Pride and Prejudice - The Special Edition (A&E, 1996)

I am so secure in my masculinity that I can actually admit to having watched Pride and Prejudice.  This is a miniseries on two DVDs that Strix and I watched in two nights.  She put it on our Netflix list, and I could have begged off of it, but I decided to throw caution to the wind.

It was actually pretty good.  The actress playing Elizabeth (the main character), Jennifer Ehle, in addition to be extremely pretty, has the ability to convey about eight or nine emotions through her facial expressions in two seconds.  I was extremely impressed with her acting abilties.

Strix says the story is very true to the book.  I'll take her word for it.

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From Russia With Love

Hey, long time no blog, right?

A couple of weeks (okay, more like a month ago), we watched From Russia with Love, the second James Bond movie in the series, this one from 1963.  The evil terrorist organization with no apparent raison d'être SPECTRE is the bad guy (bad guys?  bad people?), and Bond is trying to save a beautiful (of course) Russian woman who is ostensibly smuggling a code cipher machine out of Russia to hand over to the British, but actually is an unwilling double agent and an unwitting triple agent (she thinks she's working for Russia, but actually she's working for SPECTRE).

I really like the plot.  It's complex and requires some attention to follow, which is more than you can usually say for Bond flicks.  On the other hand, they didn't exactly have the "action" part of "action movies" down back in 1963, and parts of it really do drag.

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Catch Me If You Can (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Features)

I was prepared to not like this movie much, mainly because movies glorifying con men don't really appeal to me, but this was a good flick.  DiCaprio did a good job of playing someone pretending to be someone else, in fact several someone else's, but what I liked best about it is that it didn't show him getting away with his cons because he was such a good liar, but rather it seemed that everyone he conned wanted to be conned.

Tom Hanks plays the FBI agent trying to track him down, and they develop a bond over time that was understated but obvious.  The acting was excellent on both their parts.

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The Invincible Iron Man

I couldn't find the right movie poster, so the one to the left is for an animated feature, not for the new movie with Robert Downey Jr.  As most people who have seen this have said, the movie is a very fun ride.  Downey's performance made the character compelling, and the high-tech eye candy was a lot of fun.

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Brick

This is an outstanding movie.  The dialogue is quick, crisp, and intelligent, and is thoroughly rooted in the film noire, hardboiled-detective tradition.  The fact that it's set in a high school seems to be incidental at first, and I thought that with a few change it could have been cast with adults in the 40's.

As the story continues and the viewer has buy-in, more and more humor is also included, contrasting the seriousness of the topics and the dialogue with how seriously the characters take themselves.

This is one I need to own.

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Soylent Green

Overacting, really bad stage fighting, and laughable costumes (like anything made in 1973), but you gotta love it.  I borrowed this from a friend because I hadn't seen it in years and Strix had never seen it.  Watching it again makes me want to read the book it was (loosely) based on, Make Room Make Room, by Harry Harrison.

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Backdraft

Stina had never seen this, so we got it from Netflix a while back, and I'm just now getting around to blogging it.  It came out in '91, and I saw it probably not to long after it first came out.  It stands the test of time, and while I think it's fairly weak on plot, the characters make up for what's lacking.  The special effects are still amazing, even after all these years.  I mean, who doesn't like watching fire?

Okay, just me?  I guess I'm a pyro at heart.

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Happy Easter!  This is the day that Jesus came out of his tomb on the third day, saw his shadow, and went back in, signifying that he would be able to drive all the snakes out of Ireland for at least six more weeks.  I think.  Well, anyway, Happy Easter.

Strix and I went to see The Bank Job the other night, which is based on a true story of a still-unsolved bank robbery in the early 70's in London.

This movie made 1970's London look a bit like Soddom and Gommorah.  Someone who was actually there would have to say how accurate this was, but everyone in this movie is dirty in some way, with the robbers actually looking like innocents caught up by circumstance.  Lots of plot twists and political intrigue keep this movie very interesting, and there are excellent performances by John Statham, as the leader of the gang, and David Suchet, who plays an unlikely strip-club owning, porn-movie producing criminal mixed up with dirty cops.

The robbers are brought into a plot to rob a bank by drilling up into it from underneath, where they will then have access to the safety deposit boxes.  Little do they know they're being set up to retrieve and item that the government needs, and needs to get without any chance of being traced back to the robbery.  Unfortunately for the robbers and the government, there are many other things that people have in their safe deposit boxes that they don't want to see the light of day.

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Finding Neverland (Widescreen Edition)

Man, I've been busy, and now that I've started rehearsing for the next play even though the current one isn't finished, it's likely to be like that for a while.

A few nights ago, Strix and I watched Finding Neverland.  Johnny Depp plays J M Barrie, the Scottish playwrite who wrote Peter Pan and - not incidentally - Dear Brutus, the play I'm in right now.  Finding Neverland is supposed to be about the inspiration that lead Barrie to write Peter Pan.  The beginning of the movie says, "Inspired by Actual Events," or something along those lines, and that's all you can really say, because it's not a true story.

In the movie, Barrie meets Sylvia Davies when she is already a widow, in 1903.  In reality, he met them when the patriarch of the family, Arthur, was still alive, in 1897.  Arthur didn't actually die until 1907.  Peter Pan was already written by 1903, based somewhat on the children in the Davies family, so the fact that the movie had poor Slyvia a widow four years before her husband actually died was the screenwriter's way of making her more of a love interest for Barrie.

We put this movie at the top of our Netflix list because I was interested to learn more about Barrie since I'm in a play written by him right now.  The character I play, Mr. Dearth, is semi-autobiographical, I think.  Barrie's relationship with his wife, Mary Ansell, was, at least according to some, a cold and possibly even sexless marriage.  Mr. Dearth is in a marriage with a wife that hates him, apparently for failing to measure up to some unspoken ideal that she had set up.  Dearth is an artist, and his wife is a model, whereas Barrie was a playwrite, and his wife was an actress.  Barrie and his wife were childless, a fact that he apparently regretted since he romanticized childhood so much in Peter Pan, and Dearth and his wife are likewise childless, a fact which he regrets but she does not.  There are a good number of parallels.

Despite the movie's playing fast and loose with the facts, it was very entertaining to watch, and had excellent performances from Depp (of course), Kate Winslet (Sylvia Davies), and an incredibly cold and unlikable Radha Mitchell (Mary Ansell, Barrie's actress wife).

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Sweeney Todd

This movie can really be summed up in two words: Holy Crap.

I had seen the play once years ago, but had to leave at intermission because I was working nights and the play was very long.  Of course, seeing half of the stage production cannot prepare you for this extremely bloody screen adaptation of the morbid musical known as Sweeney Todd.

Excellent performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman make this very watchable, even if you do occasionally have to look away from the screen because of the buckets and buckets of blood.  And oh, is there blood!  You could fill a swimming pool with it, then go for a dip, the way this movie uses it.  Still, if you like your darkness dark and your mobidity morbid, this is your movie.  Plus, true to Tim Burton form, he made sure to spray a lot of blood directly into Johnny Depp's face.

Interesting trivia: Former Branagh-Thompson homewrecker Helena Bonham Carter is now engaged to director Tim Burton.  This isn't really news, because they've apparently been engaged for six years and have had two children in the interim.  So what do out-of-the-box actress Bonham Carter and creative genius Tim Burton name their first child?  Billy Ray.  Go irony.

In unrelated theatrical news, I auditioned for the next Theater Arts Ensemble play last night and this afternoon, and got a call today telling me that I got one of the lead roles.  It's called Love, Sex, and the IRS, and it's a farcical romp and is going to require a lot more on-stage physicality and running around than I've done up to this point, to it should be interesting.

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