Rango

If you're looking to warm up just a little more before spring returns, take a gander at Rango.  It will have you as parched as the characters who reside in the western town this film takes place in.

When I saw this in 2011 I had really no expectations as I hadn't read up on it.  I assumed it was a run of the mill celebrity-laden animated feature (which it is to some extent) out to grab another family-audience buck.

Johnny Depp plays the title character, a chameleon. Actually the character is unnamed but takes on the pseudonym Rango. He is a city slicker lizard who lives in a beachy terrarium and questioning his existence as his human family crossing the desert.  When due to accidental circumstance he is stranded in the desert, his existential search leads him to the town of Dirt, where the old timey western denizens are parched and the most valuable commodity is water.

Rango finds himself out of place but ready to realize a bigger persona than he has had up til then.  He helps the townfolk defeat the baddie whom as we expect has been hoarding water from them.

The bones of the story are quite conventional: a (literal) little guy tells tall tales about himself, pretending to be something grander than he is. The town believes in him and believes he is their salvation. When they need him most he is exposed for a sham. But, he finds redemption and becomes the savior he didn't think he or they thought he could be. A typical western plot.

What sets this above other animated movies:

Past seven days

Looks like it has been a Netflix week.  The weather kept me in again so just DVDs and streaming:

All Is Bright
Audition
Grabbers
Secrets of Scotland Yard
Temple Grandin

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Still continuing a few reviews of films that take place in a hotter climate than where I am now, here's my take on the classic, both cult and otherwise, directed by Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock.  It takes place in late 1800s.  Students at a girls school in Australia go on a picnic, ostensibly to study the local geography, at a site called Hanging Rock.  One student, Sara, a girl who has a slightly lesbian love for a classmate, and a nervous teacher, are not allowed to attend per the headmistress (the headmistress perhaps has a bias toward them).  The girls overall are seen as very obsessive about romance and moon-y, and the trip takes place on Valentine's Day, but since it is "down under" the weather is pretty hot this time of year.

Two teachers chaperone, one is the masculine though female mathematics teacher and the other is the very feminine French teacher (Helen Morse).  Being a hot day many of them nap near the rock formation while four girls explore.  These girls are seen by two boys nearby, a visiting Brit Michael who sees the beautiful Miranda, and his young valet who happens to be the brother of Sara, the girl left behind; the siblings are orphans so Sara's financial status is below that of her classmates, which may play into the headmistress' bias of her.

Three of the four wandering girls in a sort of dream state go into a crevice in the rocks, and three of them the math teacher go missing, while the fourth becomes hysterical and can remember nothing or very little of the event or what happened.  Searches are made and the boys and others give witness statements, but nothing can be explained.

Michael becomes a bit obsessive about finding Miranda and makes an attempt to do so.  Later one of the girls reappear but she can remember nothing.  There are many unexplained answers.  Families start removing their daughters from the school.  Although she is losing a lot of students, the headmistress also forces Sara, the orphan, out of the school since her patron has been unable to make payments.  Sara is later found under tragic circumstances.

Cairo Time

Cairo Time I think is about how one defines fidelity in a relationship, especially when one is in a situation that is out of place of what one has been used to.  Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, who is a writer in a women's magazine (the Glamour or Vogue type) who comes to meet up with her husband who works at the U.N., but he is delayed in the Gaza area so she is on her own for a few days in Cairo. He has asked an old colleague, Tareq (Alexander Siddig) to drive her to the hotel and set her up there. Tareq runs into an old girlfriend at the airport who invites them to her daughter's upcoming wedding. He is retired already despite being youngish (younger than Juliette at least) and now runs a men's only traditional coffee hangout, so for the most part he can come and go as he pleases.

At first Juliette is at sea trying to fill up her day without being bored. Here, her identity is not as an independent woman, but "the wife" and finds she is expected to conform to those boundaries.  She attends a consulate function by herself and meets another of her husband's colleagues, Kathryn (Elena Anaya) who invites her for a daytrip to meet her family out in the desert. The two talk a bit about following the men in their relationships. Later Juliette rashly decides to take a bus to Gaza alone, and during a tense checkpoint, she is advised to return to the city (she's the only Westerner on the bus, and one of the few women). During this ride she befriends a young woman who asks her to do a dangerous favor, which Juliette consults Tareq on.

Every now and again Tareq either comes to meet Juliette to take her about the city, or she seeks him out at his coffee shop and they spend the day together, even staying out very late and coming back to the hotel at dawn, or she even becomes a bit more daring and ventures out on her own a bit. These meetings are usually unplanned. Of course they end up attending that wedding, which leads Juliette to consider what she wants, just when her husband returns to her.

Desert Bloom

Living in a part of the U.S. where there is definitely a winter (Chiberia, anyone?), I thought I would try to find a film taking place in a hot locale for a change.

When I picked up this movie, for some reason I thought Christine Lahti starred in it and that it was a contemporary film (I confused it with a film called Housekeeping). She does narrate as the adult version of the character played by Annabeth Gish (though Gish doesn't even get a credit on the VHS box despite being the central character).

Gish plays Rose, a 13-year old living in Las Vegas during the Korean War era, on the cusp of A-bomb testing. Her stepfather (Jon Voight) is unstable and abusive and her mom (JoBeth Williams) tries to hold things together. Although stepdad is at times loving, his behavior becomes increasingly less so when he drinks and when he has PTSD/hallucinations from WW2 service, which as we know now was not well-diagnosed back then. Mom starts becoming more independent by working outside the home and trying to keep a cheerful face when he has to spend some time in an institution due to the stress. Rose though, as a child, still cannot understand what is happening to her stepfather, and can only relate it to herself: the abuse, what she perceives as his hatred of her. Small gifts she gives him are looked on with distrust and paranoia.

A glamorous aunt (Ellen Barkin) visits after a breakup, at first a breath of new life then straining the family. She is at first seen as glamour and happiness, but her relationship troubles and intrusion at a difficult and tenuous time for the family affect them negatively and then causes a betrayal for Rose. Her "makeup" with Rose was too

Allen Garfield plays an astute sympathetic teacher, Jay Underwood a nice guy friend.

Past seven days

Despite another almost repeat of a polar vortex, I'm still stuck watching TV dvds and not movies.


American Experience:  The Poisoner's Handbook
American Experience:  Triangle Fire
American Experience:  Tupperware!
Frontline: The Secret State of North Korea
The Legend of Drunken Master

Past seven days

I guess I am on a Sherlock Holmes kick, rewatching my DVD sets of the newish Sherlock series from BBC.  Here are some other DVDs I watched in the last 14 days:

The Big Clock
Burning Love
I Love You, Man
Sesame Street Old School
Sherlock Holmes and he Baker Street Irregulars
The Soloist

Never Cry Wolf

Oh, the weather outside is frightful!  Keep warm indoors but still get into this winter weather!

Never Cry Wolf is based on Canadian writer Farlew Mowat's autobiographical novel of the same name.  The film starts with a written intro about wolves suspected of killing off the caribou population in the arctic.  Since no scientist has verified that wolves are the culprits, the government sends Tyler (Charles Martin Smith) to track wolves and monitor their impact on the environment.

Tyler opens the film with narration in a diary style (which he does for most of the film), observing the people he meets, including a brash bush pilot (Brian Dennehy, although he's not in the film for long).  Tyler is unsure of his assignment and he is a fish out of water in this environment, he's frightened and is intimidated by the first wolves he encounters.

At first he just sits and watches for signs like tracks, but as the weather warms he decides to go out in the open and make himself visible, thus inviting curious wolves to come up to him and making it easier for him to observe.  As time goes on, Tyler learns to be more savvy to nature's way of doing things.

He eventually observes a family of wolves and makes assumptions about their behavior.  He gets a visit from some Eskimos, one who has traditional ways (Zachary Ittimangnaq) and the adopted son who has more modern values.

Past seven days

Although I did watch a lot of DVDs, very few were movies, and in fact, the two I did watch were movies I had seen before on the big screen. Hope your 2014 is getting off to a film-filled start!

Berberian Sound Studio
The Muppets