Displaying Digest #20090752.

 
I enjoyed AVATAR. It was a lot of whooshing fun to watch and I am second to
none in my appreciation of looking at Sam Worthington for as much screen
time as he got in the almost 3 hours. Whatever wooden dialogue he had to
say. . Not being a snob - I've watched every sci fi TV show and almost all
sci fi movies my whole life. (BTW my sister-in-law who has a tendency to
migraines had to walk out of the film as the 3D whooshing really got to
her.)

 

When the critics' organization I belong to met for our annual Best of voting
(and we had a lot of debate ahead of time whether AVATAR was mostly animated
or not), the young woman critic next to me who writes for a notable web
site, and my kids read her reviews instead of mine, voted for AVATAR for
every possible category.  When I asked her wasn't it really the same plot as
DANCES WITH WOLVES she stared at me - she had never seen that film (I
noticed that when she was on Charlie Rose she made a point to see Jeff
Bridges' older films to make an obvious reference to doing that.)  With the
older folks' vote split between HURT LOCKER (the art house crowd) and UP IN
THE AIR (the mainstream folks), "Avatar" carried the younger folks' vote and
won the group's designation, one of the few critics' groups to do so.  

 

I had a similar experience last night. I was at a press screening for GREEN
ZONE (mostly terrific!) and the young man next to me introduced himself as
with WNYC. We talked about the film's director Paul Greengrass and the guy
show-offingly asks me if I'd seen the director's first film. I was nodding
before he even finished talking to say that I thought BLOODY SUNDAY was one
of the finest docudramas ever made (I reviewed it here on the IDD back in
those days), and he was really surprised I'd heard of it "because noone I
know has seen it. They all think UNITED 93 is his first film."  I (hopefully
gently) asked him if he'd only asked people in his cohort as older folks
would have seen a 2002 film.  That had never occurred to him at all. Hmm, I
forget to ask him if he realized the relationship to the U2 song.

 

I have heard many complaints from folks about AN EDUCATION, though mine are
different from most, as I was totally turned off by the inappropriate age
relationship (as I was with the college student and the much older teacher
in A SINGLE MAN).  I hunted down the actual memoir it's based on, which was
published as an essay in Granta, a literary magazine.  In real life, the
older con man was in fact Jewish.  But what doesn't come across in the
adaptation is that her family was just barely above working class, her dad
being a former coal miner, so that it was easier for the older guy to seem
exotically middle class to them. Also not made clear is that she was on
scholarship at the school and didn't fit in with the other girls because of
that so was vulnerably isolated. There is zilch in the memoir about the
women teachers lecturing her with un-feminist stereotypes, which I found
unncecessary and probably inaccurate in the film.  I shouldn't let all that
color my appreciation of the lead actress's sympathetic performance, but I
let it.

 

BASTERDS is a must-see movie, much less violent than many other WW2 movies
let alone other QT films.  It has the most mesmerizing Nazi on screen ever.
Here's some interesting trivia about the actor playing the Nazi (who unlike
most German-speaking actors who, heck, need to work, had turned down Nazi
roles before this):

http://www.movieline.com/2009/10/lawrence-bender-the-movieline-interview.php
?page=2

 

And folks last week were seeing it as a Purim story:

 
http://andthewinneris.blog.com/2010/02/28/ad/

 

I saw a capsule review of A SERIOUS MAN where a critic put it in his Top 10
of the year-and didn't mention the word "Jew" at all.


Sandra Bullock was quite fine in CRASH and INFAMOUS, so she has shown she
can act outside SPEED.

 

Roger Ebert's appearance on Oprah, and unveiling of his Oscar picks and new
voice machine, was really touching. I also recommend the Esquire profile on
him:

http://www.esquire.com/features/roger-ebert-0310

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mandel/Shultz Maven's Nest is at:
http://MavensNest.net  

 


Dear Fellow Idiots
I have a date for book signing and reading for my book Something In The Nei=
ghborhood of Real --
April 9th at 7pm at the Borders Books here in Glendale at the Atlas Mall.

I really would like to see my fellow idiots in the neighborhood where we hi=
ked -
 laughed and enjoyed life so many summers ago.

Keep smiling and Rock On - Kiddrane out near Lake Marie buying pens. 

Return to Index.