New law: Everyone must live up to my standards of quality or GET OFF MY PLANET.
Sigh. I'm so tired of this...
The bad news: It's transferred in full screen, not letterbox. Which utterly annihilates the cinematographic brilliance that I love so desperately about this film. Bastards. What was spectacular lighting, sublime framing, and gorgeous sweeping movement in letterbox is cramped, dizzying, and often just plain lost in full screen. And in some of the most lovely scenes faces are chopped in half and the framing is unbalanced. It's like the difference between a classic film and it's remake - The *personality*, the *magic*, is totally lost. ARRRRRGGGHHH.
On the other hand, you can actually see what an extraordinarily good kisser John is and when he's making out with York, I swear he looks like he's a 20 year-old kid again. I wonder if his wife can stand to watch this movie - It would take a *saint* not to feel jealous watching them. I will *never* tire of them knocking into the tea service as they collapse to the floor to make wild monkey love... (No, we don't get to *see* that. ;-)
And the sound is better - When Mark is threatening to run, and she kisses him again, you can hear him moan in angst and it's.... AUGH!
eBay, you have failed me... Why has this photo never come up for sale? Bastards.
Here's a quickie to hold you over... Mark recites part of An Arundel Tomb by Phillip Larkin: PLAY MP3
An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin