Last night, I watched and thoroughly loved The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I’ve been putting off watching it for months, having rented it from Netflix back in January, I think because I worried it would be too dark and depressing. Whereas, in reality, it was anything but. I like what Roger Ebert says about the film:
The result is not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. It is more than that. It is heroic. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve. And also with lust, hunger, humor and all of the other notes that this man once played so easily.
I also recently watched In the Mood for Love (as mentioned here), which was also thoroughly wonderful, largely because of its two terrific leads, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and the subtle, dreamlike spell their story casts. Scott Tobias this time:
…director Wong Kar-Wai has developed an intoxicating style that reaches beyond the shopworn conventions of traditional storytelling and into a more abstract realm of human emotion. His unique virtuosity has often been compared to the improvisational riffs of a jazz artist, with straight scenes dropped in favor of rhymes, repetition, and dizzying impressions….In detailing the intimate friendship and love between two unhappily married lonelyhearts, Wong collects vivid moments out of time as they might play out in a person’s memory many years later.
I’d highly recommend both movies.
Diary of the Dead, though…well, maybe not so much. I think Romero does some very interesting things here, and manages some real scares that his other zombie movies maybe don’t always provide — the humans are almost always scarier than the zombies in the other films — but I sometimes felt like I was being preached to. I liked it a lot more than Nathan Rabin, for instance, but I’m not sure he’s wrong in thinking
…there’s a big difference between making a kick-ass zombie movie with a trenchant sociopolitical subtext, and making a dreary, didactic film about the ethics and politics of journalism and non-fiction filmmaking that just happens to have some zombies in it. With his latest undead opus…Romero set out to make the first kind of film, but ended up making the second.
I did like it, but I think it’s easily my least favorite of the four Romero movies I’ve now seen. (I’ve still not seen the original Night of the Living Dead.) Still, even a semi-disappointing George Romero zombie movie is pretty darn good.
