Showing posts with label Pawel Pawlikowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pawel Pawlikowski. Show all posts

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Music Hath Charms

Films: Cold War (Zimna Wojna)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I went into Cold War (also called Zimna Wojna) completely cold. In fact, I had no plans to watch this today until I discovered it at my local library just waiting to be checked out. It’s great when the library grabs a film like this one, since it’s one that isn’t necessarily going to get a lot of play in a small town like mine, at least not before the students come back for the spring term at the local university. Anyway, knowing that I don’t have a great many more films to watch to complete the Oscars as much as I can (and that will change in a month), it seemed like a good idea to knock this one out, sneaking it in before the end of the year.

I don’t know what I expected with Cold War, but I definitely didn’t expect a movie about musicians in Poland under the Soviet regime. That, however, is what I got. More specifically, this is the story of a very tempestuous relationship between a composer and arranger named Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and a singer named Zula (Joanna Kulig). This love affair will take them out of the Eastern Bloc, through multiple relationships, and back again under the shadow of communism.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Pole Position

Film: Ida
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

There aren’t a lot of guarantees in life. When it comes to the 1001 Movies list, though, whatever has won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Foreign Feature are going to show up on the list come August/September. Fortunately for me, Ida is currently streaming on NetFlix, which makes it easy to locate and watch. It’s also scarily, almost “not feature length” short, which is a nice feature on a busy day.

For a movie that won such a prestigious Oscar, I haven’t heard a lot about Ida that made me really want to watch it. Watching it today was more or less heading things off at the pass since I’m as certain as I can be that if I didn’t watch it now, I’d have to watch it in a couple of months. Critical acclaim for Ida has been pretty universal, but otherwise, the reaction has been pretty bland. I won’t keep readers in suspense: I pretty much concur with the general reaction over the critical one. Ida isn’t a bad movie, but I also wouldn’t go so far as to call it a great film.