Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts
First time in a long time I’ve watched two movies back-to-back… following The Constant Gardener, we put on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This pun-filled animated amusement was spot on. Couldn’t have stayed awake for anything deeper, either.
Metacritic score of 87 seems high, but this is excellent for its type. The Aardman folks aren’t Pixar, but they deliver.
The Constant Gardener moves too slowly. The story is interesting (if a bit shallow in points), but I wanted a conspiracy thriller to move more quickly. Also, the key husband and wife relationship felt impossible to me. Maybe the book gave the depth which is hinted at, but skipped, in the movie.
John Le Carré wrote the book from which this movie was made. Le Carré made his name with cold war spy thrillers. While current events now would seem to point to Russia being worth watching still, we don’t have a simple enemy to use in movies anymore. In The Constant Gardener, global drug companies are asked to fill the “simply enemy” role, as environmental and ethical terrorists testing drugs on Kenyans without their consent. A bit much, although I’m sure there are elements of the caricature which ring true.
Africa — in this movie, Nairobi and (in one sequence) Sudan — shows as sunblasted landscape and human despair. The scenes in the rest of Europe, especially in London, are just overtly grey, damp, and gloomy.
Metacritic score of 82 shows why this is an Oscar candidate, I suppose. A faster pace, and I would have leaned towards a higher opinion of the movie.
Brokeback Mountain is a good movie, though tough to live up to the hype. The Metacritic 87 is the highest score I’ve seen in my short experience with Metacritic. On the all-time scores Brokeback Mountain ties for 64th… note, however, that Metacritic has only been around for ~5 years, and while they are working backwards to include films from the pre-internet era, it’s not a comprehensive list in any way before 2001.
Strangest part about watching the film for me was that all I knew going in is that it’s a love story about gay cowboys. Most movies about love stories build to a match, so when the central couple gets together early in the film, I didn’t know what to expect for the rest of the movie.
The mountains of Wyoming play a gorgeous supporting role.