Film Geekery: Brando, Bourne, F911
I don’t write about film here nearly as much as I should. For example, this shouldn’t be my first-ever MT entry about film. So here are two quickies:
- Marlon Brando: 1924-2004. Jesse Walker put it best here: “At his best, he was one of the greatest there ever was.” Sure he made some stinkers, but his performances in The Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather – in the same year! – were all-star.
“Well – this wasn’t enough time, Michael. Wasn’t enough time… “
- On a lighter note, I got around to watching The Bourne Identity tonight. If it weren’t such a “location” movie, I wouldn’t care about it one way or another – the romanting scenes are downright embarassing – but someone in that crew really knew Paris, and knew how to make Paris work as a backdrop for an action flick. Roger Ebert called it “unnecessary, but not unskilled.” I can’t really disagree, but the “necessity” of a film has never been a major priority of mine.
- Everybody knows about IMDB, which is obviously a great resource for film data, but Yahoo! Movies, in addition to its showtimes for current films, makes it really easy to find reviews of just about any film you could want to know about. That’s how I found Ebert’s review of Bourne.
- No, I still haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11. I read the partial transcripts posted here and here (via links from Crazy Andy), and it seems to me like a bunch of things I already knew (and was already angry about) compressed into a manipulative “two minutes hate” montage. N. Todd says he “shook with rage“. Shaking with rage isn’t really my style (although it describes how I felt when I wrote this), but if the weather is bad when my (more loyally Democratic) parents come to visit this weekend, we’ll probably check it out.