Ammonite

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Dev Patel in THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

New this week – a dazzling literary adaptation, a profound social satire and a dreary slog. And check out my Best Movies of 2020.

I’ve also recently remembered 32 filmmakers that we lost in 2020:

  • 2020 Farewells: On the Screen (Part 1): Kirk Douglas, Sean Connery, Max von Sydow, Carl Reiner, Olivia de Havilland, Rhonda Fleming. Brian Dennehy, Fred Willard and Chadwick Boseman.
  • 2020 Farewells: On the Screen (Part 2): John Saxon, Ian Holm, Jerry Stiller, Allan Garfield, Michael Lonsdale, Ann Reinking, Stuart Whitman, Wilford Brimley, Sue Lyon, Jo Shishido, Little Richard, Linda Manz and John Benfield.
  • 2020 Farewells: Behind the Camera: Ennio Morricone, Buck Henry, Terry Jones, John le Carré, Lynne Shelton, Ivan Passer, Michael Chapman, Alan Parker, Joel Schumacher and Mike Cobb.

ON VIDEO

The Personal History of David Copperfield: That master of social satire, Amando Ianucci, brings Charles Dickins’ masterpiece to life in this vivid and brilliantly constructed film. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Another Round: Writer-director Thomas Vinterberg once again explores human foibles with humor and cold-eyed insight – and profoundly to boot. Mads Mikkelsen is stellar. I watched Another Round on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.

Ammonite: The fine acting of Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan can’t save Ammonite, a slog of a period romance. Streaming on Amazon.

And some more current films:

ON TV

Alec Guinness in THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI

On January 5, Turner Classic Movies presents David Lean’s WWII epic The Bridge on the River Kwai.  It’s the stirring story of British troops forced into slave labor at a cruel Japanese POW camp.  The British commander (Alec Guinness, in perhaps his most acclaimed performance) must walk the tightrope between giving his men enough morale to survive and helping the enemy’s war effort.  He has his match in the prison camp commander (Sessue Hayakawa), and these two men from conflicting values systems engage in a duel of wits – for life and death stakes.  William Holden plays an American soldier/scoundrel forced into an assignment that he really, really doesn’t want.  There’s also the stirringly unforgettable whistling version of the Colonel Bogey March. The climax remains one of the greatest hold-your-breath action sequences in cinema, even compared to all the CGI-aided ones in the  62 years since it was filmed.

Sessue Hayakawa in THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI

AMMONITE: when the slow burn is a dud

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Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in AMMONITE

The fine acting of Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan can’t save Ammonite, a slog of a period romance.

Winslet plays a 19th century paleontologist isolated in the inhospitable climate of an English coastal village. Ronan plays a young wife whose clueless husband has diagnosed as melancholy, although her biggest issue seems to be him; he thinks that leaving her with Winslet’s loner in the brisk ocean breeze might be therapeutic.

The general arc of the story is predictable – these two underestimated women will come to appreciate each other’s gifts and will fall in love, a forbidden love in this time and place. Of course, it takes a long time to break down the anti-social barriers that the Winslet character has constructed to protect herself emotionally. In the mean time, there’s only so much smoldering that the audience can stand to consume.

The problem here is the directing and editing – the pace needed to be picked up. There’s not enough of a payoff to this story to reward a slow, slow, slow burn. The Wife and I just couldn’t hang in there with it. We stopped caring.

The Winslet character is so solitary – and so terse when she’s not alone – dialogue in Ammonite is scant. And the sound design is intentionally rigged to emphasize this – and it’s a problem. All of the non-dialogue sounds are louder than usual. Now, this works near the crashing surf; we all know that voices are drowned out by waves crashing on rocks. But every footstep and creaking hinge a makes a pronounced, even jarring, sound. Once you figure out what’s going on, it’s very distracting.

The sound design, because it is so innovative, has prompted some Oscar buzz. But it’s innovative-bad, not innovative-good.

Ammonite is available to stream; I watched it on Amazon.