I'd heard a lot of good things about this movie, but I was a little disappointed. A midwife (Naomi Watts) gets involved with a baby she helps deliver when the mother dies. The mother leaves behind a diary written in Russian, and Watts's uncle (who's Russian) refuses to translate it. Watts takes it to a restaurant where the kindly owner agrees to do the job. I knew instantly that the kindly owner was the typical cliched mob godfather. He plays the violin (not very well) and seems to be a sweet old man, but he's really a cold-blooded killer and gangster. His son is the typical nutty incompetent. The movie plays out pretty much as I expected it to, but I won't tell you what else I knew instantly lest I spoil things for you. I liked Viggo Mortensen's performance, and while Judy no doubt appreciated the frontal nudity of the bathhouse beat-down, she found the movie too violent for her tastes (she won't be reading Savage Night; see below). While I thought the movie was okay, I wouldn't recommend that you see it immediately (which is what someone recommended to me).
Have I used my weekly allotment of parentheses yet?
9 comments:
I was definitely disappointed after A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, but it is a good-enough film, I'd say.
One to avoid, with heavy Eastern European flavors and trappings, is WANTED, unless you want a protagonist (and general viewpoint of the film) even more smug, arrogant, self-pitying and feckless than Peter Parker in the Spider-Man films. Stuff blows up real good and Jolie flashes her rump, but that is hardly enough.
I liked it a lot, in part because its intensity was a relief from the snarky attitude, senseless blow-em-up FX, and bloated running time of most modern thrillers.
And Mortensen's performance was good. Maybe the build-up I had led me to expect too much.
WANTED is one I'll probably see one day on cable or DVD, though.
Me, too. Just too violent for me and a waste of Naomi Watts, for sure. And a little convoluted if I remember. But VM was a keeper.
FWIW, the GET SMART movie (as opposed to the GET SMART! tv series and its two movies) is actually an amiable way to pass the time, with a superb cast and good blown up stuff and a script that doesn't get where it wants to go but isn't nearly as bad as I feared. I liked it better than I liked CASINO ROYALE or FAY GRIM, among our recent spy films, even if it isn't up to the Bourne films as an esthetic experience.
Another one for the Netflix queue.
I just watched it for Viggo. Sometimes eye candy is all you need...
There was plenty of that.
Catching the eye...Naomi Watts, Tereza Srbova...did you say Viggo Mortensen was in the film somewhere?
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