Movie suggestions

NaBloPoMo Day 14: We've taken a bit of a break today, napping and knitting, said labor being divided along gender lines. It's been raining in Boston since before dawn, and the grey atmosphere has been the perfect inducement to lounge about.

Had the weather been nicer, we would probably have taken a walk over to Coolidge Corner to see a movie this afternoon. Instead we stayed home and are now in the middle of watching Smiley's People, the 1982 British adaptation of the LeCarre novel, starring the masterful Alec Guinness. He's absolutely terrific as the Cold War spymaster called out of retirement. (As I write this, we're taking a short break. Two hours of viewing already, two more to go tonight, then another disc from Netflix later next week.)

But back to movies. I was reminded this week that I should mention a couple of films we've seen at Coolidge Corner this season and which we highly recommend.

Revanche (now in its Ithaca premiere, as I was informed by the Cornell European Club email announcement Thursday) is an Austrian film that explores the repercussions of an bank robbery (and a couple of lives, really) gone wrong. Strongly acted and engrossing, even though it's paced rather slowly. As in most German films I've seen, the production values are chosen so that whatever nudity and violence are shown speak plainly, rather than being needlessly and meretriciously eroticized, as is so often the case in Hollywood movies. The Austrian and Russian accents are so thick that even native speakers may need to rely on the subtitles to follow all of the dialogue.





When our NYC friends visited a couple of weeks ago we saw An Education, screenplay by Nick Hornby. I would normally have tried to talk M. into a more ostensibly "masculine" choice, but the two wives prevailed upon their husbands and we ended up seeing quite a good movie. I won't summarize the story (NYTimes review here), but I will comment that (1) Peter Sarsgaard did a quite convincing job as the lead sleazeball; (2) I liked Rosamund Pike's sly and somewhat subtle balancing of insecurity and obliviousness in her portrayal of the sleazeball's ignorant girlfriend; (3) the ending was the weakest part of the movie, but not unexpectedly so, and it didn't detract all that much from the enjoyability of the film as a whole.