toole standing in for Gregory Peck in
Roman Holiday) who manages to win her heart. Although lesser known,
How to Steal a Million has much of the same type of wit that makes
Roman Holiday fun to watch.
SUMMARY: Nicole Bonnet (Hepburn) is an honest woman who comes from a long line of men reknowned in the art world as collectors with incomparable collections. These works are a source of pride for the Bonnets as well, but for a different reason--they are faked. Nicole's father gleefully reveals to a shocked Nicole that a large French museum is set to loan the star of their collection--the long-missing Cellini Venus, sculpted by her grandfather with her grandmother as the model in the Bonnet interpretation--to use as the main attraction for their upcoming exhibition.
On the night of the opening, Nicole stays home and catches a man (Peter O'Toole) standing in the living room, holding her father's Van Gogh (which in the movie is pronounced "van 'go-huh") in his hands. Attempting to scare him with an antique gun that hangs on the wall in the hallway, she accidentally shoots him in the arm and ends up having to drive the thief back to his hotel.
A few days later, her father unwittingly signs a form authorizing a series of tests to be performed on the Cellini Venus for authenticity, throwing both father and daughter into a series of fits. Nicole then enlists the help of Simon the art thief to help her steal the Cellini Venus, insured for a million dollars, back before it is discovered to be fake.
VERDICT: 8.0/10.0. Both Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole are very good in the movie, but it's their comedic dialogue that is the star of the film.
A Very Long Engagement 7.7
Movie, 2004. In French with English subtitles. Rated R.
stars Audrey Tautou as Mathilde, Gaspard Ulliel as Manech, and a host of other characters whose names have all turned into a French blur. (Jodie Foster makes a surprise appearance as a French widow.)
A Very Long Engagement tells two overlapping stories: the first of 20-year old Mathilde (Audrey Tautou of
Amelie), an orphaned victim of childhood polio who lives with her aunt and uncle, as she waits stubbornly her fiance Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) to return from the war, and the second of aforesaid Manech, set two years in the past when he was first sent off to war and consequently reported as dead. The film opens with Mathilde narrating the circumstances of his death by execution--he was sent to the strangely named Bingo Crepuscule trench along with four other soldiers who had shot or otherwise mangled one of their hands in the attempt to escape the fighting. Convinced he is still living, the irrepressible Mathilde writes letters tracing possible leads, limps from city to city, sits in a wheelchair to gain sympathy and much-needed security clearance, and even hires a sketchy detective named Pire, who refers to himself as The Peerless Pry/The Peerless Pire (is this some sort of alliterative pun? I don't know). Over the course of the film, there are endearing flashbacks into childhood of the two young lovers; we see in one scene the scrawny, ten-year-old Manech carrying Mathilde to the top of his uncle's lighthouse.
While I thought that overall this movie was very good, I don't know how wholeheartedly I can recommend it, because there were a good many scenes where I couldn't watch (mostly the ones that earned the film its R designation). When the subject is war, there is always the question of how true to remain to the realities of human conflict, to the dark depths of man that are dredged up by exposure to warfare. With a film such as
Saving Private Ryan or a book like
Flags of Our Fathers, the decision is probably a bit easier to make. But
A Very Long Engagement is primarily a love story, a movie that is at its heart not about a soldier but about the woman who waits for him. While it is probably good that the film doesn't limit itself to the sun-drenched villa that Mathilde lives or the bustling Paris that seems almost unconscious of the war going on, I still have to say that these are the parts that I watched the movie for.
VERDICT: 7.7/10.0, with a hand waiting to fast-forward and another ready to cover the eyes.
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro 6.2
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 304 pages.
English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is famous for his Booker Prize-winning
Remains of the Day. Admirers praise his books for being deceptively easy to read, layered and complex studies of English society where the narrator is much less objective than he or she believes. That's a pretty big compliment, but one that may have some grounding, as
Never Let Me Go is probably the best work of fiction published in the last decade that I have read so far in my life. However, the qualifications of the previous sentence are severely limiting, as 1) most of the books I have read that have been published in the last 10 years have been nonfiction, and 2) I have an admittedly low opinion of the quality of contemporary fiction, and generally stay away from it.
Ostensibly a novel about clones raised to be organ donors for "normal people,"
Never Let Me Go is actually a weakly plotted story that relies on the implied suspense of the narrator's smooth, cold, lyrically reflective voice to create the "soaring understatement of loss" or whatever it is that Ishiguro apparently does so well.
Meticulously controlled,
Never Let Me Go is a novel where the author wants you to see how carefully everything was laid out while maintaining the illusion of ease; while it is clear from the reading that Ishiguro has an impressive talent for writing, the ultimate sense of loss that the reader feels is the sense of disappointment in the story; it is to finally meet someone you have idolized all your life to find that he only talks about himself.
In the end, only two great questions remain, neither having much to do with the plot: How bad was everything else written this year, that this novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize? And more importantly, what in the world are the cartoonish, tribal-geek figures that are inserted in separations between chapters supposed to be?
VERDICT: 6.2/10.0 Eminently readable but fundamentally flawed.
Lunch no Joou (Lunch Queen) 7.5
Lunch no Joou. Japanese Drama (2002)
(Tomato, Yujiro, Minoru, Natsumi, Junzaburo, Koshiro, Kennichiro.)
stars:
Yuko Takeuchi as Natsumi Mugita, lead
Yosuke Eguchi as Yujiro Nabeshima, serious second brother
Satoshi Tsumabuki as Junzaburo Nabeshima, earnest third brother
Tomohisa Yamashita as Koshiro Nabeshima, carefree youngest brother
Shinichi Tsutsumi as Kennichiro Nabeshima, errant oldest brother
Takayuki Yamada as Minoru Ushijima, youngest brother's friend, restaurant apprentice
Go Wakabayashi as Kenzo Nabeshima, wise old dad
Misaki Itoh as Tomato Shiomi, delivers groceries and evil looks at Natsumi
Go Morita as bad ex-boyfriend
SYNOPSIS: Natsumi (Yuko Takeuchi) works as a waitress in a cafe. Abandoned by her father as a young child and possessing many other unhappy memories of the past, Natsumi lives for lunch time, that precious hour of the day where she is free and in charge. Through times of extreme depression and poverty, lunch was the one thing that never changed and never let her down. Her favorite meal? An egg omelette filled with fried rice and covered in demiglace sauce.
One day, she is pulled from a glorious lunch by a patron of the cafe (Shinichi Tsutsumi) where she works. Incensed at being disturbed in the middle of her meal, she yells and raves and refuses his strange and desperate request that she pose as his fiancee and accompany him to reconcile with his dying father. That is, until Kennichiro tells her that his father and three younger brothers run Cafe Macaroni, an Italian restaurant that is famed for its handmade demiglace sauce. How can she refuse such an opportunity?
Kennichiro, citing a misunderstanding within the family as the reason for his longtime separation, asks Natsumi to scope out the restaurant before he goes in. The egg omelettes at Cafe Macaroni are indeed amazing, and her obvious enjoyment of the dish draws the attention of both Yujiro and Junzaburo, Kennichiro's second and third brothers (seeing her smile, Junzaburo is a lost cause for the rest of the drama) . However, Kennichiro's entrance doesn't bring the fond family reunion that Natsumi expects; instead, Yujiro rushes toward him in a fit of violent rage, shocking Natsumi into speechlessness. Both Natsumi and Kennichiro are surprised to find that Mr. Nabeshima in good health, and Natsumi becomes increasingly shocked when she discovers that Kennichiro had a falling out with his family by refusing to help with the family restaurant and running away with a large sum of the earnings. She is left even more aghast when Kennichiro repeats his crime and leaves Natsumi to fend for herself. Through a combination of Natsumi's tenacity and the Nabeshimas' pity for her situation, she is allowed to stay and help out at the restaurant while waiting for her wayward "fiance" to return.
Gradually, the Nabeshimas come to respect and love Natsumi, and with the three younger brothers, this love gradually becomes less and less platonic, making the living situation kind of complicated. External jealousies enter in the form of Tomato Shiomi (Misaki Itoh), who has long harbored feelings for the friendly and good-looking Junzaburo. Additionally, Natsumi has something of an unpleasant past, which Minoru (Takayuki Yamada), a classmate of Koshiro's (Tomohisa Yamashita) and an apprentice at the restaurant, promises to keep a secret for her but eventually comes into play as well.
DRAMA REDUCTION: Will Kennichiro ever return? Can Natsumi find the security and happiness at Cafe Macaroni that she has long sought? How long can she keep the nature/lack of her relationship with Kennichiro a secret? Which of the Nabeshimas will eventually win the hand of the lovely Natsumi? And most importantly, how many people will be transformed by the power of a good lunch?
OPINION: Lunch no Joou traverses the distance between comedy and drama, presenting as comedy Natsumi's relationship with the Nabeshima brothers and as drama (albeit sometimes mock-seriously) the theme of good food as a sustenation of hope in darkness, not only for Natsumi but for a varied group of customers at Cafe Macaroni as well. For the most part, the talented cast shift easily between the serious and lighthearted moments, keeping the drama fresh and interesting in its treatment of friendship and family dynamics.
VERDICT: 7.5/10.0. Lunch is good, but is it
that good?
PERSONAL OPINION ON ENDING: Despite being in some ways frustratingly open-ended, the last episode makes some strong emotional moves.
