So despite doing an entry earlier it appears I have a load of stuff to talk about, so I'll try and get that out of the way in one go. I'll start with the Camilles. Now, over the past couple of months I've been raiding Lovefilm's Greta Garbo box-set and this was the last one I hadn't seen. It's an excellent role for Garbo and she gets quite brilliant when the big scenes come calling, she holds EVERYTHING back and totally underplays it, such confidence in her abilities and such a shrewd reading of the material to do that - it pays dividends. Robert Taylor is more than adequate and Lionel Barrymore very memorable in his scene with Garbo. Overall good but not great, but worth it for the performance alone.
So the bonus, quite literally, was they put the 1921 Valentino silent version on the special features part of the disc. I popped it in out of curiosity and it starred simply "Nazimova", who I'd never heard of before but WHAT A FACE! I love that woman's nose. Apparantly she was an accomplished stage actress but I'll let you find all that out on imdb if you're interested. Anyway, this was a "modern" version with some amazing art-deco sets. The acting is obviously overly stylised but i enjoyed it, Valentino really came into his own when being "hurt", but this was the Nazimova show, she was excellent. The film though is even more stripped down than the Garbo one and sadly as a consequence not as moving. It's still though well worth watching both, especially together to see just how much things had changed in a little over a decade.
On to the comedies, I caught Thank You for Smoking on sky, finally, which I've been meaning to do for some time. Aaron Eckhart is very good, consistently funny, charming and knowing. The actor playing his son though may be the worst child actor I've ever seen, he ruined Birth and was the reason I turned off Godsend as quickly as I did - he's completely incapable of portraying the slightest emotion, he's appalling. Anyway, the most fun part of the movie is the Maria Bello parts where Eckhart's cigarette company spin-doctor comes weekly to compare notes with his counterparts from the alcohol and firearms industries. In the end I do think, despite being consistently laugh-out-loud funny, it is ulitmately in love with itself and as a result I found it easy to like but very hard to love. Well worth a look though.
Now this next one has not and doesn't look like it's getting a release here and I suppose I should do a full review on it but I'll do it here instead. The Hunting Party is about a journalist (Richard Gere) and a cameraman (Terrence Howard) who renite 5 years after Gere's on-screen meltdown which resulted in his firing (and Howard's promotion) whilst reporting on the war in Bosnia. The film's set up is Gere wants to find "the fox" (obviously based on Radovan Karadzic) and needs a favour from Howard to help him do this as he has no cameraman. They are joined by the son of the network vice-president (Jesse Eisenberg) and it soon becomes clear Gere is after the $5m reward for the Fox's capture.
It takes a while to get going but once it does it is HILARIOUS as the three journalists are continually mistaken for a CIA hit-squad, which is only confirmed by their continual denials. You can even forgive the script the odd contrivance as they find their way closer and closer to their "target" with increasingly humourous situations. Diane Kruger makes a cameo and is quite brilliant, that alone makes this unmissable. It's silly, witty, clever and the final credits are unmissable (with them letting you know what was true in the story based on real-life, plus making some brutally funny observations on the subject as a whole), I've no idea why it's not being released here but it must do at some point as it's too good not to.
Finally, The Cherry Orchard, an adaptation of the Chekhov play, written and directed by Greek legend Mihalis Kakogiannis. It's a great cast, headlined by Charlotte Rampling, with very nice supporting turns from the likes of Melanie Lynskey and Katrin Cartlidge and the characters throughout are very interesting. I do feel though that the longer this went the less interesting it got, especially after the fate of the orchard (which Rampling and her brother, Alan Bates, are being pressured to sell to pay their debts) is sealed. It is very nicely acted though, especially by Rampling who is better in the role the less she has to "do" and the film as a whole has sweet moments which tantalisingly fall short of being genuinely poignant. So a nice enough watch but stalls short of greatness.