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Movies from My Trip
Nov. 16th, 2019 09:49 amOn my trip I managed to watch a number of movies that I’ve been vaguely meaning to see for a while, so I thought I’d toss out a few quick reviews.
Moonstruck first came to my attention on a list of movies for Mother’s Day, which frankly shows the paucity of movies about mother and child relationships: the mother in Moonstruck is a great character, but the movie’s not really about motherhood at all. Rather, it’s about love! passion! Italian-American identity! and Nicholas Cage chewing the scenery like nobody’s business. Everything is purposefully over-the-top, and I really enjoyed it.
I came into The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with low expectations, because one of my friends told me she didn’t like it (although another told me she loved it, so go figure), which is probably the right way to approach it. It’s a solidly enjoyable period piece that doesn’t quite capture the charm or the voice of the book, although to be fair it probably would be difficult to capture the voice of an epistolary novel in a visual adaptation.
Also, I super got the impression from the movie that Dawsey was in love with Elizabeth, which I don’t remember being the case in the book. This is not a problem (in fact I think it adds a certain verisimilitude: why shouldn’t Dawsey have a romantic past?), but it did strike me as different.
I’ve been eyeing Mary and the Witch’s Flower ever since it came on Netflix streaming, intrigued by its Ghibli-esque aesthetic (the director actually got his start at Ghibli, where he directed Arrietty; Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the first film from his new studio). But in fact neither Paula or I really liked it: it’s scary, but without emotional depth, and the character development wasn’t as strong as it could have been.
This became especially surprising when I discovered that the story is based on Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because usually Mary Stewart’s books are good at that sort of thing. (It’s surprising that more of her books haven’t been made into movies: they’re so action-packed and picturesque that they ought to be easy to film.) Something must have been lost in the translation from book to screen.
Moonstruck first came to my attention on a list of movies for Mother’s Day, which frankly shows the paucity of movies about mother and child relationships: the mother in Moonstruck is a great character, but the movie’s not really about motherhood at all. Rather, it’s about love! passion! Italian-American identity! and Nicholas Cage chewing the scenery like nobody’s business. Everything is purposefully over-the-top, and I really enjoyed it.
I came into The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with low expectations, because one of my friends told me she didn’t like it (although another told me she loved it, so go figure), which is probably the right way to approach it. It’s a solidly enjoyable period piece that doesn’t quite capture the charm or the voice of the book, although to be fair it probably would be difficult to capture the voice of an epistolary novel in a visual adaptation.
Also, I super got the impression from the movie that Dawsey was in love with Elizabeth, which I don’t remember being the case in the book. This is not a problem (in fact I think it adds a certain verisimilitude: why shouldn’t Dawsey have a romantic past?), but it did strike me as different.
I’ve been eyeing Mary and the Witch’s Flower ever since it came on Netflix streaming, intrigued by its Ghibli-esque aesthetic (the director actually got his start at Ghibli, where he directed Arrietty; Mary and the Witch’s Flower is the first film from his new studio). But in fact neither Paula or I really liked it: it’s scary, but without emotional depth, and the character development wasn’t as strong as it could have been.
This became especially surprising when I discovered that the story is based on Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because usually Mary Stewart’s books are good at that sort of thing. (It’s surprising that more of her books haven’t been made into movies: they’re so action-packed and picturesque that they ought to be easy to film.) Something must have been lost in the translation from book to screen.
