Monday, April 05, 2010

To that kind of London

Have been very slow these days; too busy at work. Apart from re-watching some familiar (to me) titles, not many new films. Still.

13. Peter Jackson, The Lovely Bones (2009)
14. David Mackenzie, Young Adam (2003)
15. David Cronenberg, Spider (2002)
16. Guy Ritchie, Sherlock Holmes (2009)

13 is great. Just watching it and you feel that Kiwi kind of aesthetics! Superb beauty rendered skillfully. The girl what's-her-Irish-name (from Atonement) is destined to become a great actress.

14 is a story of water, beautiful cinematography, and a disgusting story staged by good actors. Sex-obsessed Adam doesn't begin a lineage. But that life on a boat is quite attractive.

15 is a confusing story in which you will never know how much and what has really happened in the man's life. It might all have been in the boy's imagination. He thinks that his father killed her own mother, but it could have been him killing the mother or his father's adultery could have been his mother's. Such emotional ambivalence and factual ambiguity are everywhere; what you see is what the boy imagines his reality to be, interwoven with inescapably realist depiction of the film language. There is literally no distinction between fantasy and reality.

16 is so entertaining! I haven't watched Rocknrolla; in fact I haven't watched anything anything by Guy Ritchie since his masterpiece LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS. This atmosphere of nineteenth-century London is so attractive and it's the place I least want to live in.