response 141 of 278:

May 23 14:47 UTC 2004

Two recent rentals we missed in the theaters:

RUSSIAN ARK (A) - A Russian director's loving homage to Russian culture 
and The Hermitage, the big museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg to you 
capitalist pigs).  The camera travels from room to room -- 37 of them 
in all -- following a European snob (Russian actor doing what I suppose 
sounds to Russian ears like a French accent) and his invisible Russian 
companion (the voice of the director, from whose POV the movie is 
seen).  There we see personages and incidents from 300 years of Russian 
history.  The movie is 90 minutes long, and although it took four years 
to prepare, the actual shooting was done in one single 90-minute-long 
take.  I knew beforehand that that's how the movie had been shot, but I 
didn't beieve it until I actually saw it.  The final 15 minutes, in 
which about a thousand actors dressed in period costumes dance the last 
dance at a grand ball then make their way down the huge double-
staircase and off the stage of history forever, is one of the most 
beautiful things I've ever seen in a movie.  (This is one movie where 
the interviews and "making of" documentary in the Special Features are 
just as interestng as the movie itself.)

CALENDAR GIRLS (B) - A trying-not-to-look-exploitive movie about the 
middle-aged English garden club ladies who made a nude calendar of 
themselves to raise money for a good cause.  Helen Mirren is excellent 
as the ageing egotistical wild child whose idea the whole thing is.  
Lots of false sentimentality and other commercial phoniness, but really 
no worse than most other movies.  Plus, the Brit's eye view of American 
glitz is priceless.

response 143 of 278:

May 23 16:45 UTC 2004

In Troy's defence, the director does include the caveat at the beginnign of
the end (credits) that the story was *inspired* by The Iliad, a level of
honesty you don't find in 3rd-rate Tolkien-inspired fantasy.

response 145 of 278:

May 23 17:26 UTC 2004

Haven't seen "Troy", but as I understand it the movie has no supernatural
beings (a.k.a. gods).  They were pretty important characters in The Iliad.

response 149 of 278:

May 23 19:08 UTC 2004

The characters are doing all sorts of things because of and on behalf of
their gods, and statues of them abound. One would interpret from the movie
that much in their society was heavily influenced by their beliefs in gods.

Aha! I will speak to my resident expert on Greek myths, who told me
Cassandra slew Agememnon. However, she was close: Clymtemnestra slew
both Agemenon and Cassandra. 

At least it was faithful to Achilles' heel, which everyone knows about
and therefore had to be kept (at least, everyone knows Achilles had a
heel....).

response 153 of 278:

May 23 20:02 UTC 2004

"The actor portraying Achilles"?! Are you telling us you never heard of Brad
Pitt?!

response 155 of 278:

May 24 05:45 UTC 2004

Wasn't Pitt the actor portraying Achilles?

response 161 of 278:

May 26 13:54 UTC 2004

Supersize Me - In case you aren't familiar with the premise of the
movie, here's how it works:  A guy decides to eat nothing but McDonalds
food for a month.  The rules are he can only eat things that are sold at
McDonalds, he has to eat three meals a day, he has to try everything on
the menu at least once, and if they ask him if he wants to supersize it,
he has to say yes.  The effects on his health are dramatic -- he gains
about 20 pounds, much of it in the first two weeks; his cholesterol
skyrockets; his liver starts to shut down; he suffers mood swings and
depression that are only relieved by eating more food.

Now, to get the main criticism of the movie out of the way, no, there's
nothing particularly unique about McDonalds food.  If he'd eaten 5,000
calories a day somewhere else, he probably would have gotten pretty much
the same results.  But there's more to the movie than that -- he talks
about how fast-food advertising is targeted at children, how the
advertising we see favors unhealthy foods over healthy ones, how portion
sizes have expanded over the years, and how school hot lunches are now
mostly reheated convenience foods instead of healthier food cooked at
the school.

It's a funny and thought-provoking movie, and it'll make you wonder
about your own diet.  Even the doctors he consults with are astounded at
how dramatic the effects on his body are in just 30 days.

response 163 of 278:

May 27 03:33 UTC 2004

At the screening of "Supersize Me" that I saw here in nyc, the director
spoke afterwards.  He made it clear that one reason the effects of all
that eating McD's were so dramatic in his case, is that he did not and
does not regularly eat junk or high fat foods.  His girlfriend is a vegan
chef.  So his body was not in any way conditioned to that kind of diet.
It is like if you have two guys who decide to go on a booze binge, and one
of the guys is a habitual regular drinker and the other guy is normally a
teetotaler.  Who is the binge drinking going to affect more?  Answer-- the
guy who doesn't drink normally because his body isn't used to it.  So
naturally, a guy who is mostly a vegetarian and never eats fried food, to
all of a sudden eat nothing but fried food for a solid month, is going to
have tolerance issues.  As he said, once his body adapted to the high fat
fried food diet, the physical problems would be reduced.  He was less sick
at the end of the month than he was seventeen days in.  His body was
adapting.