Presenting: Movies I've Meant To Buy, But Never Got Around To (Until Now)
Enigma
This film is set at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, among the codebreakers and support staff who labored to decipher German communications. The Germans have changed their submarine code just as three huge convoys have sailed from the US and everyone's scrambling to find a way back in. Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) has been called back from Cambridge, where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown following the distintegration of his relationship with Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows). Just before he returns to the Park, Claire disappears.
The knock on the movie when it first came out (and why I didn't break down the door to see it) is that it's slow moving, which is true, but it's more "measured" than just "slow". The Tom Stoppard script is pretty good. There are about three real anvils in there and a coda I'm not overly fond of, but it does a good job of adapting a murky novel into a movie. The performances are all quite good. Dougray Scott carries the movie ably, and he gives you a good idea of how much thought his character gives to each problem. Kate Winslet rocks, as usual, is a believable prim and proper nerd, and she gets the best line in the movie. Jeremy Northam seems to push his oily, ultra-upper crust intelligence agent a bit too hard, but it makes sense. Saffron Burrows is approximately 8 feet tall in heels and gives a good performance for what time we see her, although the fashions and makeup make her look rather older than she actually is.
Sitting in here is also the best movie I've yet seen about codebreaking work during World War II. Edited down, it would be a good 20-minute film for a history class. It doesn't go through exactly how it's done, it just shows the mechanical computers, tells how an Enigma machine works, how the ciphers were broken in the first place, and what you needed to read their traffic.
A Very Long Engagement
Or, Amelie at the End of the World War. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou reunite for a very different fable. Last time, the message was about taking a risk, this time it's about faith and constancy. Mathilde refuses to believe the official notice that her fiancee died at the Somme in the last months of the war and sets about trying to locate him.
Jeunet doesn't give Tautou as much to work with this time around, except in flashbacks. Present-day Mathilde goes between worry and determination with very little in between, but those flashbacks do go a long way. She's not immediately winning in the same way Amelie was, but at the same time she doesn't vacillate the way Amelie did, and she's a character you want to root for.
If the palette for Amelie was all red and green, A Very Long Engagement is all beige and blue-gray, depending on the scene. Present day (1919) France is a digitally washed-out beige, full of wheatfields and other grasses. It isn't the dust bowl browns seen in O Brother Where Art Thou?, but it looks very dry. The Somme is the opposite. The trenches are half flooded, it rains a lot, and no man's land is a collection ponds formed from the craters left by bombs and artillery shells. The orange of fire is nearly the only thing to cross those boundaries.
The color palette is part of the reason, but Jeunet's version of the front never comes close to feeling like reality. Even as the horrors of war are shown, it isn't Saving Private Ryan: 1918. It never stops being a story, and I'm not sure how I feel about that after just one viewing. I liked the movie as a whole, but this part of it is unsettled.
State & Main
I've seen this one before, back when it first came out on VHS. I liked it then, and I still do. Some comments:
Tomorrow: Either Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
This film is set at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, among the codebreakers and support staff who labored to decipher German communications. The Germans have changed their submarine code just as three huge convoys have sailed from the US and everyone's scrambling to find a way back in. Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) has been called back from Cambridge, where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown following the distintegration of his relationship with Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows). Just before he returns to the Park, Claire disappears.
The knock on the movie when it first came out (and why I didn't break down the door to see it) is that it's slow moving, which is true, but it's more "measured" than just "slow". The Tom Stoppard script is pretty good. There are about three real anvils in there and a coda I'm not overly fond of, but it does a good job of adapting a murky novel into a movie. The performances are all quite good. Dougray Scott carries the movie ably, and he gives you a good idea of how much thought his character gives to each problem. Kate Winslet rocks, as usual, is a believable prim and proper nerd, and she gets the best line in the movie. Jeremy Northam seems to push his oily, ultra-upper crust intelligence agent a bit too hard, but it makes sense. Saffron Burrows is approximately 8 feet tall in heels and gives a good performance for what time we see her, although the fashions and makeup make her look rather older than she actually is.
Sitting in here is also the best movie I've yet seen about codebreaking work during World War II. Edited down, it would be a good 20-minute film for a history class. It doesn't go through exactly how it's done, it just shows the mechanical computers, tells how an Enigma machine works, how the ciphers were broken in the first place, and what you needed to read their traffic.
A Very Long Engagement
Or, Amelie at the End of the World War. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou reunite for a very different fable. Last time, the message was about taking a risk, this time it's about faith and constancy. Mathilde refuses to believe the official notice that her fiancee died at the Somme in the last months of the war and sets about trying to locate him.
Jeunet doesn't give Tautou as much to work with this time around, except in flashbacks. Present-day Mathilde goes between worry and determination with very little in between, but those flashbacks do go a long way. She's not immediately winning in the same way Amelie was, but at the same time she doesn't vacillate the way Amelie did, and she's a character you want to root for.
If the palette for Amelie was all red and green, A Very Long Engagement is all beige and blue-gray, depending on the scene. Present day (1919) France is a digitally washed-out beige, full of wheatfields and other grasses. It isn't the dust bowl browns seen in O Brother Where Art Thou?, but it looks very dry. The Somme is the opposite. The trenches are half flooded, it rains a lot, and no man's land is a collection ponds formed from the craters left by bombs and artillery shells. The orange of fire is nearly the only thing to cross those boundaries.
The color palette is part of the reason, but Jeunet's version of the front never comes close to feeling like reality. Even as the horrors of war are shown, it isn't Saving Private Ryan: 1918. It never stops being a story, and I'm not sure how I feel about that after just one viewing. I liked the movie as a whole, but this part of it is unsettled.
State & Main
I've seen this one before, back when it first came out on VHS. I liked it then, and I still do. Some comments:
- Rebecca Pidgeon has the most perfect diction in the western hemisphere. The precision of her dialogue is perfectly astounding.
- The David Mamet stylized dialogue is more noticeable to me now than it was before, but it doesn't bother me.
- Future Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman does a good job with a character who's both a little overwritten and underwritten. I mean, he plays a writer, and the character's ideas are spoken about a little too much, but who he is rests a lot on Hoffman's performance.
- I think the subplot about the firehouse window must've had more to it, because it was talked about far too much to lead to just one discovery.
- Clark Gregg actually looks different when he's playing the bad guy.
- The tagline for this movie is remarkably stupid.
Tomorrow: Either Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.