Breakfast was beef, mushroom and Monterey Jack omelets drowned in beef gravy; hash browns; orange juice. First DVD of the day was To the Wonder (2012), written and directed by Terence Mallick. Ben Affleck meets Olga Kurylenko while in Paris, they fall in love, and move with Kurylenko’s daughter to Oklahoma, where Affleck lives, and where the local priest, Javier Bardem, is trying to help his parishioners cope with the lives they’ve been given. The movie, to me, is about searching for purity, whether in romantic love, in Kurylenko’s case, or spiritual love, as with Bardem. Much as Bardem’s priest has a one-sided conversation with God throughout the movie (“You are everywhere, inside me and outside me, but I cannot see you”), Kurylenko is filmed with an Affleck who barely says anything at all in the film (perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue in all.) He’s there, physically, but his lack of dialogue makes him remote, unknowable. Like Mallick’s previous movie, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder eschews conventional narrative, so that we get two hours of one apercu after another, each lasting less than a minute, with each glimpse rarely given much context. I happen to like the approach, but it may grate on some viewers. Many of the scenelets are quite good though, for example one where a convict wants to get down on his knees to receive Bardem’s blessing, but is constantly irritated by the sunlight streaming in through the window each time he bends down. Bardem’s story in particular is quite moving; I wish we had more of it in the film. And Kurylenko does a fine job as a woman finding love. Affleck, perhaps by thematic design, barely registers. The film sometimes becomes a bit too precious (It’s the sort of movie where the two principals wander through an incredible amount of tall grass, over and over again), but overall, it’s certainly worth seeing. With a great score by Hanan Townshend. Recommended. My Amityville Horror (2012), written and directed by Eric Walter. This is a documentary about Daniel Lutz, one of the three children who lived in the Amityville house 35 years ago with their mother and stepfather. A lot of the movie is Lutz talking about his experiences, and reconnecting with some of the journalists and parapsychologists from that time. Lutz himself makes an interesting subject, bald and jittery, with a rage that’s just barely suppressed throughout the film (when he’s asked at the end if he’s willing to take a lie detector test to confirm his belief in what he’s been saying, he looks on camera like he’s considering a violent reaction to the interviewer.) And some of his claims (for example, that his stepfather used to levitate objects in their garage), are hard to believe. But it is a well-made documentary about an interesting guy. youtube/watch?v=g-t3l6T53V8
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 21:39:48 +0000
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