Alright, I know I've been absent a bit. Pretty vacant, really!
I've been working like a dog, sleeping like a (an insomniac log), and eating like a hog for days...
This week has been a pretty tough one, and I have an Intensive Weekend of creative skills practice and psychotherapy coming up.
Yesterday I treated myself, as I'd been working so hard, and I went to see The Descendants.
The fact that George Clooney was in it had nothing to do with me going to the cinema for only the second time this year! I have a lot of catching up to do with movies when all this study is over...
Review: I liked it. I think it's too easy to knock popular, so-called middle-of-the-road movies that deal with the 'worried well' (because they don't have problems too?!). I mean, what's two hours in the cinema unless you've had to labour over tragic socio-demographic mores and plundered your social conscience that we should all 'do more' to help others...? Or you've managed to shoot up a couple of aliens, terrorists, or more?
This is a gentle film. Relational, true to life, banal, if you like.... I read it described as tragi-comic - I laughed in parts, but managed not to sniffle my way through it - So the therapy must be working, right?
I loved the soundtrack, featuring real, beautiful and poignant Hawaiian music and musicians. If it doesn't get best soundtrack for the Oscars (I don't even know if it's been short-listed), I'll eat my Buckingham Palace hat! CLICKIE for a taster, and even more lovely CLICKIE HERE.
I enjoyed the little quirky touches - A goat tethered to a house-lawn, Clooney inelegantly schlepping half a mile to a friend's house in ill-fitting boat shoes, looking every inch the harried rich Dad that he portrays. He seems to have slipped under the skin of his character. He's not playing Clooney the Charmer here.
I loved the supporting cast, all brilliant, including a beach-bum cameo by Beau Bridges, one of my favourite actors. Clooney's teenaged daughter, played by Shailene Woodley, will surely be tipped for even bigger things.
In other words, the first film I went to see this year was The Artist.
Would you be surprised if I said I loved it? Perhaps you think me easily pleased. Maybe I am. There are some things about me I might not want to change.
The love of simple films is one of them.
Go see The Artist, if you haven't already. Don't watch the trailer on YouTube - It gives the game away. I hate it when a trailer does that - I prefer to keep my expectations suspended, as if in aspic. I like to make my own mind up about a movie.
The Artist is a wonderful and beautiful film too, very French, very entertaining. It pays lots of homage to earlier silents and even surrealist movies...
It's brilliant. A classic. Clever. So redolent of the Thirties. The stars are terribly talented, especially DuJardin who epitomises the stars of the era, like a cross between John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks Junior.
The 'coat scene' with Berenice is truly moving. I felt she came somewhere between Mary Pickford and Louise Brooks. The dog, Uggie, is a true star, obviously. I found it a very touching and unique movie.
It may sweep the red carpet at the Oscars. J'adore Les Oscars. CLICKIE.
Remember, Fhina's Bloggy Oscar Give-away will be coming around soon!
Meantime, here is a little, behind the scenes vignette. It's en Francais. Gird yer loins!
