![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passés, ni les amours reviennent
Sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.
--Guillaume Apollinaire
I was originally going to see Daredevil tonight because it was advertised in the Paramount listing, but when I got there I discovered it's opening on Valentine's Day (great date movie, of course).
So instead, and to my lasting satisfaction, I decided to go see The Hours, which has got to be one of the most moving movies (erk! that sounds terrible) I've seen in the past year.
It featured a star-studded cast as well as a strong group of lesser-known actors who all blended together beautifully, even though many of them never shared a single scene.
Now, normally when I find myself analysing the camera angles in a movie, it means I'm bored or not really engaging with the story or the characters. Not so with this flick. I was captivated almost from the start (the first two minutes were a bit of a rocky beginning for me), fascinated, riveted to the screen, trying to make out every single detail of every single screen.
The movie was so intricately crafted that I had a hard time taking it all in. Each scene was a portrait and an analysis and a feeling and twenty feelings and a sketch, an illusion, a mirror, a reflectionless pond... Every object, every shadow had meaning, and yet nothing was so important in the film that you had to know what it meant in order to hear what was being said.
The story, the stories, were poignant and real and even though I'm not sure that anyone in real life would ever speak the way those characters did none of it sounded contrived. There were repeated jumps back and forth in time over three generations and over two continents, but the transitions were seamless and breathtaking and completely natural, almost inevitable.
The poet, the visionary, is going to die.
The choice between life and death... after The Hours, it's very hard to tell which of the two is more difficult. As Virginia tells her husband: "You say you live every day with the threat of my extinction. Well, I live with it too."
On a lighter note, I'd like to say that Meryl Streep in this movie plays the woman I want to be in twenty years (with some obvious changes).
Ni temps passés, ni les amours reviennent
Sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.
--Guillaume Apollinaire
I was originally going to see Daredevil tonight because it was advertised in the Paramount listing, but when I got there I discovered it's opening on Valentine's Day (great date movie, of course).
So instead, and to my lasting satisfaction, I decided to go see The Hours, which has got to be one of the most moving movies (erk! that sounds terrible) I've seen in the past year.
It featured a star-studded cast as well as a strong group of lesser-known actors who all blended together beautifully, even though many of them never shared a single scene.
Now, normally when I find myself analysing the camera angles in a movie, it means I'm bored or not really engaging with the story or the characters. Not so with this flick. I was captivated almost from the start (the first two minutes were a bit of a rocky beginning for me), fascinated, riveted to the screen, trying to make out every single detail of every single screen.
The movie was so intricately crafted that I had a hard time taking it all in. Each scene was a portrait and an analysis and a feeling and twenty feelings and a sketch, an illusion, a mirror, a reflectionless pond... Every object, every shadow had meaning, and yet nothing was so important in the film that you had to know what it meant in order to hear what was being said.
The story, the stories, were poignant and real and even though I'm not sure that anyone in real life would ever speak the way those characters did none of it sounded contrived. There were repeated jumps back and forth in time over three generations and over two continents, but the transitions were seamless and breathtaking and completely natural, almost inevitable.
The poet, the visionary, is going to die.
The choice between life and death... after The Hours, it's very hard to tell which of the two is more difficult. As Virginia tells her husband: "You say you live every day with the threat of my extinction. Well, I live with it too."
On a lighter note, I'd like to say that Meryl Streep in this movie plays the woman I want to be in twenty years (with some obvious changes).
