Mike Crowl's Blog, page 34

French movie, Israeli movie

Some spoilers here...

Having a bit of a run on movies worth mentioning at the moment. In the last few days we've seen the Israeli film, The Lemon Tree and the French movie, The Big Picture (L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, which translates roughly as 'the man who wanted to live his life').

The French movie was well made, but left you with a rather flat feeling: it comes to a sudden halt at a point which could be said to be showing something of an epiphany in the main character's...

Mt Zion

Some spoilers here.
We watched Mt Zion last night, a NZ movie focused on Maori growing potatoes in Pukekohe. It’s set in the late seventies. These aren’t Maori who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly, though there is some underhand stuff going on with the pakeha owner (?) it seems; this wasn’t ever very clear. 
The main character, played by singer Stan Walker, is the musical/artistic type, a bit of a misfit in this community, where grind is the word. His father, Temuera Morrison,...

Death and Mr Pickwick

I’ve started reading Death and Mr Pickwick, which I’d heard about from the author himself (Stephen Jarvis) some months ago. It’s 800 pages long or so, and it’s proving to be an absorbing but odd novel; novel may not be its best description. It’s like a bunch of stories, handfuls of them, many of them based on fact and then dramatised. It also delves into the underbelly of the Victorian world, where there are many things that Dickens never wrote about thankfully or wasn’t able to be because...

Mozart's Sister

This wonderful French film, ( Nannerl, la soeur de Mozart ) presents a family making ends meet by travelling from one wealthy 18th century European establishment to another...including the Palace of Versailles. The family are the Mozarts, of course, and the two children, Nannerl and Wolfgang, are both prodigies in an age when such beings were supposedly commonplace. The only problem is that Nannerl is a girl, and while her talents are almost on a par with Mozart the child, her father doesn't ta...

Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts

Two movies - Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts - take us to foreign climes where unconventional things happen. In the first movie we know exactly what's going to happen because it's hinted at so strongly from the beginning that we'd have to be stupid not to read the signals. In the second movie, which begins in New York but soon after heads to Cambodia, we have almost no idea what's happening, what's happened, and what will happen. Eventually we get the picture, but it takes quite...

Birthday update

I turned 70 yesterday (for some reason I invariably type 708 when I go to write that; not sure what that's saying about me). Facebook came to the party in a big way, by giving umpteen friends from all over the place the chance to wish me Happy Birthday. If FB provided no other service than the ability for dozens of people to give someone birthday greetings it would be  worthwhile. 

So a big thanks (again) to all those who wished me well. 

There were a number of unexpected highlig...

Once my Mother

Once my Mother is a kind of two-pronged documentary in which the Australian director, Sophia Turkiewicz, explores the horror journey that her mother, an orphan from a young age, had to endure, as well as her own journey of learning to forgive her mother after she’d ‘abandoned’ her in an orphanage in Australia. Helen, the mother, born in Poland in the years before the Second World War, lost both her parents early on. She went to live for a few years with an uncle in Poland,...

Detective Zen

We've been watching a three-part series called Zen, about an Italian detective working in Rome. There were going to be more in the series, but it was cancelled...ratings weren't good enough, of course.

The series is based on three books by English writer Michael Dibdin, and strangely enough, the first of the books is actually the third in the series; so plainly there's been some mucking about with the original stories.

The most curious thing about the series, it seemed to me, is that it's...

Quirky woods

Some while back I wrote a few posts on quirky places in Dunedin - here, for instance, or here, and here. These posts, which date from 2009 and 2011, are now all in need of updating. I've just updated the one on quirky water, for instance, though it could probably do with a total overhaul.

Anyway, to add to the 'series,' my wife and I today discovered 73 Hillary St. Celia had seen something about it online when she was searching for the whereabouts of chestnut trees in Dunedin, and suggest...

Bad and goodel

Last night we watched an Israeli movie, supposedly a comedy, about a trio of geriatrics who try to rob a bank, with the aid of the grandson of one of them. Sir Patrick Stewart (as he's listed on the cover) was one of the trio; the other two were Hebrew actors. For some reason crudity was the order of the day, along with a good deal of swearing. Which always seems worse when it appears as a subtitle. (We watched the awful Gone Girl recently with subtitles, because the dialogue was so hard...