Meh.

Beautifully shot, an interesting story, but those sex scenes were just creepy. I’d read the novel for a class when I was in high school and had enjoyed it enough to read more Duras, but now I just couldn’t get past the idea that I was watching a 15-year-old girl with a 35-year-old man. The movie is also very slow, so a lot of the action in the movie is, well, the two of them getting it on. I guess I’m just used to movies where they cut away after 15 seconds.

Meh.

I never got into this movie. There were a whole spate of movies produced in the decades before I was born where the women have scenes where they do “things” but are otherwise totally opaque. We’re supposed to believe certain things about them [Catherine is a “force of nature”], but we never really get to know them the way we do the other characters. I like Truffaut, but maybe I should have just read the book instead…

I was kind of excited when I saw that there was a version of Pride and Prejudice with Olivier as Mr. Darcy coming up on TCM. I read the book for the first time a few months ago and had just seen the version from 2005 a few weeks before. I really enjoyed Keira Knightly’s performance in that movie but I didn’t quite connect with the actor playing Mr. Darcy, so I was curious to see how a different version with a really wonderful actor as Darcy would work.

Unfortunately, I just didn’t like this version of the story. They changed the setting a bit and chose to put everyone in 1830s clothes [big full skirts and stiff fabrics] instead of 1815 clothes [wispy, empire waisted nightgowns]. I feel like they made the same choice with everything else they did—they made the whole thing stiff and awkward. Most of the actors never quite inhabit the period language and just sound silly. The script has a lot of additions and whole sequences of scenes are cut out. We never see Pemberley, the Darcy family estate, and the storylines with Mr. Wickham are compressed. I found myself cringing and fast forwarding through the sections with Mrs. Bennett and her girls. I often watch the movie version of a novel or play to see how actual people fill out the characters, but I didn’t feel like this version added anything to that… If I had only seen this movie, I never would have read the book.

I’m not sure what I really thought about this book. I was hoping that it would actually be an essay on typography, but instead it’s… well… He talks briefly about type, but he really spends most of his time talking about the technical details of printing books in the 1930s. At the time, a lot of writers were discussing the industrial age and how it was going to change everything and Gill gets a little gloom and doom about it, while also recognizing that it would be useless to hand-print the Daily Mail. There’s also an essay at the end where he advocates using shorthand in schools and abandoning the alphabet for greener pastures.

I wonder if all of those early books about how the internet was going to change everything will read like this 70 years from now.

A day in the life of three French kids from the banlieue - jewish, arab and black - as they waste the day away and get in scrapes. A really well done movie about race and class, it’s something like “Crash” or “Do The Right Thing”.

an amazing book, with amazing ideas… I wish that everything I bought was made with their principles in mind.

This movie never quite caught me… I ended up just leaving it on in the background while I puttered around the house.

The reason why you’ve never seen this movie is that it’s just not good enough to really be a classic. The art direction is wonderful and the basic story is pretty good, but there’s a lot of stilted dialogue in the movie. If you’ve seen stills of this movie and thought it looked good, skip over the middle era and turn the sound off for the rest…

I watched both versions in the same week and while this one is… okay, the Audrey Hepburn/Humphrey Bogart version is better. The performances are good, and they gently update and modernize the story, but if the other version didn’t exist this one would just be a fine-but-forgetable romantic comedy.

Oddly enough, they’re both period films now. I was in middle school when the remake was made, and I kept wincing at the clothes and hairstyles…

I was going to skip this one [dancing penguins?!?], even though I’m an animator, until a friend of mine urged me to go see it. I’m not certain if I loved the story itself, but the animation and visual style were great. [Savion Glover was the choreographer!] Animal Logic has done a lot of special effects for films, but I think this is their first feature and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do in the future.