I was at a jazz concert the other week, and I was looking at the CDs and stuff the musicians had brought to sell.
Adam Pulz Melbye had brought a shrinkwrapped bass string:
With a Bandcamp download code. (Censored above.)
I just had to buy one! Genius!
It’s weird that I haven’t seen anybody doing something along these lines before… It’s like a souvenir from the concert, but it’s also a way of selling music.
An Ideal Husband. Oliver Parker. 1999.
How weird. I can’t find the DVD for this film, or any of the other four I ripped on the same day… I must have… put them… somewhere..
But. Hm. what’s the expression to describe this… “Aggressively pedestrian”? “Excessively standard”?
Ever single shot here is a shot you’ve seen, down to every detail, in half of every British period comedy/drama for the past quarter century.
When the cinematographer and director are no help whatsoever, it falls upon the actors to try to charm their way through the schmaltzy soundtrack into your heart. And I think they give it their best effort. Minnie Driver is great, and so is Julienne Moore, and Rupert Everett plays Rupert Everett.
But it’s Oscar Wilde, so there are tons and tons of witticism and a fun plot. It’s really entertaining watching Wilde’s clockwork intrigues tick tock into place with such precision.
This blog post is part of the Century series.
Star Trek 8: First Contact. Jonathan Frakes. 1996.
Oops! Another Star Trek film. I guess my stacks of DVDs were pretty light on 90s films…
I remember this as being much better than it is. It’s got the best Star Trek villains, the Borg, but somehow this film manages to strip away many of the things that made them scary: Their unrelenting, impersonal drive for assimilation.
Instead we get a time travel thing with lots of Rikerian humour, and they’ve made the Borg be personified by one evil woman, and that’s just not as interesting.
But it’s easier to write lines, I guess, when you have an eeeevil character instead of an impersonal, implacable collective.
That said, the film looks very nice, especially on bluray, and there are several scenes that have nerve. I’m just… disappointed.
This blog post is part of the Century series.
Rendez-vouz in Paris. Éric Rohmer. 1995.
Eric Rohmer was a director I was totally and utterly unaware of until a couple of years ago when I bought one of his films on a whim in a DVD shop somewhere. Mostly because of his name, which reminded me of Sax Rohmer. And it’s weird, because he was a major name from the Nouvelle Vague of the 60s, but, like, you know.
I’ve seen a handful of his films now, and they’ve all been great. Quiet and still and intimate in a very enjoyable way, so I’m excited to watch this now (which I apparently got in a Danish DVD shop at some point).
I’m guessing that Rohmer is fond of using non-actors. Sometimes that’s wonderful, and sometimes things fall flat because some of them are so much more convincing than others. This film has that problem: The main protagonist, played by Clara Bellar (I think; I may be reading the cast list wrong), is so perfect, but some of the actors she speak with have that “I’m waiting until I can say my line” expression on their faces.
This film is so much up my alley that I’m probably not a very good judge of whether it’s actually good or not: It’s basically pretty people walking around Paris talking rapidly at each other. Who wouldn’t want to watch that?
This blog post is part of the Century series.
Trois Couleurs Blanc. Krzysztof Kieslowski. 1994.
This is one of the oldest DVDs I have, I think. I remember buying the box set while on holiday in London in the 90s. And somehow it’s never felt vitally urgent to watch these films, so it’s taken me almost 20 years to watch the trilogy.
I have to admit to being somewhat distracted while watching this, because I’ve got a new wifi setup here, and I’m kinda tweaking it, which isn’t the optimal condition for watching Kieslowski.
I like the actor who plays the protagonist. Some of the other ones aren’t as convincing, though.
The plot’s way silly. I wonder whether Kieslowski meant it to be that way or whether he thought he was making something serious.
This blog post is part of the Century series.