I'll take these in order, mainly seen off the tv. Last year I saw Deepa Mehta's Water at my local arts cinema, I'd heard it pimped since before the oscar foreign language submission list came out and I'd been interested in it for a while. It didn't disappoint. So it was a lovely surprise to see the two previous efforts in her "elements" trilogy playing back to back on sky, so I checked them out.

The first, Fire, is about two lonely wives living under the same roof who begin a lesbian relationship due to their husbands' ignoring them. It's very well acted from the leads, but it's lurching in tone (rather like There Will Be Blood) as there are "comedic" scenes throughout (e.g. a servant masturbating to dirty movies in front of the mute grandmother who cannot alert anyone to his misdeeds) which are at odds with the drama they're telling. Decent watch but nothing too great.

The second one, Earth, is a very different film, set in Lahore during the partition of India. So it's political and has previous friends coming to blows over religious and political issues. Beautifully shot, nicely acted, but not terribly insightful as it's told through the child's eyes with both the positives and negatives that come with that. Still a good film and somewhere inbetween the opening and concluding chapters of the trilogy in terms of quality.

Now on to the good stuff, my final lovefilm dvd as my 3 month free trial is over, but what a way to go out. I said the other day I was only on to "minor" Ingmar Bergman films but this one, Summer Interlude, is one of his best that I've seen (either embarrassingly or impressively, it's the 27th film of his that I've been able to get my hands on). Similar to Summer With Monika in that  this too is about an idyllic summer which ends with a massive reality check, the simple 3 part structure of that film is not present here. This is about a Ballerina who upon receipt of someone's diary and following the postponing of a dress rehearsal finds herself on a boat back to where she spent her youth. She finds her old cottage and upon sitting down begins remembering her summer spent with a young man.

It's so incredibly fluid and smooth, the cinematography is first rate, the editing rhythmic and ebbing, it's a masterful job by Bergman of flowing between the timelines. The performance of Maj-Britt Nilsson is exceptional, as is expected in a Bergman film. It seems amazing that such a talented person that Bergman could extract such a great performance from only made three films with him (notorious as he is for repeatedly using the same actors), but his infatuation with Harriet Andersson was only 2 years away and it was probably more to do with him liking Harriet than being displeased with Nilsson. A Beautifully made film with an ending I find a tad rushed, but so much had been done so wonderfully up to that point you can almost forgive Bergman anything.

That's it though for quality sadly and I have two more to talk about. I have no idea why, but I saw Next with Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore (actually I do know why, I'll watch almost anything with Julie in it). For the most part it's an inoffensively average flick about a man (Cage) who can see two minutes into his future and the FBI (Moore) want to use him to prevent a terrorist attack. It's fine for long periods, but the gimmick (which is basically the great scene from Minority Report repeated over and over again) gets tiresome and the end completely wrecks the film, rendering it a complete conceit. They had no idea how to end this thing and crapped on long periods of the film which didn't have that much tension to begin with.

While Nicolas Cage could go back in time, Norma Shearer clearly could not and being in her mid-thirties meant that her and the 40+ year old Leslie Howard's version of Shakespeares drama about "Two houses, both alike in dignity" would be better entitled "Romeo and Juliet's Mom". They're insanely old for the part and they look all of their years, them being referred to as "young" is unintentionally hilarious. If you can get past that though Howard is okay, but Shearer was in full "shagging the boss" (MGM honcho Irving Thalberg, who she was married to) here, she's very limp and then horrendously over-theatrical when the big scenes come calling. The tone is all over the place, the comedy does not gel with the drama, it's the weakest adaptation I've seen by a mile and the only one that wasn't at least very good.