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I just came across this review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and thought that it sounded like a fascinating movie. I can't get to the film's official site from work, so I don't know where the screenings that start today are going to be, but I hope that there's one in my area; I'd love to go to that tonight. I don't actually think that it *will* be playing anywhere near me, but you never know.
In any case, it looked like an interesting enough film that others here might appreciate the heads up.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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The book was great. Haven't seen the movie, but I'll put it on the list.
Noemon, my Dave recommended The Namesake (rotten tomatoes freshness at 85%), and it also seems right up your alley. We have that on our version of Netflix.
quote:In Jhumpa Lahiri's book, which opens in the late '60s, a young Bengali couple, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, move to Cambridge, Mass., to start a new life and a family. When their son is born, they don't have a name for him -- the name is to be chosen by Ashima's elderly grandmother in India, and the letter has somehow gone astray -- and so, spontaneously, they decide to call him Gogol, a name that has special significance for Ashoke, enamored as he is of the great Russian writers. Gogol will be his pet name, the one used at home by his family; Ashoke and Ashima will know his "good" name -- the name by which he'll be known in the outside world -- when that letter finally arrives.
But it never does, and so Gogol keeps his makeshift name, one that begins to bother him as he reaches adolescence: It represents all his conflicted feelings about who he is and where he's come from.
-- exerpted from Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com
I'm also grimly fascinated by the 70's cult documentary Grey Gardens (RT freshness at 100%). It's about an eccentric mother-daughter pair (linked through marriage to the Kennedys) that live alone together in a crumbling mansion behind high garden walls. I haven't seen it yet either, but I suspect that it is definitely one that you need to be in the mood for.
quote:The house was beautiful once, and so were the Beales. They look through old scrapbooks, this woman of 82 and her 56-year-old daughter, and we see them when they were the cream of society. Edith on her wedding day. Edie modeling at a charity fashion show. Now a slow disintegration has set in; rooms of their mansion and areas of their lives have been closed off, one at a time, left to the forages of raccoons and memories.
Still, they've preserved a few things, while abandoning so much. They still have wit, style and what I would define as sanity. "Grey Gardens," one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.
-- from Roger Ebert's review at the Chicago Tribune
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I really wanted to see "The Namesake" when it came out, but never got around to it. If someone does see it, can you tell me how it is? Please? Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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I just saw this tonight. It was Ericka that really wanted to see it, but I ended up actually enjoying it - a lot. I haven't seen all the movies in each category yet, so I won't say it should win in any of them (although I'm fairly convinced it can't be beat in cinematography), but this most definitely deserves all four of its Oscar nominations.
It's very depressing, of course, but I'm sure most people going to see it already know that.
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