Tag: review

Movie Review: Quartet

Incidentally, I discovered that there was a 1981 movie called Quartet, also starring Maggie Smith.

The Wife and I decided we wanted to see a movie Sunday afternoon, which was a bit ambitious since church tends to run long on the first Sunday. The Daughter and we fairly bolted out the door, picked up the babysitter – no, make that child watcher, per the Daughter’s instruction – dropped them at home, then got to the Spectrum at 12:47 to see the 12:55 showing of Quartet.

There is a home for retired musicians in a lovely part of rural England. Every year, there is a concert to make sure the home will be solvent for another year. The director of the production, Cedric (Michael Gambon), imperiously decides who is in and who is out. Reginald (Tom Courtenay), the musician who sees parallels with opera and rap, is in, as are the lecherous Wilf (Billy Connolly), and the increasingly addled Cissy (Pauline Collins). Then Jean (Maggie Smith), someone from their past moves into the home; Reg is particularly peeved by this turn of events. Jean, proud and sad to be forced into this situation, has her own issues with yet another resident.

I enjoyed this film by 75-year-old first-time director Dustin Hoffman, who tells a pleasant tale about aging, fear, and complicated personal histories. The characters were engaging, and I found myself caring for them a great deal. I also enjoyed the minor characters, many of whom you find out more about in the end credits.

Oddly, this film has been compared, generally unfavorably, with the depressing film Amour. One example by Matt Pais of RedEye: “Unlike the devastating portrait of aging in Michael Haneke’s Amour, Quartet favors cheeky over honest.” Well, I sure hope so! Quartet is primarily a comedy, its dealing with the ailments of getting older was meant to suggest that one perseveres anyway, while one can.

A couple weeks ago, Maggie Smith was on CBS News’ 60 Minutes. She HATES doing interviews and it showed; she’s indifferent to the fame the British TV series Downton Abbey has suddenly foisted on the 78-year-old actress. However, she was most effusive with her praise for director Hoffman. For his part, he appreciated her being “difficult” because it was always about creating a better movie.

Incidentally, I discovered that there was a 1981 movie called Quartet, also starring Maggie Smith.

MOVIE REVIEW: Amour

Georges becomes Eva’s primary caretaker for a time, trying to hide the degree of her deteriorating condition.

My wife asked after we saw Amour at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany Sunday, whether I thought Emmanuelle Riva was embarrassed being partially nude when she played Anne, a woman in need of being cleaned by others in the movie Amour. I quipped “Nah, she’s French!” In fact, and I did not know this at the time, she had appeared in the erotic 1959 art house film Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Still, I was wondering how awful Anne, the character, must have felt at the indignity. Anne was a proud woman, an accomplished piano teacher. In an early scene, we see Anne beaming as she and her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an older couple, sit in an audience watching her former student Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) perform.

Soon, though, Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes her on one side. She is adamant; no hospital for her! So Georges becomes her primary caretaker for a time, trying to hide the degree of her deteriorating condition from their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), not to mention their annoying British son-in-law. Ultimately, though, Georges is forced to get some outside help, which is difficult for them both.

More than the story itself, which is well-acted, but ultimately depressing as hell, I started thinking about how one does deal with being the caretaker of an aging and ailing parent or spouse, or how one would feel being the one cared for. This movie may be a how-to NOT do so. One of the POSITIVE reviews in Rotten Tomatoes, by Tom Long, says: “In many ways, it’s the best horror film I’ve ever seen. At the same time, it’s hard to recommend; I believe I will be struggling to forget this film as long as I live. I doubt I’ll succeed.” Other comments read along similar paths.

Amour is nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Film -it’s in French with subtitles. It’s worth seeing, I reckon, but I shan’t watch it again.

Book Review: THE ME GENERATION…BY ME (Growing Up In The ’60s)

Ken Levine’s early life had a lot to do with growing up Jewish, not particularly coordinated or popular – perhaps one could say nerdy – in Southern California.

 

Ken Levine is a blogger I’ve been following for about five years, and whose observations about the entertainment industry I enjoy a lot. He is “an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer.” So I was interested in a book by a guy who both wrote shows I’ve watched, such as MASH, Cheers, and Frasier AND has done play-by-play for Seattle Mariners and other baseball teams.

I put his new book on my Amazon wish list and received it for Christmas. The premise of the book he dedicated a blog post to is that:

“They say if you can remember the’60s you didn’t live through them. But that’s not true. 99.9999% of the largest generation the world has ever known grew up in the ’60s and were not so drugged out that the decade became a mere purple haze. 99.999999% of them didn’t attend Woodstock, move to Haight-Ashbury, protest the war by burning their bras or banks, or form a band that played Woodstock. Most of us went to school, had summer jobs, wrestled with adolescence, and enjoyed being catered to by the media and Madison Avenue because of our sheer size.

“And the world changed dramatically while all of this was going on. But in the background.”

Levine’s early life had a lot to do with growing up Jewish, not particularly coordinated or popular – perhaps one could say nerdy – in Southern California. He didn’t have a rebellion against his parents, though.

Like many boys of his vintage, he was competing with the Beatles for the attention of girls. He writes a lot about his success, or more correctly, lack of same in the area of romance. Levine knew actress Ann Jillian and had an unrequited crush on her.

Levine had some interest in politics; he actually watched political conventions. World and national events both surprised and impacted him, from the assassinations of JFK, MLK, Jr., and RFK, to the 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

What I really liked was how music was a marker for much of that decade for him, as it was for me. He managed to be invited to the first episode of Shindig, an ABC-TV music show, but somehow didn’t quite make it.

I was distracted by some chronological errors. The musical Hair was popular in 1968, but Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In by the Fifth Dimension wasn’t a hit until 1969. George Wallace was a serious contender for President in 1968, not 1964.

Still, it’s enjoyable enough, although if coarse language bothers you, this book will annoy you. Non-essential; I suspect that his next volume when his writing career begins in earnest, will be more to my liking.

Movie review: Life of Pi

After making it back home from the Madison Theatre after seeing Wreck-it Ralph, I went back there with my friend Mary, while The Wife and the Daughter went ice skating. We saw Life of Pi, the fifth Best Picture nomination I’ve seen this season.

One thing is for sure – I don’t believe in God any more than I did; that’s a reference to a line in the film. If you have seen the commercial of the young man on a boat with a Bengal tiger, you find out early on that that guy survives, because he’s telling this whole back story to some writer guy. This is only occasionally interesting to me, the growing up at a zoo, though there is an important early scene involving the tiger, and another setup involving swimming.

When the zoo is being moved from India to Canada, and a storm hits that imperils everyone aboard, human and animal, then it gets rather interesting. The bulk of the film is this vegetarian Catholic Hindu trying not to become a meal for this powerful carnivore.

This lengthy segment is alternating tense and quite lovely, with the 3D surprisingly effective. The Daughter would have been quite unsettled had she seen it, even though the film had a PG rating.

I liked this movie more than I think it sounds; it just took me a while to hone in on it, not having read the book on which it is based. All the actors playing Pi were strong, especially Suraj Sharma as the Pi on the boat. It’s quite an interesting, nonlinear tale, involving a mysterious island. It’ll stick with me for a while, I believe.

BOOK REVIEW: The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

This is the narrative of a bunch of soldiers, including one named Tim O’Brien, who ended up fighting in the Vietnam war, not always clear on the motivation.

Each year, there is an event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts called The Big Read. The idea is that whole communities, generally through the local library, pick one of (this year) 21 books for people to read. The Albany Fund for Education, a “not-for-profit charitable organization that raises funds for innovative programs in support of the Albany City School District” picked Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Free copies were distributed through the branches of the Albany Public Library, of which I am an active and vocal supporter. I had never participated before, but this time, someone literally had a copy of the book, said, “You ought to read this, it’s good,” and put it in my hands.

It’s helpful that it reads on the title page, “a work of fiction” because I would have thought otherwise. Indeed, the book is true, even if a few of the circumstances have changed. There’s quite a bit of contemplation about what “truth” is in the book, including the chapter, “How to tell a true war story.”

This is the narrative of a bunch of soldiers, including one named Tim O’Brien, who ended up fighting in the Vietnam war, not always clear on the motivation. Some of the guys made it back home, others didn’t. Those who made it sometimes had a difficult time, and those who didn’t have a hard time felt some pangs of guilt over THAT.

The writing style is intentionally nonlinear. It does not start at the beginning and go to the end. Sometimes, one gets a bit of recapitulation, so that by the end of the story, one KNOWS these guys, and can relate to their travails.

During the war, going off to Canada was an option many men considered, and some actually did, to avoid the war. Other thought of this as an act of cowardice, but if you read “On the Rainy River,” you might think otherwise.

The book was published in 1990, and about half of the 20-odd stories had been previously published, five in Esquire magazine. The edition I have is from 2009, suggesting that, when it is well told, the experience of war is, unfortunately, timeless.

Here’s a study guide of this extremely positively reviewed book.

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