This week's movies
July 16th, 2004 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shiredancerHuh, seems to be a weekly event, my movie recs. Just call me Siskel. Or Ebert. Whichever one is still alive, anyway.
So we saw "Two Brothers" and "The Notebook" this week. The Notebook was good, a nice summer romance film. I have the book but, of course, haven't read it yet, so had no idea what to expect. I liked the way they played up the tension over which guy she was going to end up with -- and you couldn't tell by the looks of the old guy which young guy he was (actually Hollywood usually does a better job of matching older and younger characters -- I have to say, it was a suspension of disbelief to think that James Garner was *either* of the younger guys grown old. But hey, James Garner.) So they did successfully maintain the guessing until the end. And they didn't just oversimplify it with the hunky-and-good-but-poor versus hunky-but-rotten-and-rich class status thing; they gave each character a lot of pros and cons and some complexity. It was just sweet, and funny, and romantic -- like I said, a nice summer film. And the ending was just right (if smacking a bit of the miraculous) -- didn't even make me cry.
What *did* make me cry was the plight of the captured tigers in Two Brothers. I went in expecting a fluffy, Disneyesque cute-animal-flick, and got a lesson in the war between man and animal, and ethics, and no easy answers. It did a tremendously fair job of showing both sides of the issues: the lessening space for animals to live in the wild vs. the anger of the village people who lost livestock, and lives, to animals turned man-eater (and I believe I read once that tigers have more of a propensity to turn man-eater than lions). And then the hunter and his ethical issues -- the villagers praised and lauded him as a hero for killing a tiger, but once he befriended a tiger cub he had to ask all kinds of questions. And the sheer brutality of the treatment of the tigers in captivity was disgusting. It's set in the 1920s, long before animal-rights activism, and anybody could -- and did -- do anything to keep the animals in line or make a buck off their skin. In a nutshell, it was *far* more moving and thought-provoking than I anticipated on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well worth it, I thought.
So we saw "Two Brothers" and "The Notebook" this week. The Notebook was good, a nice summer romance film. I have the book but, of course, haven't read it yet, so had no idea what to expect. I liked the way they played up the tension over which guy she was going to end up with -- and you couldn't tell by the looks of the old guy which young guy he was (actually Hollywood usually does a better job of matching older and younger characters -- I have to say, it was a suspension of disbelief to think that James Garner was *either* of the younger guys grown old. But hey, James Garner.) So they did successfully maintain the guessing until the end. And they didn't just oversimplify it with the hunky-and-good-but-poor versus hunky-but-rotten-and-rich class status thing; they gave each character a lot of pros and cons and some complexity. It was just sweet, and funny, and romantic -- like I said, a nice summer film. And the ending was just right (if smacking a bit of the miraculous) -- didn't even make me cry.
What *did* make me cry was the plight of the captured tigers in Two Brothers. I went in expecting a fluffy, Disneyesque cute-animal-flick, and got a lesson in the war between man and animal, and ethics, and no easy answers. It did a tremendously fair job of showing both sides of the issues: the lessening space for animals to live in the wild vs. the anger of the village people who lost livestock, and lives, to animals turned man-eater (and I believe I read once that tigers have more of a propensity to turn man-eater than lions). And then the hunter and his ethical issues -- the villagers praised and lauded him as a hero for killing a tiger, but once he befriended a tiger cub he had to ask all kinds of questions. And the sheer brutality of the treatment of the tigers in captivity was disgusting. It's set in the 1920s, long before animal-rights activism, and anybody could -- and did -- do anything to keep the animals in line or make a buck off their skin. In a nutshell, it was *far* more moving and thought-provoking than I anticipated on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well worth it, I thought.
