... just been so little on recently. I have a 3 months for the price of one offer from lovefilm though and I may have to take them up on it because there's been so little on tv recently - I just had to check my vote history at imdb then this blog to see what I've written about and not, this'll be a spin through and some aren't complete viewings for varying reasons.
I saw The Year of Living Dangerously a while ago and ... I think I've been spoiled by The Quiet American. That said, this isn't the first journalist out in south-east Asia while it's kicking off-film even from that period, I enjoyed The Killing Fields a lot. This looked nice and had some decent performances (the oscar win for Linda Hunt is a joke, stunt casting is fine, but I'm not rewarding Krystyna Feldman in Mój Nikifor or Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There either - being convincing as a man or not is the *absolute minimum* and should be a complete afterthought) but it's more about making Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver look as pretty as possible than anything else. The subject has been tackled far better in many ways since.
I also saw The Inn of the Sixth Happiness for the first time in about 15 years - I remember them showing us this at Junior school and certain elements of it have stayed with me. It holds up though cinematically for a mature viewing of it. Ingrid Bergman is just exceptional and while Hollywood still hadn't got round to finding Oriental actors I thought it worked nicely for what it was. Obviously the end is incredibly moving and the final reel or two are almost literally pure cinema. Not without flaws (frequent injections of cheese into the proceedings) but a very fine film.
Last night I have no idea why (I just came across it online), but I watched One Day in September. I'm a fan of Kevin Macdonald after Touching the Void and to a lesser degree The Last King of Scotland, so I decided to check it out. Overall I found it a very well made piece capitalising on unprecedented access to the sole survivor of the terrorists very well. It was informative, pacey and comes to a dramatic climax very nicely. Thing is though, it's not a fiction film and having the montages to cool music which were so effective in The Last King of Scotland to set the mood, tone and time of the piece don't help when you're using modern stuff over unneccessary stock footage. Despite the thoroughness of 90% of it, dealing with the aftermath felt tacked on and rushed, not going into the detail of before and introducing rumour and innuendo rather than the eye-witness accounts of before. Also, going the Schindler's List route for the ending was an unneccessarily reaching act to try to sentimentalise what happened even more. Excellent for the most part but they either bottled out or didn't follow through - tantalisingly close to a brilliant documentary, let down by giving in to temptation.
Now for a trio of films I didn't finish. I caught the last half an hour or so of Travels With My Aunt and was a little disappointed in Maggie Smith. The film was okay and mildly amusing but she can do this sort of thing in her sleep and it got a bit one-note at times. Still a one-note Maggie Smith is better than 95% of other people and will make a film sufficiently watchable. I caught the first half of Fire Down Below waiting for the Wimbledon final and it turns out the film takes a complete change and becomes a different movie. The opening was okay, seemed pretty contrived as you could feel the pitch to the studio, but the leads make it more than watchable. Finally though I attempted to watch 300. Don't ask why, I was bored enough to give it a chance. Utterly risible, truly pathetic misogynist pap to make 14 year old geeks cream their pants over (in many, many ways). Style over any semblance of substance, unintentionally funny performances, fails on every conceivable level.