Movies

Last week we saw Mike Nichols' Wit (2001) with Emma Thompson, who also wrote the teleplay. I'm a fan of her as an actress. It was Ok, if a little long.

Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) hasn't aged very well. It's not as ridiculous as some of his later movies, but it just didn't grab us very much. Although I'm fond of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings", there was far too much of that. And the scene where Willem Dafoe was being tracked down ended up just being silly, like the death of the heroine in House of Flying Daggers 十面埋伏--not what I'd choose to put on the box. I keep finding a lot of new movies dreadful, so I thought I was getting old and would like the older stuff, but I'm surprised to find I liked Blackhawk Down more. One other thing--Johnny Depp had a fairly prominent screen credit, but he was only on screen for a few minutes.

On the other hand, Anatole Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) is still pretty good. (I confess I thought it was Hitchcock's.)

Several weeks in a row I borrowed Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful (2002), but partly because I dislike Richard Gere, and also because the preview didn't make it look very good, I kept putting it off. I've got to admit it was pretty good. I especially liked the ending. Maybe sometime we can see Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle, upon which it was based. I wasn't very familiar with Diane Lane, but it just so happens this week one of the DVDs we borrowed was Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders (1983). I only watched about half of it, and got disgusted. Apparently Coppola wanted to make it look like a fifties movie. The effects were awful and the original music by Carmine Coppola was a poor fit. The book seemed good back when I read it, but the story may not have much to it. Anyway Lane looked almost unrecognizably young (I had wanted to see a pre-star Tommy Cruise, but I just couldn't take it).

I was also interested to see that Lane starred in Rakuyô (1992). One site claims she plays Cho Renko, a Chinese cabaret singer. So in 1992 were we still having Westerners playing East Asians? Or was she maybe a Eurasian? Anyway, the movie was apparently a real bomb.