Things I have watched
Jan. 25th, 2015 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariWild (2014)
I was surprised at how much I liked this movie - it was definitely more than the aims-to-be-inspiring chick flick I was half expecting. Reese Witherspoon gives a really good, restrained performance as Cheryl Strayed, a woman whose grief over her mother's death causes her to seriously lose her way. In order to extricate herself from the mess she's made of her life and get back to the person she wants to be, Cheryl decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, a trip of a few thousand miles and a few months. It's grueling and Cheryl is clearly not fully prepared. But she gets by on sheer determination, brains, and the help of a few kind strangers along the way.
The cinematography was very good - the west coast is gorgeous. It made me want to go hiking out there, too. I also very much liked the way the film wove in flashbacks to Cheryl's earlier life and the things that brought her to the trail. They weren't entirely sequential, they were sometimes fragmentary, and sometimes came at unexpected points, so it was more like the way real memory works. It avoid over-sentimentality and brought the viewer closer to Cheryl.
Life on Mars (UK version, 2006)
This series falls into the genre of British people solving mysteries, and it was quite good. It follow Sam Tyler, a Manchester police detective in 2006 who has a serious car accident and wakes up in 1973. He's still in Manchester and still a detective, but things are very different. Not only does Sam have to function in 1973, he also has to try to figure out what has happened to him: is he dead, in a coma, hallucinating, insane, time-travelling?
The mysteries themselves are often quite clever, but it is the interactions among the characters that really make the series. Sam often clashes with his superior, Gene Hunt, who is very old-school and brash. In fact, he and Sam make a nice inversion of a typical cop show trope. Here it is the experienced chief who is the renegade and the new guy who is the one who want to reign things in and go more by the book. I also liked the sweet and slow-boiling romance between Sam and Woman Police Constable Annie Cartwright.
Watching Sam try to deal with what has happened to him is also interesting. Not only does he have to try to figure out what is going on, he also has to cope with connections between his 2006 life and his current existence in 1973. The episodes where he meets his parents as they are in 1973 are particularly poignant. The show never does fully explain what has happened to Sam. The ambiguity works, though. And there is a follow-up series, Ashes to Ashes that more fully explains things, but it's not available in the US yet.
Defiance (2008)
I really liked this film about the Bielski partisans, a group of around 1000 Polish and Russian Jews who hid in the woods during WWII. They did so for about two and half years and thus survived the war and successfully built a community in the forest, with a school, medical clinic, workshops, etc. The movie centers around Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig), the eldest of four brothers, who was the leader of the partisans, and his younger brother Zus (Liev Schreiber), who leaves the forest community to fight with a group of Soviet partisans nearby. Defiance thus gets to explore both survival and resistance in the face of the Holocaust, and it makes for a great story.
The performances are very good. I was particularly impressed by the way Craig was able to rearrange the muscles of his face to look Polish (Other Kenjari commented that he looked somewhat like my father in the film). He gave Tuvia a fitting mix of sadness, resolve, and resignation. Liev Schreiber was also good as Zus, a much more intense and volatile person than Tuvia - Scheiber was very intense but also very layered.
The film-makers make great use of a series of parallels throughout the movie. First, there are some great juxtapositions between what is going on in the forest encampment and what is going on with the Soviet partisans. Then, there is the extended invocation of the Exodus when the Bielski partisans have to move their encampment, complete with a river crossing. It makes for some very striking storytelling.
I was surprised at how much I liked this movie - it was definitely more than the aims-to-be-inspiring chick flick I was half expecting. Reese Witherspoon gives a really good, restrained performance as Cheryl Strayed, a woman whose grief over her mother's death causes her to seriously lose her way. In order to extricate herself from the mess she's made of her life and get back to the person she wants to be, Cheryl decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, a trip of a few thousand miles and a few months. It's grueling and Cheryl is clearly not fully prepared. But she gets by on sheer determination, brains, and the help of a few kind strangers along the way.
The cinematography was very good - the west coast is gorgeous. It made me want to go hiking out there, too. I also very much liked the way the film wove in flashbacks to Cheryl's earlier life and the things that brought her to the trail. They weren't entirely sequential, they were sometimes fragmentary, and sometimes came at unexpected points, so it was more like the way real memory works. It avoid over-sentimentality and brought the viewer closer to Cheryl.
Life on Mars (UK version, 2006)
This series falls into the genre of British people solving mysteries, and it was quite good. It follow Sam Tyler, a Manchester police detective in 2006 who has a serious car accident and wakes up in 1973. He's still in Manchester and still a detective, but things are very different. Not only does Sam have to function in 1973, he also has to try to figure out what has happened to him: is he dead, in a coma, hallucinating, insane, time-travelling?
The mysteries themselves are often quite clever, but it is the interactions among the characters that really make the series. Sam often clashes with his superior, Gene Hunt, who is very old-school and brash. In fact, he and Sam make a nice inversion of a typical cop show trope. Here it is the experienced chief who is the renegade and the new guy who is the one who want to reign things in and go more by the book. I also liked the sweet and slow-boiling romance between Sam and Woman Police Constable Annie Cartwright.
Watching Sam try to deal with what has happened to him is also interesting. Not only does he have to try to figure out what is going on, he also has to cope with connections between his 2006 life and his current existence in 1973. The episodes where he meets his parents as they are in 1973 are particularly poignant. The show never does fully explain what has happened to Sam. The ambiguity works, though. And there is a follow-up series, Ashes to Ashes that more fully explains things, but it's not available in the US yet.
Defiance (2008)
I really liked this film about the Bielski partisans, a group of around 1000 Polish and Russian Jews who hid in the woods during WWII. They did so for about two and half years and thus survived the war and successfully built a community in the forest, with a school, medical clinic, workshops, etc. The movie centers around Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig), the eldest of four brothers, who was the leader of the partisans, and his younger brother Zus (Liev Schreiber), who leaves the forest community to fight with a group of Soviet partisans nearby. Defiance thus gets to explore both survival and resistance in the face of the Holocaust, and it makes for a great story.
The performances are very good. I was particularly impressed by the way Craig was able to rearrange the muscles of his face to look Polish (Other Kenjari commented that he looked somewhat like my father in the film). He gave Tuvia a fitting mix of sadness, resolve, and resignation. Liev Schreiber was also good as Zus, a much more intense and volatile person than Tuvia - Scheiber was very intense but also very layered.
The film-makers make great use of a series of parallels throughout the movie. First, there are some great juxtapositions between what is going on in the forest encampment and what is going on with the Soviet partisans. Then, there is the extended invocation of the Exodus when the Bielski partisans have to move their encampment, complete with a river crossing. It makes for some very striking storytelling.
