FILMS 2004

Frank and I really enjoy going to the movies, although we don’t see everything we would like and have to watch some things on DVD. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but some films just don’t come over on the TV. Of course, DVDs have the advantage of extra material and in some cases this is as interesting as the film. Finding Forrester comes to mind, which was actually the first film we ever saw on DVD when we were vacationing in Virginia in 2002 and had Jenny and Ulf to operate the DVD player for us. And now that we have one of our own it’s fun to buy our very favorite films so we can show or lend them to family and friends. Bella Martha is a prime example, one of our favorite films of recent years. However, in general it’s better to watch a good film in a cinema where there are less distractions and more incentive to give a film a chance to improve even if the beginning isn’t to our liking. If after a while we agree that the film isn’t to our taste we leave. This only happened once in 2004. We used to leave more often, but I think we are more selective now so there is less chance of catching a real lemon.

The first film I ever saw was The Wizard of Oz. I was probably around five at the time, maybe a little younger or older, but I know I saw it in Ohio so I couldn’t have been more than six. I think we saw it in a church, not in a regular movie theater. Of course I’ve seen it again since then although not really very often because it’s practically unknown in Germany. As far as I know it’s never been on TV here. I wonder why that is. Some junk is replayed several times a year and some movies are never shown. It must not have been in the package that they bought from Holly wood.

One reason I remember this film so well is that I had nightmares for decades afterwards about it. It wasn’t the wicked witch, although I’m sure at the time she frightened me terribly, it was the tornado that transported Dorothy to Oz. I’ve been frightened of tornados since then. At least with hurricanes you get a few days’ notice.

Anyway, it would be nice to be able to remember all the films I’ve seen as well as I remember The Wizard of Oz. Alas, it’s getting to the point that I have to really think hard to remember the last five at all. And as for remembering everything we saw last year before they all fade into oblivion, I’m sure I’ll leave out several, but maybe with Frank’s help I can manage to comment on most of them. This is basically for us as a sort of scrapbook of films we have seen, but if you are looking for recommendations you are welcome to browse. Just a caution – our judgements are extremely biased and make no attempt to be objective.

                                                            Calendar Girls

Isn’t that a very appropriate name for the first film of the year? And I have to say looking back over the entire year that this was one of the most enjoyable films we saw. It’s a true story about a group of women in England who decide to raise money for a new couch for the waiting room at the local hospital after one of their husbands dies of leukemia.
                                                                                                                                                                  
Put that way it doesn’t sound very interesting, but the idea they come up with is to produce a nude calendar with themselves as pin up girls. The film is delightful and I especially enjoyed their appearance on the Jay Leno show. They ended up raising millions of pounds for cancer research and the film is a real gem.

                                                             The Hours

After a morning of shopping and a lovely lunch in Hannover Anne, Frank and I decided to see this movie. (I think Ingo had an orchestra rehearsal or something like that.) The theatre was at the top of a building and we decided not to take the elevator but to walk the eight or so stories. The theatre was dark and warm and the seats soft and comfy. All these circumstances might have been the reasons all three of us had problems keeping our eyes open during parts of the film. I don’t think it was the film itself, which was about Virginia Woolf and a modern day figure of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Anne and Frank found it very depressing, but since I had read the book and knew what to expect I concentrated on other aspects and the sad parts didn’t bother me so much.
                                                 
I thought it was an excellent transformation of the book into film and just as the film Mrs. Dalloway helped me to understand that book, this film broadened my understanding of The Hours, which by the way won a Pulitzer Prize. Virginia Woolf is not easy reading and sometimes I need all the help I can get.

Nicole Kidman played Virginia Woolf and much was made of the new nose she “wore” for this role.  I’m not a big fan of hers but she gave a very convincing performance and I thought Meryl Streep was perfect for the modern day Mrs. Dalloway role.

By the way the director also directed Billy Elliot, one of our favorite films.

                                                                 Big Fish

We saw this while we were in Nantes at Easter. This was so NOT my kind of film and Frank didn’t like it very much either.
                                                                                                
Basically a father – son conflict because the father was incapable of telling a story without embellishment, the film re-enacts many (too many!) of the tall tales for the son’s benefit. I’m not sure what the point was. In the end there was a reconciliation, but the film didn’t work for us. We did sit through it to the end though.

                                                       Bend it like Beckham

This is a fun movie that really has almost nothing to do with Beckham, famed British soccer star. It’s the story of an Indian girl in England who really wants to play women’s soccer, but it is so contrary to the traditions of her family that she has to do it secretly at first and then against the wishes of her parents.


It all works out in the end and there are some delightful scenes of Indian life and of course a full blown Indian wedding. The actress (Parminder Nagra) who plays the main character is extremely good and probably has quite a career to look forward to.

                                                                                                                                                                  
                                                        Lost in Translation

Frank and I enjoyed this movie and recommended it to Jenny and Ulf, especially since Jenny had had her own experience with Tokyo, but they hated it.  Maybe it reminded Jenny too much of her insomnia.
                                                
And it’s true that there isn’t really much of a story here. An aging actor and a young newly married girl, whose photographer husband is off on a photo shoot, cope with the alienation of being on their own in Tokyo and the writer and director, Sofia Coppola, does a great job of injecting humor into the situation with a very light hand. Just the image of Bill Murray towering over a group of Japanese men in an elevator is amusing and the scenes where he has to film a whiskey commercial for the Japanese market are priceless. The end is very ambiguous because he whispers something to her that the audience can’t hear and of course everyone is terribly curious to know exactly what he said. No way to know so you have to create your own ending here.

                                                           The Company

We liked Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and Shortcuts, especially because they had such multi-layered story lines. Very confusing at times, they all came together in the end, or in the case of Gosford Park, on second viewing. (My respects to anyone who understood everything in that movie the first time they saw it.)
                                                                
Our expectations might have set us up for disappointment when we saw The Company, because what seemed to be a complex story line turned out not to be anything of the kind. The story of a dance troupe and one ballerina in particular in the course of a year Altman filmed this as a pseudo-documentary, and just as in real life people came and went, funny things happened but there was no follow up. Maybe if we had expected this we would have liked it more – I don’t know. The dancing was stunningly beautiful and the scene in which they performed outside while a thunderstorm built up and exploded was breathtaking. This movie could have been so much more, but in the end we just looked at each other and said, “What was that supposed to mean?”

                                                                 Chicago

Frank saw this on his own when he was out of town and didn’t like it at all, especially the music which was, in his opinion, not at all memorable. I took his word for it and didn’t bother going to see it, which is just as well because when I watched the DVD I could choose the English version.                                                    
We watched it one evening with Jenny and Ulf and it really amused Jenny and me. I thought the lyrics were extremely witty and it is sad to admit maybe, but the lyrics come first in my view. (That’s one reason I don’t care for songs in languages I don’t understand.) And it was a fun movie with a very capable cast. Even Frank liked it better seeing it with us – an important lesson, don’t you think?

                                             Die Kinder des M. Mathieu

I often have a problem with French movies. I’ve seldom seen one that I unreservedly liked and recently have been put off by quite a few of them. I know this makes me terribly uncool but I didn’t care for Amalie. I thought the plot was weak and strange and the whole thing didn’t touch me. Then Frank brought home a DVD of a movie that he had seen and loved – 8 Femmes – with a cast that reads like the “Who’s who” of modern French film, beginning with Catherine Deneuve. I hated it. I made Frank turn it off when the ensemble broke into song. It was just too much.

Oh, but it got worse. One evening he brought home Swimming Pool, which just happened to be directed by the same man who directed 8 Femmes. We managed to watch this one to the end and were completely baffled. We even watched the extra material to see if we could find some clues about what had actually happened, but no luck. Two thumbs down for that one. I thought for a minute Chocolat might be the exception, but it isn’t really French. It was written by an Englishwoman and directed by a Swedish man. It just happened to take place in France.                                                                                                                                          
All this to lead up to the film The Chorus, or in German Die Kinder des M. Mathieu. It’s one of the few films I’ve seen so far that has been nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. And contrary to all expectations (see above), I liked the film. I didn’t love it, but it was cute and sweet although not too cute or too sweet. My problem with the plot was the relative ease with which this music teacher transformed his pupils (or at least a good portion of them). Having taught for many years I wonder at this. But perhaps it’s easier within the confines of a 90-minute story.

                                              Girl with a Pearl Earring

I can remember standing in line at an airport, waiting to check in, and we started talking to someone on her way to Holland to visit her daughter. She recommended this book very highly and at some point Frank bought it, read it and really liked it. (He’s a big fan of Dutch art.) Some time later I also finally got around to reading it and liked it too, not as much for the story (which was okay) as for the atmosphere and the descriptions of what life was like in 17th century Holland. So we were both looking forward to seeing the film.
We were not disappointed. It is a lovely film that sticks very close to the book, as it should, and does a great job of catching what Delft must have been like at that time. And Colin Firth! Need I say more? Any fan of Pride and Prejudice pricks up her ears at the mention of his name and he played the same sort of moody, sultry, unapproachable (but in the end not) character as Mr. Darcy was. But I would have seen this anyway just for the beautiful photography.

                                              Something’s Gotta Give

This was the first movie I ever saw in our local communal movie theater which I had been avoiding because someone told me it was very uncomfortable and still had the original seating from the 1950s. Frank had already seen this film and really wanted me to see it, so he talked me into going in spite of my reservations. The movie theater really has the atmosphere of the ‘50s but the seats are perfectly comfortable and they show a lot of good movies at ridiculously low prices, so we have been quite a few times lately. It's very nice in the cold snowy weather we’ve been having this winter not to have to bike into Mainz (or be considered a complete wimp by my husband). The theater isn’t even ten minutes from us by bike.
                                                                                                                            
As for the movie I liked it a lot. I’m not the biggest Jack Nicholson fan and I think a little of him goes a long way, but he (or the director) did a good job in this film of toning down his personality, a bit anyway. And Diane Keaton was great in this role. She looks amazing, especially in the 2-second nude scene. Quite a contrast to the nude Kathy Bates in About Schmidt, also with Jack Nicholson, which nearly traumatized me for life. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson nude was hilarious. (These were very short, unimportant scenes, but for some deep Freudian reason I remember them well.)

I seriously covet Diane Keaton’s house in this movie. So tasteful, so lovely, right on the beach. But I can’t condone her taste in men. Give up Keanu Reeves for Jack Nicholson? Not me!

                                                   My Big Fat Greek Wedding
                                                  Under the Tuscan Sun
                                                  Raising Helen
                                                  How to lose a Guy in 10 Days
                                                  Love, Actually

I’m grouping all these together for what are obvious reasons. These are chick flicks in which the plot centers around a girl and a guy and maybe a wedding. I didn’t like Under the Tuscan Sun, probably because I was expecting something different. I had heard it was the Tuscan version of Toujours Provence (which has never been filmed), which is why I wanted to see it. There were so many irritating things about this film I don’t even want to go into it. I think it was the second worst film I saw in 2004. (The worst is still to come!)
The other four were cute even though they were terribly predictable, but just not memorable – I had to look them up to remind myself of any details at all. There's nothing wrong with this kind of film, a little candy for the mind.


                                                        Before Sunset

Some might argue that this film belongs to the preceding group but they would be wrong, so wrong! On the surface it’s the same type: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, problems get in the way, boy and girl overcome problems. However, this story transcends the simplistic plot. First of all, the story began ten years ago in 1995 with the film Before Sunrise, which I haven’t seen yet but will very soon. American boy meets French girl in Vienna, they are only together one night but they fall in love, they lose contact with each other through no fault of their own.

Then in 2004 the director decided to film the sequel with the same two people, who meet by chance again, this time in Paris. There is no action in this film, only dialogue, but for me it had an aura to it that was a little magical. (Frank liked it too and Jenny didn’t, which makes it more difficult to classify it as a chick flick.)
                                                                                                                      
The only thing that wasn’t perfect was the French girl, played by a French actress (Julie Delpy), had almost no accent at all. This was strange because in the interview in the supplements she had more of an accent than in the film. She was supposed to have lived in the U.S. for a few years, but it would have fit the story better to have the accent more noticeable. I think it bothered me because it reminded me of Green Card, which I saw in German, and Gérard Depardieu was dubbed without a French accent. If you have seen this movie you know how absurd that was.

                                                        Fahrenheit 9/11

What’s to say about this? When I saw it I thought, “No one can see this movie and then vote for George W. Bush.” And maybe that was even true for the most part, but evidently the millions who saw it were the ones who weren’t going to vote for him anyway. A very depressing film with an even more depressing world view. What can I say?

                                                                                                                                                                
                                                         Super Size Me

I wondered whether to even see this because I had heard enough about it that I felt I knew the story, but when it played here in our village we decided to go.
                                 
I’m glad I did because it was better than I thought it would be. There were some very amusing parts to it and of course some very scary parts. But since we eat at Mc D.’s about once a year, we’re not too worried. I loved the song the children sang at the beginning!

                                                                                                                                                                  
                                               The Terminal

O.K. I’ve saved the worst for last. This movie gets our “Sour Lemon Award”. We went with high expectations. I mean, after all, Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stevan Spielberg should be good for something.
                                                                            
We were very disappointed and left after about the fourth time someone slipped on the wet floor in the terminal. The film was not believable, although based on a true story, it was not funny, it was not entertaining. It was the only film all year that we abandoned before it was over. However, I still like Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Steven Spielberg and am willing to give them all another chance!

That's it for 2004. 2005 coming soon to a theater near you.