The Painted Veil Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Irish film director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) once told me that people don't really watch movies; they listen to dialogue to get the gist of the story. For example, if in his movie In America (2003), a little girl enters the New York apartment and exclaims, "It's huge!" then everybody complains that the apartment was too big for the family to afford. The dialogue suggests the review. Sheridan makes a good point. Certainly there were a handful of recent movies that relied on their images more than on dialogue, and they received mostly negative notices, or were flatly ignored (The New World, The Intruder, The Black Dahlia, Marie Antoinette, etc.). But there's another factor in movies that gets even less notice. I promised myself a year ago that I would spend more time listening to musical scores while watching movies to determine how effective they are. But more often than not, after the fact, I don't even remember hearing a score.

Hey all. Tommy here, pinch-hitting for regular box-office soothsayer Patricia, who is off battling near-sub-zero temperatures in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival this week.

So here's what's happening this weekend at the box office. In the wake of the Golden Globes and in anticipation of this coming Tuesday's Academy Award nominations, a slew of Oscar contenders (most of which were released in 2006) are expanding to more theaters. These include Golden Globe Best Picture winner 'Babel,' the critically acclaimed 'The Queen,' the enthralling adult fairy tale 'Pan's Labyrinth,' Clint Eastwood's other World War II flick 'Letters From Iwo Jima,' the powerful indie 'The Last King of Scotland' and the Edward Norton period drama 'The Painted Veil.' Alas, despite their lofty aspirations and high caliber, these almost-sure-to-be-nominated flicks will get crushed -- and I mean crushed with AUTHORITY -- by this week's only new wide release 'The Hitcher.'

Despite its R-rating, 'The Hitcher' appeals to that primal desire in a large group of moviegoers to watch a beauitful scantily clad woman (in this case Sophia Bush) flee from an eerie-looking -- and clearly deranged -- dude (in this case Sean Bean) who likes to thumb rides in the rain and then end the lives of his car-pool "buddies." Prediction: 'The Hitcher' will be riding solo atop the box office come Sunday.

Prediction deadline: Saturday at noon

1. The Hitcher
2. Stomp the Yard
3. Night at the Museum
4. Dreamgirls
5. Pursuit of Happyness

POST: What's your weekend top five prediction?

POST: What do you think of these movies?

John Patterson has an interesting article up over on The Guardian carping about the liberties Hollywood has taken in adapting classics of British children's literature. The most recent offender, of course, is Miss Potter, directed by Australian Chris Noonan and starring Texan Renée Zellweger as Britain's beloved best-selling author, rather than any number of British actresses who could have played the part.

Patterson is (mostly, at least) tongue-in-cheek -- at least I think he is, I don't always grok British humor. But this is, after all, the same chap who, in writing about the religious right witch-hunting animated films, called Bugs Bunny a "flagrant naturist" and said of Foghorn Leghorn that he's "all about the cock" -- something that most American writers would be way too uptight to dare to say in print. Any writer who goes after Dr. James Dobson for labeling Spongebob Squarepants a "nellie" just because he holds hands with his best friend Patrick and watches "The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy" is okay in my book.

"... the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding." -- W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

If you want to set out to make a period drama set in China in the 1920s, it's only natural that the source material should be a work by William Somerset Maugham, whose simple direct prose and uncanny talent for telling tales of less-than-perfect characters without resorting to preachiness or melodrama made him the most famous and highly paid writer of the 1930s. The Painted Veil, helmed by John Curran and starring Naomi Watts as unhappy, solipsistic socialite Kitty Fane and Edward Norton as her stern and unforgiving husband, Walter, takes us from London to Hong Kong to the remote outreaches of a Chinese village beset by a cholera epidemic, in this bittersweet tale of love and duty.