A writer looking for a good story is directed to a man who survived a shipwreck. The man is mild mannered, calm, almost spiritual as he goes about the business of telling the story of his life. We learn about how he came to be called Pi, how his father ran a zoo, how he fell in love, and how he came to be on that ship in the middle of the Pacific. Then we are told a story, about a young man spending two hundred days on a lifeboat with the tiger Richard Parker. Ang Lee did an amazing…
Tag: coming attractions
Larry Crowne-Good Old Fashioned Tom Hanks Film
I watched Larry Crowne because of Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman. I especially liked Biff Henderson’s brief cameo in the restaurant. When we meet Larry Crowne he is a very happy employee at a big box store, a kind of cross between Wal-Mart and Target. He loves his job. He comes into work with a smile on his face as he picks up garbage in the parking lot-and he has been Employee of the Month 8 times. This all ends when a number of higher ups in the company fire him-the reason…
Made in Dagenham
Among the Coming Attractions on the DVD of The King’s Speech was the trailer for Made in Dagenham. It looked like my kind of film, an underdog story, a cute British cast, and good old Bob Hoskins. I grew up in the 1970s with no father to speak of, a working mother, and an older sister who was quite taken with the women’s liberation movement. It is a bit shocking to see that male chauvinism and outright sexual discrimination was still going strong in 1968. For some reason I thought that whole Suffragette thing would have fixed this problem as…
Tron Legacy-Big on Looks
Tron Legacy was a visually stunning bit of work. The CGI world was rendered perfectly and I liked the way a de-ressed program fell into tiny cubes and sounded like shattered glass. We saw Tron Legacy in 3D, but it was clearly not made with 3D in mind. It opened with a slug screen telling us that parts of the film were in 2D, but we should keep our glasses on anyway. The most impressive 3D effects were in the Coming Attractions trailers. I still like 3D, I just wish people would stop adding it to a film as an…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Clocking in at about 3 hours-counting the mega dose of Coming Attractions-HP7.1 doesn’t feel like that long a movie. There are only a few breaks in the action-and then there is that whole Long Goodbye feeling that permeates the whole experience. Harry looking longingly at his former room under the stairs. Hagrid reminding us that he brought Harry into this magical world all those years ago. References to the other times that Harry has done battle with The Dark Lord. I began to loose my way in the Harry Potter world right after Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. …