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We had a marathon week watching all 4 seasons of "The Tudors" and although I had to skip a lot of graphic scenes due to the young ones, Jonathan Rhys Meyers' portrayal as king Henry the 8th was absolutely worth noting.
I don't have a TV so cheers for the reminder of this series... have never seen it, but Henry VIII is one of my favorites, as is Rhys Meyers. I'll check it out at the library, if possible, to see if I like it... if so, it shall be one of my new DVD collections.
I don't have a TV so cheers for the reminder of this series... have never seen it, but Henry VIII is one of my favorites, as is Rhys Meyers. I'll check it out at the library, if possible, to see if I like it... if so, it shall be one of my new DVD collections.
Hope you had Happy Holidays, Ans! Happy New Year!
It's definitely one of mine now. If you like Meyers, you'll like it, he got my attention especially toward the end, when Henry VIII was nearing his death...superb performance , reminding me of Richard Harris in the musical Camelot!
I don't have a TV so cheers for the reminder of this series... have never seen it, but Henry VIII is one of my favorites, as is Rhys Meyers. I'll check it out at the library, if possible, to see if I like it... if so, it shall be one of my new DVD collections.
My parents and I went to see War Horse on Monday. This is Steven Spielberg's newest flick and it's already garnering Oscar buzz. I have no idea why, to be honest, unless it's just that it's a Spielberg movie and therefore the Oscar buzz is mandatory.
I wanted to see this when I first saw the trailer, but the reality.... Eek. I wouldn't say it was a bad movie, but I didn't enjoy it at all.
2 out of 5 stars for me.
Major spoilers about the movie below....
Spoiler
A lot of the scenes, particularly in the beginning, are beautiful: the bucolic English countryside makes you want to go for a visit ASAP. Just gorgeous. And really there aren't any BAD people in the movie. The main character of the movie is the horse, Joey, and he's surrounded throughout the film by caretakers who genuinely seem to care for him, which is nice to see. A couple of the human characters are maybe not-so-nice, but it's not a movie with a villain -- unless the villain is the war itself. I did notice that the only humans who were painted in a negative light were either Germans or aristocratic.)
There's a Saving Private Ryan-esque battle between the English and the Germans across No Man's Land. Maybe not as graphic as SPR, but still...high body count.
And there's an obligatory, Spielberg happy ending at the end. Yay. (Although his aesthetic choices for the final shots were jarring for me.)
But the reason I couldn't enjoy the movie is because it was just one harrowing scene after another. Poor Joey. I "watched" a lot of the movie with my eyes closed or my hands over my eyes. It was just so hard to watch what he was going through. Not just him, but the other war horses, too. He wasn't the only horse in this movie, of course. There were hundreds, and watching them die by the dozens -- from gunfire or overuse -- was painful.
On the one hand, Spielberg sort of anthropomorphized the main horse. He was intelligent, noble, compassionate, honorable...the finest horse in all the land. And that was fine with me. I was happy to buy into that, and buy into the loving relationship between Joey and his owner, Albert. Between Joey and all the people who had the care and keeping of him, really. But on the other hand, the other horses were portrayed as expendable cattle. I couldn't root for Joey and yet remain unaffected by the dozens of other animals dying grisly and wasteful, painful deaths. There's a scene after a disastrous cavalry charge that shows literally dozens of horses lying slain on the battlefield. (Maybe it says bad things about me, but I felt worse about the loss of equine life than I did about the loss of human life in that scene. The men enlisted willingly or were professional soldiers. The animals were hapless victims.) In another scene, we're shown a large grave holding dozens of dead horses. We see a horse buckle under the strain of pulling cannon, so the German officer in charge matter-of-factly shoots him in the head, while other solders pull the now-dead horse out of the line and off to the side and replace him with another candidate who maybe will be a bit luckier. The barbed-wire scene near the end of the movie almost had me hyperventilating in the chair. If I'd been in the privacy of my own home, I would have been sobbing noisily, but instead I was just gritting my teeth and trying to control my weeping. (It wasn't the good kind of movie-theatre crying, either. By that scene, I was so worn out by the horrors poor Joey experienced that I felt truly angry.) Actually, if I'd been watching the movie in the privacy of my own home, I would have turned it off long before the barbed-wire scene happened.
My mother left the theatre with 20 or 30 minutes still in the movie and didn't return, and when we joined her in the car afterwards, she was still seething. She deemed the movie "malicious." It was just too much for her to watch. My father enjoyed it, however. I think he liked the overall story and I don't think he was bothered by the collateral damage. It's just a movie, after all -- not real. I didn't hate the movie but I definitely didn't enjoy it, and I would never want to see it again.
Just saw an interesting German vampire movie: "We are the night", it is available on Netflix streaming. I felt that it was nicely executed, although the story was nothing extraordinary, just a nicely acted, decent movie. Only thing I hated about it was it was dubbed in English. I would rather watch it in Geman with English subtitles. Dubbing a foreign movie to suit the viewer's interests takes away from the "essence" of the movie in my opinion.
Twight: Breaking Dawn. Had forgotten that I went to see this movie a few weeks ago with a younger friend. Let me say that I saw the first Twilight movie and thought it was excellent. The Breaking Dawn movie seemed to have slid down a few notches in quality, etc. I wasn't bored, but the movie seemed to take a long time to say just a few things...it was stretched thin...and didn't think the quality was the same. Possibly if you are a Twilight fan you will like it.
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