Films
My mother and I watched two films recently.
The first was There Will Be Blood. It's a film about an oilman in 1910s America who is a suave businessman but also just hates people, and yet works in a business where he deals with lots of them, and it follows his exploits in trying to extract oil from an oilfield in a small town, with the occasional really self-destructive outbursts. There's not that much that happens, and the film is long, so the performances mainly rely on strong acting by the lead characters. Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as the oilman, and the preacher he goes up against is also pretty good. It's a great film as an exploration of the particular anti-social type of character that drives some people to be successful, but not really an easy one to watch. I can see why it got excellent reviews, though.
The second was Midnight in Paris, the only recent Woody Allen film to have had any great reviews. It's about a writer who comes to Paris with his fiance. He's a successful movie script writer but he wants to write a novel. While in Paris, he starts to find Paris inspirational, and at midnight he gets transported back in time to the 1920s, when he meets his literary heroes such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It's a great film about artists, art and writing, as well as the sense of nostalgia. I liked it.
The first was There Will Be Blood. It's a film about an oilman in 1910s America who is a suave businessman but also just hates people, and yet works in a business where he deals with lots of them, and it follows his exploits in trying to extract oil from an oilfield in a small town, with the occasional really self-destructive outbursts. There's not that much that happens, and the film is long, so the performances mainly rely on strong acting by the lead characters. Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as the oilman, and the preacher he goes up against is also pretty good. It's a great film as an exploration of the particular anti-social type of character that drives some people to be successful, but not really an easy one to watch. I can see why it got excellent reviews, though.
The second was Midnight in Paris, the only recent Woody Allen film to have had any great reviews. It's about a writer who comes to Paris with his fiance. He's a successful movie script writer but he wants to write a novel. While in Paris, he starts to find Paris inspirational, and at midnight he gets transported back in time to the 1920s, when he meets his literary heroes such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It's a great film about artists, art and writing, as well as the sense of nostalgia. I liked it.