dirac

Does old age exempt you from picking up the occasional tab? I imagine David Rockefeller does so despite his advanced years. And my late grandfather cooked until a stroke made it dangerous. Hardly constitutes 'having a dig in' for Ashton.

SanderO, there are many things wrong with awards ceremonies as well as contemporary cinema, but it is possible to discuss them without deploying phrases like 'screw that' and I wish you would keep this consideration in mind should you choose to post any further observations on the matter.

Well...I’d not go quite that far, although I do see what you mean, GWTW. The category is not for children IMO, and my example, Kelly Macdonald, is young and beautiful and a plausible leading woman. I agree – do the awards mean as much if unaccompanied by a big ceremony and the attendant fuss? I suppose they do, kind of, but it’s definitely not the same.

yes, I never would have suspected he was that young and it makes his performance all the more remarkable. Such dreadful news. I pray for the peace of his family. He did age most convincingly in the role for an actor of his age. The others in the cast were good and Jake G. is adorable but the role of Ennis is the key to the story. Ledger's was the crucial contribution. (He did another movie around the same time, Casanova, which wasn't up to much but gave an indication of what was looking like a very wide range.)

You know, miliosr, I thought she was good but not all that. The late Heath Ledger was just as good IMO, but he was at a disadvantage, lacking the gimmick of being in drag. I'm also against the recent trend in the Supporting Actor/Actress categories of nominating stars in slightly subordinate (or actually co-starring, as in the case of Jamie Foxx in "Collateral") roles. That's not what they're for - the intention is to recognize acting of distinction by non-leading actors, although there may be some overlap. Blanchett already has a best supporting and one of these days she'll get best actress. Better to spread the wealth. I thought Kelly Macdonald was excellent in No Country for Old Men, for example, and would have been a deserving nominee here.

Here are the nominations. http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/2008012...0102108000.html

I had trouble taking in the headline. Not only that he was so young but he had so much promise as an actor and artist. Ledger struck me at first as yet another blond hunky number with a winning smile, and then came Brokeback Mountain, where he was good beyond all expectations. (I still think he should have gotten the Oscar over Philip Seymour Hoffman, although that's a trivial matter at such a time.) This is dreadful. I am so sorry.

Thanks for posting, papeetepatrick. This sounds like a promising idea for an opera. Food for thought in the article, too.

Thanks for taking the time to post, Ed. These all sound worth reading. And he gets profiled in Vanity Fair.

Belated thanks for the link above. Interesting.

Thank you for posting, vagansmom. I'm inclined to agree with you about the 'quirky' independent picture, it's almost become a genre to itself, and I have a few problems with it. I still have not seen Juno but it seems to be one of the better ones. (I haven't put up a thread about it, but 'The Savages' is a movie about family matters that may serve as a grim but healthful corrective. Contrast the passing of Philip Bosco in "The Savages" with that of Alan Arkin in "Little Miss Sunshine" and you'll see what I mean.)

Thank you, PK. I hear Ellen Page is indeed very good. Probably in another era Juno would have been a play first.

Thank you for the report, Helene. I hope others who see the production will chime in. I certainly wish I could afford a subscription to SF Opera - I'd settle for bronze.

Thank you for posting, sandik. Our day will come.

Thanks for the heads up, atm711. I'll keep an eye out for it. I saw it some years ago and while I don't like it nearly as much as the Thirties version with Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, it has its own interest.

I often find that if I see the movie before reading the book, the film has a way of imposing itself on my mind’s eye. This can be true even if the movie itself wasn’t very good (and Children of Men was a very good movie). I don’t always mind, however. I doubt if I will get around to reading No Country for Old Men again, but if I do I will not mind visualizing scenes from the film. JMcN, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Da Vinci Code in book form, and so I was actually looking forward to the movie, figuring that there was, well, room for improvement. It turned out to be not bad at all and the locations were splendid. Interesting that you noted a difference of opinion between those who’d read it earlier rather than later. I disliked book and film of Bridget Jones’ Diary (although I might have liked the latter better if they’d gone with Kate Winslet instead of Renee Zellweger). True.....but not good news if those elements were what you enjoyed about the book. I liked the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ Claudius books back in the day, but the episodes dealing with the reign of Claudius were weak precisely because the series couldn’t incorporate those parts of the book that didn’t push the story forward, such as Claudius’ noodlings with the alphabet. I really enjoyed Enigma (the movie was good, too, although Michael Apted is not perhaps the ideal director for a thriller) and Pompeii too – have not read Imperium although I believe the book came up earlier in this thread. I enjoyed the Iliad much better as an adult than a kid. I wasn’t ready for it back then.

Thank you for the heads up, volcanohunter. (When I think of how difficult it used to be to see many of these old titles, and now look.)

Interesting view of On the Corner, miliosr. I couldn’t get that interested in a Miles Davis album with hardly any trumpet on it, though. (I did like Live-Evil, which came a year before On the Corner.) I agree that the critical reception was by and large uncomprehending, but what I didn’t like about a lot of Davis’ faux-funk was that it was just that, faux; why listen to imitation Sly Stone with the real thing readily available? The same could be said of Stockhausen, as well.

I like that kind of thing, too. It works as comedy also. There’s an old piece by James Thurber called ‘If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,’ in which the hammered Union chieftain surrenders to a puzzled Lee. Some time ago I read a thriller by Robert Harris called ‘Fatherland,’ which takes place in a post World War II era after Germany’s overwhelming victory. An entertaining read. artist, IMO there's no other work 'like' Paradise Lost, but if you are looking for great epic poetry, there's The Iliad and The Odyssey, and you might even have a go at Spenser's The Faerie Queene, not a big favorite of mine, but others love it. Milton was a fascinating man and his life and shorter works are well worth looking into. You might also try Wordsworth's 'The Prelude,' which was deeply influenced by Milton although very different thematically.

I expect that it did. The stage sequences would have carried considerably more force on the big screen, I think. I'm sorry I missed it in theatres.

You don't have to be a 'buff' to know a good film when you see it.

I did catch this on DVD recently, and although it’s watchable I am sorry to report I didn't care for it much. Do forgive me, glebb. Part of the difficulty is the biopic genre; there are the scenes of struggle, the big break scene, the pinnacle of stardom scenes, etc., and La Vie en Rose doesn’t always avoid cliche. We even get a fictional Hooker with a Heart of Gold. There's surprisingly little sense of the artist, except for the view that Suffering Made Her Great, which may have been true in part but isn't exactly an overpowering insight. The arty flashbacks didn’t work for me as storytelling or as drama; the time leaps are sometimes jarring in unhelpful ways, and there’s a particularly bad patch at the end when the writer/director, Olivier Dahan, pulls out another personal tragedy like a rabbit from a hat. Some events are shown in such a way that they make little or no sense – the death of Louis Leplée is botched thoroughly, you have little idea of what’s going on except that our heroine is unhappy again. And you’d get the impression from this movie that that’s all she was; even if you’re not familiar with the events of Piaf’s life, the movie shows you what’s coming and emphasizes the bad stuff, of which there was admittedly plenty, so everything is just one long foreshadowing of the ghastly end and you’re basically sitting there watching Edith’s Magical Misery Tour. (The jumping around also puts a lid on coherent character development, and for me it limited the story’s emotional power as well; just as I was getting involved with Piaf at one point, I’d get yanked away, and after a point it simply became annoying.) Piaf was not above self mythologizing, in the way of many great stars, but Dahan delivers everything absolutely straight. I would have hoped for more singing, too. The songs that we do get are fine, and Marion Cotillard’s performance is a strong argument for the virtues of lip-synching, but even more would have been welcome and some of the songs are snipped up or interrupted. One of the virtues of the musical biopic as a genre is that you’re likely to get a fine perfomance at the center and Cotillard does not fail in this respect, especially in the beginning showing us Piaf as an almost feral street arab (and she’s good at showing us how Piaf never quite lost this quality even at the height of success). She’s considerably taller than Piaf and yet manages to shrink herself down to size. (There were times when she reminded of Giulietta Masina, in ways both bad and good.) And in a movie that lasts almost two and a half hours, Dahan found no room for World War II, a period during which Piaf was rather busy onstage and off. It's a serious omission, and I wonder if the time hopping method was a way of skirting it.

Thank you for starting the topic, sandik, and to all of you for posting. I confess I'm not rushing out to see this one as I have become increasingly wary of indie pictures characterized with the favorable language I've seen in the reviews of 'Juno' and the characters are described as 'quirky,' but you reassure me that if I do go the experience won't be painful and I might even like it.

Yes, it would. Sounds like a nice spring. Thank you, Andre and Patrick, for telling us about the production, I've enjoyed reading these.

Thank you, vagansmom. No indeed, it's not funny at all when you're the one at the desk. That wouldn’t bother me, but I had the impression that many of the style details were off. There’s a montage of Anne Hathaway right after her makeover that is really quite odd – here she is looking like Ali MacGraw circa 1972, here she is again looking like an extra from Eyes of Laura Mars. In another era it might have been, with Susan Anspach instead of Meryl Streep. In the Thirties you had snappy comedies about girls on the make (The Greeks Had a Word for Them, Three on a Match, etc., later translating into How to Marry a Millionaire and so on). Eventually this material made it to television, its rightful medium, in Sex and the City, and now with movies like this one and the upcoming big screen Sex and the City (and unless Michael Patrick King has come up with a few decent ideas, of which the series had completely run out, that one is going to be like Judgment at Nuremberg), it’s returning to the multiplex. I think it’s best on television and I don’t mean that as denigrating; at its best Sex and the City was a wonderful example of, among other things, the pleasures of good ensemble acting. There are quite a few movies like that these days, especially with these very long trailers that they have taken to showing some of which pretty much give away the film, saving alert moviegoers ten or eleven dollars. I thought Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt were good, given what they had to work with.