Westeros, North Carolina

Film: Cold Mountain
Format: HBO Go on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m not sure what compelled me to watch Cold Mountain today. It might be that it was one of the longest movies still on my list of films and it was available. It might be that I’m not a fan of Renee Zellweger and there are still too many of her movies I have yet to see. Maybe I’m just a masochist. Cold Mountain isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it’s very well made. But it’s one of those movies where nothing good happens to anyone and everything is terribly tragic. It’s like Game of Thrones, American Civil War edition.

It’s also very oddly cast. Don’t get me wrong here; the cast is an excellent one. It’s just a strange one for a film that takes place during the American Civil War. It stars Brit Jude Law romancing Australian Nicole Kidman and features major roles from Irishman Brendan Gleeson and Brit Ray Winstone. There are also small roles for Canadian Donald Sutherland and Irishman Cillian Murphy. All of them but Murphy play Southerners; Murphy plays a Yank.

Assumed Identities

Film: The Talented Mr. Ripley
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

Matt Damon was around before 1997, but that was the year he really hit it big. Of the films he did in those first heady years of his fame, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the one that seems not to fit with the others. And yet this is a film that very much plays to his strengths. Matt Damon, like him or not, is blessed with the ability to be both likable and sympathetic. Most people want to like Matt Damon, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, wanting to like Matt Damon’s character is what gives the film its strength.

Everything starts with a borrowed jacket and a chance meeting. Tom Ripley (Damon), sits in at a cocktail party as the pianist. He is approached by wealthy industrialist Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), who has noticed the Princeton logo on Ripley’s borrowed jacket. Greenleaf is concerned about the direction his son’s life has taken. Young Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) his bumming around Italy, frequenting jazz clubs and wasting his father’s money. Herbert Greenleaf offers Tom $1,000 (a decent sum in the 1950s) to go to Italy and convince Dickie to return to New York. Tom agrees on the pretense that he knew Dickie at Princeton despite not really knowing him and having never been a student at Princeton.

Burn Notice

Film: The English Patient
Format: DVD from NetFlix on various players.

While I currently have fewer than 200 films to watch to finish up the full 1001 List, I have a surprising number of Oscar winners and nominees still to see and review. I’m frequently surprised at how many there are left, so I’m going to try to make a larger effort to get through more of them sooner rather than later. To continue things from yesterday, what could be more appropriate for Valentine’s Day than The English Patient? This is grand romance in the classic tradition, epic in scale and length, making it perfect Oscar bait.

The film takes place about half in the present day of the film (late in World War II) and half in the years before that. A badly burned man (Ralph Fiennes) is being cared for in a desert hospital by a French-Canadian nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche). The man, partly because of his past and partly because of amnesia, refuses to divulge anything about himself, and so he is referred to only as the eponymous English patient. In reality, he is Count Laszlo de Almasy, a cartographer attempting to map the Sahara in the pre-war years.