Loads of old stuff...

Well I've been monumentally depressing myself with the films I've been watching, none really being new ones so I haven't mentioned them, but I do plan to talk about pretty much everything I've seen this year, but it's not that much really.

I managed to see The Notorious Bettie Page a few days ago. Lovely little performance by Gretchen Mol, a tad mannered, but it was very cute seeing her do all the facial expressions on the photo-shoots and then contrast that with some of the more meaty scenes. Her face when presented with some of the kinky stuff she has to wear is just a treat. In the end a run of the mill biopic, but it's actually funny throughout and that light tone serves the film well. Worth checking out for Mol, definitely.

I also saw Kurosawa's Dreams solely because I knew Scorsese was playing Vincent Van Gogh in one of the segments. By its nature (it's depicting 8 of Kurosawa's dreams) it is very fragmented and while there are some similar themes thoughout them the whole thing does remain a mystery. It is stunningly beautiful though, the cinematography and art direction are just gorgeous. Having a man run after Van Gogh through his paintings, oh it's so exhilarating. Overall, it's interestingly impenetrable and a treat for the senses, even though sense isn't too high on the list of priorities.

Yesterday I saw a film which was denied eligibility for the oscars foreign language category in 2005 due to being too much in English. While there is a lot of English in it, I still didn't know what was going on in some of the segments (the copy I saw wasn't subtitled) and it was only broad plot outlines I read later that filled me in. The film was called Be With Me and it's from Singapore, telling the tales of an old man coming to terms with his wife's death, a security guard who sweetly stalks a woman who works in his building, a couple of schoolgirls who start a lesbian relationship (this isn't the first film on that topic I've seen from that region recently) and a deaf-blind woman and how she lives despite her disadvantages. It's very well made but maybe without the subtitles in one of the sections I missed too much of the specifics to get emotionally involved.

I am a really big Ingmar Bergman fan but a relatively new one. Before I got an online rental account a couple of years ago I'd not seen any of his films as they're never on tv and were always too expensive (£15 a pop) to blind-buy. Now I've seen well over 20 of his films and since the unveiling of Film Four and his death more have been on television. I decided to watch a minor film of his (as that's all I have left to unearth really, apart from Face to Face which I'm dying to see for Liv but I'm reluctant to ebay it) made when in exile in Germany for tax problems, The Serpent's Egg. Well, it's not bad but not great, Liv comes alive about halfway through and David Carradine is fine but nothing special. He has an interesting point, but it takes so long getting there and it's so divorced from the characters we've followed it's not something I'd recommend unless you're a fan of the people involved.

Which brings me to today. I've just re-activated my lovefilm account and also on new year's day I ordered some dvds from an import company, and they all came today. I watched Gong Li play a single mother raising her deaf son in Breaking the Silence. Nothing too unexpected story-wise (it's fairly routine) or performance-wise (Gong is excellent as per usual) it's a really nice little film.

Then I saw Camille Claudel, which Lovefilm sent me and I've wanted to see it for YEARS because of Adjani's oscar nomination. I must say, sadly, I was a little disappointed. I've seen her be better in The Story of Adele H. and I've seen biopics of sculptors done better before in Ken Russell's Savage Messiah. This has very high production values, it's arty as hell but it drags so much, there are repetitve scenes, the acting feels forced at times (even though Adjani is such a gifted performer she can slip back into naturalism very quickly), but there are some genuinely moving moments in there, especially towards the end. It's good that the director made me care but he had to rely a lot on my patience before he got there.

Anyway, off to see an Emmanuelle Béart film at the cinema later, I haven't seen her in the cinema for 18 months or so and I'm really looking forward to that. More depression to pile on to all the misery I've seen this week? Well, it's about AIDS in the 1980s so I expect so...