Saturday, April 12, 2008
Two more today:
The Lost Explorer--Finding Mallory on Mount Everest, Conrad Anker and David Roberts, Touchstone, 2001.
Climbing High--A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy, Lene Gammelgaard, Seal Press, 1999.
*
Finished Into Thin Air, Starlight and Storm, and Touching the Void.
*
We watched No Country For Old Men last night. What started off as a possibly new tonal frontier for the Coen Brothers devolved into more of the same cheap banter, as in their other films. They cannot seem to maintain anything remotely serious, to extend tension, without lightening it with quips and tossed-off comebacks. The intelligence of the script also went away after the transponder was located in the satchel, which is what I predicted to my wife, who didn't, it should be noted, seem impressed by my prophecy.
We have now seen three of the five Academy Award nominated films--No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, and There Will Be Blood. I really have no interest in seeing Atonement or Juno. Michael Clayton was a competent thriller, nothing more, really nothing less, but it featured perhaps my favorite female actor, Tilda Swinton, so it goes up a few notches. There Will Be Blood did contain some over-acting, to be sure, and the tension in it drifted after 2/3rds of the way in, but I still found it to be the better wrestler of bigger ideas of the three films. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, took a long leap in ambition in this film, and mostly glissaded past his earlier films' potholes of sentimentality. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.
The Lost Explorer--Finding Mallory on Mount Everest, Conrad Anker and David Roberts, Touchstone, 2001.
Climbing High--A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy, Lene Gammelgaard, Seal Press, 1999.
*
Finished Into Thin Air, Starlight and Storm, and Touching the Void.
*
We watched No Country For Old Men last night. What started off as a possibly new tonal frontier for the Coen Brothers devolved into more of the same cheap banter, as in their other films. They cannot seem to maintain anything remotely serious, to extend tension, without lightening it with quips and tossed-off comebacks. The intelligence of the script also went away after the transponder was located in the satchel, which is what I predicted to my wife, who didn't, it should be noted, seem impressed by my prophecy.
We have now seen three of the five Academy Award nominated films--No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, and There Will Be Blood. I really have no interest in seeing Atonement or Juno. Michael Clayton was a competent thriller, nothing more, really nothing less, but it featured perhaps my favorite female actor, Tilda Swinton, so it goes up a few notches. There Will Be Blood did contain some over-acting, to be sure, and the tension in it drifted after 2/3rds of the way in, but I still found it to be the better wrestler of bigger ideas of the three films. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, took a long leap in ambition in this film, and mostly glissaded past his earlier films' potholes of sentimentality. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.
