2008-03-09

While the sun shone gloriously, melting away a goodly portion of our twelve inches of snow, Jim and I hived in and had a movie Sunday. After Morning Offering, Jim cleaned house while I wrote my journals.

With our lunch came the first of our three movies for the day, Michael Clayton. The film shows what it costs to stand up against big business when big business is in the wrong and unwilling to be accountable, the seeming standard for corporate ethics today. I can see why George Clooney, the antihero of the piece, was nominated for an Oscar. His nuanced, understated performance is shot through with intelligence, wry wit and a sense of the true.

Tilda Swinton was an excellent villainess and Tom Wilkinson did a beautiful job of going mad. It was an excellent screenplay, moreover. I was not fond of the cinematography, because I was not intended to like it. It carries the weight of the gray, gray ethical world of corporate policies.

Our second feature was 3:10 to Yuma, and a modern oater it was, full of shooting and explosives, with no real character development other than the pivotal relationship between Russell Crowe as the evil thief and Christian Bale as the pegleg hero. I sank under the weight of the constant violence, wondering as I drifted off to sleep where these gentlemen carried all the bullets they fired. Perhaps they found some shooting irons from the old Clint Eastwood shoot-em-ups. The saving grace of this film was its ending! But you really had to wait for it!

For our supper feature we watched Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent in Away From Her. Christie was slated to win the Oscar for this show and she certainly deserved it, although she lost to Marion Cotillard. Pinsent and she created a lovely, gentle story about a woman’s Alzheimer’s disease and the effects of it on her marriage and on the two who made the marriage.

The story was simply beautifully done, remaining, though sad, not mawkish or sentimental. Unlike Michael Clayton, which was hard to sit through for me, this story carried me effortlessly. The sound track was full of nicely chosen classical piano music and offered just the right touch again and again. And the cinematography was beautiful, artful without being precious, loaded with symbolic images. This was a very tasty film indeed.

Mick offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.