James Mason Retrospective

Photo via the Globe

Always among my favourites, a James Mason retrospective at the Brattle and a nice write up at the Globe.

Good lot of movie references for the end

Following the caption for 2012, the article covers some movies I've missed.

An Education

How I want to see this new film about Jenny.

Both Salon and the Daily Beast are giving it rather good reviews.

And the New York Times reviews it, too, today, but not so sweetly.

What a delightful interview with Lynn Barber, the writer behind the film.

Life is Beautiful

It's been eons since I regularly went to the movies, so now I have been renting about 3 to 5 films at a time; trying to space them out and absorb their theme and plot lines. Some of it for the sheer enjoyment others to inspire me to write (again).

One of the last batch I rented included "Life is Beautiful," a film that won many awards and received great acclaim.

It is a stunningly beautiful film, more so for the sensitivity that Bertolini brought to his characters than the visuals. However, during the last few scenes, knowing full well that the protagonist would not survive, I felt this heart-wrenching loss so much so that I could barely watch. Oh, if those of us that fail to see how life is beautiful, it is painful.

The neighbours and I have been sharing some DVDs. The other night they shared, "Life as a House."


Not a great movie, but a movie that makes you think about missed opportunities, loss and gain. The two most interesting issues that came up for me were the idea that love is not all, and how to achieve your goals, even when time is running out.

So many relationships are built on affection, but it appears that is insufficient to make relationships work. A hard lesson to learn!

And as time is such a precious commodity, it is also a lesson to take the rein and run wild on the horse, something I advocate and frequently ignore.

It's amazing how we think we've been there, done that and know it but in watching Gosford Park, I learned or perhaps relearned how society operates on both a conscious and unconscious level.

It was only after previewing Fellowes articulate and intelligent explanations about his screenplay that the essence of the theme and the film itself came to life. Watching the movie, and then the background pieces made this long, but in the end I was grateful to hear about the class system, circa 1930, in Britain not so much for the period but for how much that system has affected the US society--even today. A big eye-opener.

The last of the three movies I rented and saw as Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary or docudrama, can't recall how this is classified.

A bitter disappointment to this New Yorker. I probably should have read reviews before, or listened more or less closely to those who saw the film. While it started out exactly as I had imagined, it quickly turned to an anti-war tirade and one that didn't seem to hold together thematically.

While a strong anti-War activist (loud-mouth) something about Moore's presentation seemed like a chunk of undigested food in a bad tooth--it hurt.

I'll say no more.

Rating: 6