riding the line
Mar. 1st, 2005 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauralhAfter filling his prescription Reg rented Vanity Fair for us to watch. Although his shingles bugged him too much to sit still so I mostly watched it while he ambled about. Anyway I liked it except that it was rated PG13 and had a happy ending, but it was pretty people in pretty places. Maybe I'll read the book at work. Ho ho ho.
It beat Metroland, anyway. I saw that Saturday afternoon and it was terribly disappointing. Christian Bale is married to Emily Watson, who was woefully underutilized in this role of the sarcastic wife. Every word she uttered was full of zest and barbs. Anyway, Bale's old friend from high school comes back into town, he's a poet living off his girlfriend (they're non-exclusive, of course, it's set in 1977), and makes him remember his youth. Also there's this whole thing where his friend tries to get him to cheat on his wife for no really discernable reason.
The best part of the film is the 1968 Paris flashbacks, where Bale's character is actually acting like a person with motivations instead of a confused angsty teenager. Not that he's angst-free as a 21-year-old, but it fits better, and he's also in the first flush of first love with a hot french girl. Which translates to a lot of sex scenes. He hates being a bourgeois Brit, so now he's an artist in Paris. They show him meeting Emily Watson, but not why he gives in to that life with her when it's everything he hates. It just kind of stops and goes back to the present, where he almost cheats on his wife but doesn't, and she almost cheats on him but doesn't, and then there's yet one more sex scene, and then it's basically over.
So I really have no idea what the point of the movie was, or even what it was trying to advocate, or if it was just some sad author's writing about his life, trying to justify it to himself. (It too was based on a book.)
It beat Metroland, anyway. I saw that Saturday afternoon and it was terribly disappointing. Christian Bale is married to Emily Watson, who was woefully underutilized in this role of the sarcastic wife. Every word she uttered was full of zest and barbs. Anyway, Bale's old friend from high school comes back into town, he's a poet living off his girlfriend (they're non-exclusive, of course, it's set in 1977), and makes him remember his youth. Also there's this whole thing where his friend tries to get him to cheat on his wife for no really discernable reason.
The best part of the film is the 1968 Paris flashbacks, where Bale's character is actually acting like a person with motivations instead of a confused angsty teenager. Not that he's angst-free as a 21-year-old, but it fits better, and he's also in the first flush of first love with a hot french girl. Which translates to a lot of sex scenes. He hates being a bourgeois Brit, so now he's an artist in Paris. They show him meeting Emily Watson, but not why he gives in to that life with her when it's everything he hates. It just kind of stops and goes back to the present, where he almost cheats on his wife but doesn't, and she almost cheats on him but doesn't, and then there's yet one more sex scene, and then it's basically over.
So I really have no idea what the point of the movie was, or even what it was trying to advocate, or if it was just some sad author's writing about his life, trying to justify it to himself. (It too was based on a book.)
