I have a soft spot for Dublin–I lived there for a couple of years.
I wrote a play set in Dublin about a couple of different nationalities falling in love.
I have heard and like The Frames, and the film features their singer Glen Hansard as one of the leads.
I’ve seen very few movies over the last six months, so my critical guard was probably down.
It’s a deceptively simple film. Here’s the plot summary from IMDB:
A modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant and their eventful week, as they write, rehearse and record songs that tell their love story.
That’s about it. It’s not a musical in the traditional sense, in that the actors don’t randomly burst into song. All of the singing is entirely plausible in the course of the movie. The songs, mostly written by Hansard and performed by him and his co-star Markéta Irglová, are spare, passionate and uniformally terrific. I also appreciated that it’s an Irish movie about music with nary a feckin’ diddly-eye in sight.
There are so many things to like about this film. Hansard is charismatic and disarming. It takes a genuine, contemporary look at the city and its people. It doesn’t make any easy plot choices.
If you haven’t, go see it. I know that it’s been out for a while, but I’m not sure how wide its distribution is in Canada–I just saw it in Toronto. But don’t take my word for it–the professional critics really, really liked it.
I’m judging a book by its cover, but this version (there’s also a documentary of the same name) seems more hopeful and redemptive than the book, which felt pretty bleak to me.
On a barely related note, Marina also links tothe trailer for The Mist, a new horror film based on one of my favourite Stephen King short stories. If you ask me, they show way too much of the baddies.
Geeks in their late twenties and early thirties had been very, very excited for the recent release of the Transformers movie, roughly twenty years after the original animated TV series. John from the Movie Blog, for example, apepars to have written several hundred posts about the movie.
I’m of the right age, gender and a movie geek. Why wasn’t I excited, too? In fact, I was so unexcited, I listened to the two hosts of Slate’s Spoiler podcast disclose and soundly mock the movie’s apparently obscure plot.
My initial theory was that I was just the little bit too old to really have fallen in love with The Transformers. But then I thought of something else, possibly to deflect my attention from that age theory.
Around the same time, I discovered and fell in love with the Japanese animated series, Robotech. I liked it so much that I got up at 8:30am on Saturday mornings to watch and record (on Beta) every episode in my parents’ bedroom. Patient people, my parents.
Robotech featured cheesy plot lines and transforming machine, too. Maybe there was only room for one such show in my childhood? Maybe I was just drawn to those enormous anime eyes? Plus, Robotech seems a lot darker. For probably the first time in fifteen years, I watched a clip from my favourite episode. Earlier in that episode (if I recall correctly), 75% of the Earth’s population is vapourized from space. You won’t see the Decepticons getting up to that on American television.
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With Michael Moore’s permission, I downloaded and watched a leaked copy of Sicko, his documentary about the tragically compromised American health care system. You can do the same, if you’re thus inclined.
Moore is a master polemicist, and Sicko seems to be a distillation of techniques he toyed with in his earlier work. The film is essentially a series of anecdotes, and Moore spends the bulk of his time telling stories about the superiority of health care systems in Canada, UK, France and Cuba.
One thing I remember from theatre school is that 70% of directing is casting. Moore is exceptional at this, populating his film with the accessible, friendly, articulate people who can best support his thesis. Whether it’s a Ground Zero volunteer with untreated respiratory problems or a charming, wealthy English doctor, they play their supporting roles perfectly.
Combine his casting with a natural gift for cinematic storytelling, and you’ve got the makings of a great movie.
I was frustrated by the dearth of supporting facts and evidence, a departure from earlier films. Despite there being plenty of statistics to support his case, Moore rarely cited them. He relied more exclusively on his case studies. For example, the best he offered on Canada was that we have cheap drugs and a longer life expectancy (which may or may not be the result of better health care).
That makes for a more emotionally compelling film, but not necessarily an intellectually gratifying one.
There were also egregious sins of omission. For example, Cuba may have exceptionally-trained medical professionals, but they regularly struggle to obtain the equipment and medicine they need to care for their patients. That sort of thing is to be expected, though, in rhetorical work like this.
Maybe the facts were less necessary because his thesis–that the US health care system is deeply broken, and pales in comparison to other Western nations–was much less assailable. Of course, having enjoyed 30-odd years of Canadian medicine, I may just be biased.
In any case, every American ought to take a look at this film. Every Canadian too, so that we don’t take what we’ve got for granted.
UPDATE: I just browsed around and looked at some criticism of the film. Critics seem to be working way too hard to debunk Moore’s claims about Cuba. That’s an unfortunate red herring, and distracts from the core debate about American health care. Even if Moore’s critics are 100% correct and can emphatically prove that America’s system is superior to Cuba’s, isn’t that a dreadfully hollow victory?
This film highlights the early phase of that conflict as it follows the lives of three RAF pilots: George Burges, John Waters and Timber Woods. These pilots flew Gloster Sea Gladiator biplanes in the heroic defense of the island against more modern Italian fighters and bombers. In all, about six Gladiators were involved in the fighting–some were cannibalized for parts–but only three could ever be scrambled for a single sortie.
I watched some of the hour-long film, and it’s really quite good. In particular, I was really impressed by the cinematography and sound work. The voice acting wasn’t terrific, but I’ve heard much worse in amateur and fan-made projects.
Does anybody know what game they used? I asked Bob, but I haven’t heard back.
You know, 28 Days Later was a really class horror movie. Decent performances, gripping cinematography and it was frickin’ scary. Dethroner links to the trailer for the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (MOV). It has a new cast and a grander scale, but it looks equally compelling.
A while back I wrote a post about surviving zombie attacks, which continues to attract the odd zombie theorist and has netted some interesting comments.
