Becket - Movie Review

I've been on a history of the British monarchy kick, from Henry V to A Man for All Seasons to Chariots of Fire (hey, Prince of Wales). The royals have long been popular on the silver screen, and Becket is a pillar of the genre, despite numerous inaccuracies and a general spicing-up-of-facts goin' on.

Book-ended by scenes at the tomb of Thomas Becket (b. 1118, d. 1170), the rest of the film is a flashback to his life, from a wild youth, to a career as a statesman, and then his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Central to the drama is the bond between Becket and Henry II, to the point that the film is almost less a biopic than the story of a relationship. Peter O'Toole is at his best here, throwing himself into the dissolute, petulant king with gusto (a role he would reprise in 1968's The Lion in Winter). He nearly steals the show from Richard Burton's gentle, erudite Becket, but if O'Toole provides driving force of the narrative, it is Burton that channels it.

Best of July/August 2014

Movies:
It comes down to the wire between Ernest and Celestine, Becket, and The Dark Knight - three movies that are so wildly different as to make comparison nearly impossible. I'm going to have to go with entertainment value and choose Ernest and Celestine, a slight but lovely tale of friendship, art, and forgiveness. Unusual for the modern children's movie, and despite its palette of light colors, this film has quite a few harsher edges - this world isn't one without pain and death, though it treats them with a comic spin.


A 2 1/2 hour film set in a silent monastery, Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille) is of those movies that really, really ought to be boring, but isn't. It's about silent people, not silence. The rain still patters on the rooftop, feet echo in the dusky hallways, wind whistles in the eaves, ponderous bells mark out the pace with solemn, inevitable regularity. The seasons change. We come to know the faces of these men, so anachronistically pious and dedicated. We come to see their thoughtful faith and sacrificial, unassuming love. It's a transcendent experience. Steven Greydanus's review.


TV:
I probably shouldn't admit it, but I'm a sucker for sitcoms about elderly British people being mean to one another. Like Last of the Summer Wine or To the Manor Born, As Time Goes By makes the most of we're-getting-old humor, but has slightly more gravitas when handling the characters. It isn't afraid of earnestness, and amidst all the whimsicality and sex jokes (not too crass, m'dear, we're British) come intervals of calm sincerity. Also: Judi Dench (ever-elegant) and Geoffrey Palmer (ever-jowly) are terrific. Watch here.

Agatha Christie's Poirot is over. My childhood goes with it. For those wondering (all two of you), I have not yet been able to bring myself to review Curtain. Mix of a) didn't like it as much as I wanted to, b) I haven't watched it again and c) I think I'm in denial. I'm currently nursing myself back to health watching the earliest episodes/David Suchet interviews (always a pleasant experience). Reviews: Elephants Can Remember. The Big Four. Dead Man's Folly. The Labours of Hercules.


Hannah Long

Ratatouille - Review

What does it mean to create? What does it mean to critique? These are two questions I didn’t expect to hear voiced in an animated children’s film about a French rat.

But then, Brad Bird is the man when it comes to upending expectations.

Remy is a country rat with an unusually acute sense of smell. While this gift leads him to become a food connoisseur, his more practical family employ him to be the Poison Detector. Remy, on the other hand, has other ideas. Inspired by a cookbook entitled “Anyone Can Cook,” he begins on a gourmet career that will lead him to the very heart of Paris. There, he makes friends with an awkward garbage boy named Linguini, and using this human companion, makes a splash in the culinary world.

Ratatouille manages to avoid the majority of animal-film clichés. Remy is chipper and positive, but he is also intelligent and complex; Linguini has a life beyond just being the Faithful Master. It avoids cuteness, and though there’s a brief anti-cruelty-to-animals moment, it sidesteps more heavy-handed commentary, such as the anti-gun theme in Bird’s earlier film The Iron Giant. The animation is interesting and artistic, creating a beautiful, atmospheric vision of Paris. The cast is almost devoid of caricatures, and the major one I remember is offset by development from a parallel character.

Lawrence of Arabia - Movie Review

Lawrence of Arabia is about power, posturing, politics, pride, and pettiness. And spectacle. Big-screen epic spectacle. 

If there’s one thing that provides that spectacle, it’s the sweeping panorama of the barren desert. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film which so fully impressed on me the vastness of it, and the corresponding inconsequentiality of a man on a camel, with only a water-skin between him and death.

It’s quite ironic, isn’t it? And this film lives and breathes irony, placing characters in so many incongruous situations that it gets a little ridiculous.  

The first is a placard on a peaceful country road marked “DANGER.”

It’s not much of a spoiler that Lawrence dies an ignominious death—thrown from his motorcycle into a clump of bushes—in the first five minutes of the film. For a while, I was confused as to why the filmmakers chose to start us here. I recognized the heavy contrast of cutting from a motorcycle accident in verdant Dorset to conversation in the halls of a British colonial outpost to the barren, utterly foreign desert, but I felt it sucked the uncertainty from Lawrence’s story—we knew he lived, so what suspense was there?  (Spoilers below)