Tag: Emily Watson

Here is a dumb question you can ask your friends and coworkers if you want them to dislike you a little bit more than they already do.

“Before Mount Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain on Earth?” This will make them ponder and come up with some bad guess, and you can quickly toss in a “It was still Mount Everest, it just wasn’t discovered, dipshit!” And again, you will lose friends.

My main problem with this joke, as a geophysicist/movie reviewer, is that it assumes that Mount Everest was always the tallest mountain on Earth, and that things don’t change. But we know they change, we know India and Asia weren’t always smashing into each other, so there is a real answer to the question of what used to be the tallest mountain before Mount Everest took over.

Turns out this knowledge is hard to get to and a bit awkward. But know there is a real answer out there. Just modern technology hasn’t always existed.

Oh yeah, I am supposed to talk about Everest. I think I should watch it on a large screen to give the large mountain its necessary honor.

Like a very gentle soft touch on its top most tip.

About 50-55 million years ago, India collided with Asia. It was probably the fastest moving tectonic plate ever, as it split with what is now Madagascar, presumably looking for a new climate. India was on an oceanic plate that was subducting under Asia at the time, which is the why it moved so fast. Once they crashed, the Himalaya mountains decided to be a thing, as the two land masses crumbled into each other, upward and forward! They grew fast and grew hard, making some really tall mountains that are still growing today. Mount Everest, aka Sagarm?th?, aka Chomolungma, currently sitting at 29,029 ft above sea level. Everest’s main purpose seems to be looking tall and killing crazy white assholes.

Oh, but maybe you care about those assholes? Well in that case, the film itself takes place in 1996, based on a real life disaster that took place that year and had like, five books written about it from survivors. Lot of primary sources to work with.

But our main character is Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), owner of Adventure Consultants out of New Zealand leads groups up Everest for large sums, helping them the whole way. He was the first to do this as a commercial business. There is also Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), main guide of Mountain Madness, who started doing the same thing later. In 1996, it was extremely popular though, and there were dozens of groups up there, all trying to use the few mountain paths to make it to the top, around the same time, causing a lot of problems.

Speaking of people, we have a few more notables. Like the fact that Rob’s wife (Kiera Knightley) is at home, pregnant, ready to give birth not long after his return. And Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly), a journalist who is going to write about his experience. And Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), a regular guy who worked three jobs to save up money to hike Everest, making his second attempt to the peak to help school kids realize that dreams come true! And Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), from Texas, a cocky dude who feels good when he climbs, but is depressed back at home. And and and and of course Anatoli Boukreev (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), one of the guides working with Fischer, and a general bamf climber.

Honestly, plot reviews are easy in this case, because I don’t have to describe bad things happening. I just have to talk about who is involved. And since it is such a big cast, here are a few other people involved!

Emily Watson played the base camp leader with Elizabeth Debicki as their team doctor. Thomas M. Wright, Martin Henderson, and Tom Goodman-Hill play the other 3 guides and Sam Worthington plays a literal Guy who works with Adventuring Consultants, and in real life later becomes their director and CEO. Naoko Mori plays Yasuko Namba, who had climbed 6 of the 7 main peaks with Everest as her last, and Robin Wright as the wife of Beck Weathers.

Color coding the hikers is a good strategy, but I feel bad for anyone who got stuck with red.

Apparently, sometimes, I get a little bit emotional over some geology. Because at least one scene in particular had me bawling my eyes out. I mean I found myself crying in the dark theater, surrounded by strangers, crying for like two minutes. It wasn’t even at the end of film, it was probably about 80% of the way through. I am just an emotional wreck since I had a baby, I guess.

Everest is an intense, dramatic, and gorgeous film. It was made in particular to be experience first hand on an IMAX screen. Sure, in the beginning, it is a bit weird as we get some character introductions, watching them hike to base camp and the weeks of training before they finally climb. It isn’t just a group of people running up a hill and facing constant threats. They don’t slowly die one at a time like it is a horror film. This is based on a true story and the attention to detail is astounding. It is easy to get things right when you have multiple books to figure it all out.

The last 40 minutes is extremely gripping. Not knowing the actual story, I didn’t know who would make it out alive so I was afraid for everyone. They all feel like real people and it is easy to connect with many of them before their eventual ascent.

Finally, I think my favorite part of this movie is that it isn’t about a group of people trying to battle nature and show their dominance. It is really about a mountain, who gives zero fucks about the insignificant life forms that sometimes explore its slopes. It is about how nature is unforgiving and doesn’t care about how much prep work occurs, it will do what it wants, when it wants. It is about how life doesn’t care if you are a good person, or a bad person, a newbie or a trainer climber, you are just as likely to get killed in a heart beat.

Nature is a fucking beast. And Everest is fucking good.

The Theory Of Everything. Quite a bold title for such a short movie. Alright, it is about two hours, but I figured it would take a lot longer than 2 hours to fully discuss and show The Theory Of Everything.

What? What’s that? It isn’t actually going to answer this question? Fuckers. No. The Theory Of Everything is actually a biographical romance film about Stephen Hawking. Yes, the Stephen Hawking. That makes sense that he would have a biographical movie I guess. He is a really smart and well known individual and given his conditions it would allow for some sexy sexy acting to occur. But I always feel weird watching a biographical film when the person in question is still alive. What if he still does something super fucking awesome, like, maybe finding an actual Theory of Everything? This film will feel like such a waste at that point. They’d have to do another one to include that monumental occasion.

What? What’s that? This movie isn’t entirely about Stephen Hawking?

Shit, let’s just get the plot details out then so I can stop making assumptions.

Although, with that grin, I am pretty sure I know who farted.

This film starts us off in the roaring 1960s at Cambridge. That is in the UK, for those non worldly readers out there. Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) is just a physics PhD student who doesn’t know what he wants to study! He is definitely smarter than the rest of his colleagues, everyone knows it. Especially Professor Sciama (David Thewlis), the most important person who needs to know that information, and he encourages Stephen to see a few exciting talks and labs that they have to offer for research projects.

But Stephen finds himself interested in something else. Namely, the body, voice, and brain of one Jane (Felicity Jones), a literature student who hopes to one day maybe get a PhD herself. For whatever reason, she sees something in his goofy face and is pretty sure she loves him back.

And then, a motor neuron disease starts to take hold. His legs and hands stop working as well as they used to be. Walking is hard. Writing is hard. Living is hard. He is becoming slowly paralyzed, his entire body, with about 2 years left to live. Jane doesn’t care. She wants to work through it with him. So in his last 2 years, he gets his PhD, gets married, and has a child! But then he is still alive.

And well, obviously, alive to this day.

Also featuring Charlie Cox and Emily Watson as two different caretakers for Mr. Hawking and are in his life way more than you’d might expect, and for different reasons.

Paralyzed yet still made 3 kids? Yeah, not everything turns off down there.

Alright, first thing you may have thought about when hearing this movie was My Left Foot. Or at least that is what I did. Daniel Day-Lewis, the master actor that he is, gave an incredibly performance of a crippled individual and won many praises for it. Eddie Redmayne will win very very similar praises.

Whether it is strong enough on its own to win overall? I doubt it, although it is still incredibly impressive. Also impressive? Felicity Jones. She had a lot to do with this film as well, and nothing felt forced or fake from her. It was also a great performance.

My biggest issue with this story is that it is based on a memoir from Jane Hawking, and thus most of the focus is on them and not Stephen Hawking. That’s right, this is technically more of a Jane Hawking bio movie, not Stephen. Bet you didn’t see that coming. And due to that reason, we have a huge lack of science and talk about his work in this movie. They touch on some light basics, but everything feels like it is super dumbed down and only headline creating topics hit. It felt awkward to rush through all of his academic successes and really made me feel like I was missing something.

Also, the one thing that was definitely missing was some sort of timeline to show us when things occurred. I can’t tell if he was able to finish his PhD and have the baby in the two years he was supposed to live or not. Obviously he lasted longer, but when did the milestones occur? They should have really forced the accomplishments on us and let us know how truly wonderful it was.

Belle is one of those indie movies that makes a lot of noise early in the year, yet usually gets ignored when it comes time to award season.

Not saying this film is deserved awards or anything, that is just when it was released. A nice indie number that is indeed not about Beauty and the Beast, but instead, racism in the victorian era. Ah yes, the Victorian era, where women wore corsets and giant dresses all the time, and men wore…I guess mostly regular clothes. And wigs!

But this work of fiction, based on books, is also pseudo historically accurate. Namely the character Lord Mansfield was actually Chief Justice of England during the time of the movie and presided over several cases that are relevant to the plot. Sweet. But the rest is just guesstimated fluff. I love fluff!

Despite the picture, this is also not a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

Dido Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was born in the West Indies and she is a mulatto. Her mother was a local, but her father was of the English Royal Navy (Matthew Goode) and he has decided to claim her and take her to England. Because he is at sea all the damn time, he places her in the care of his uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife (Emily Watson), even though she is BLACK and they are distinguished members of society.

But they get over it, kind of, and raise her as an aristocrat with her cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). However, she is still slightly shunned by society and not able to play all the reindeer games. Like when it comes time for suitors, she is told she cannot interact with the other gentleman as none of them would find her desirable.

Also at the same time, Lord Mansfield is ruling on a case involving a ship who threw slaves overboard out of necessity to survive, running low on supplies. They echoed it as similar to throwing cargo overboard and want to collect the insurance on their haul. His ruling on this and the events surrounding it could change Britain forever and some people think that having Dido around might influence his decision.

We also have Sam Reid as a young freedom feeling lawyer, Tom Felton and James Norton as brother suitors of varying tastes, and Miranda Richardson and Penelope Wilton as…other people.

I guess I would conclude Belle is a good movie, just one that is pretty darn predictable. Oh sorry, I am concluding before I describe.

Yes, Belle is well acted and I felt good by the end. But a lot of the movie just felt like Victorian filler in the middle. The plot is literally finding suitors for a few ladies. Is this a Jane Austen novel in secret?

Which is my main complaint. Not that predictability is a necessarily a bad thing, but if I kind of know what to expect the entire movie and it follows the path pretty straightforwardly, what is the point? It should have a lot of stuff going on for it in the middle to really make up for that fact.

And it has a few unique events to be sure. Well acted, as I already said. Outfits are nice, message is nice. But I kind of just expected something more. The film itself was incredibly safe.

I have never really enjoyed stories about children and the Holocaust, mostly because I was flooded with them as required reading in middle school. The Diary of Anne Frank, Night, Number the Stars, and a whole lot more. Every single one of them just felt like the same story over and over again, with minor details changed. Repetition only bores me.

But The Book Thief is something different AND something new. The book came out within the last 10 years, and it is about a little German girl going through this experience, not someone sent to a concentration camp. It is a completely new point of view, with some other notable differences as well.

They hide someone below, not above. Brilliant!

You know, like the story being narrated by Death (Roger Allam). Yep, that is new!

But our main character is little Liesel (Sophie Nelisse). Her mother is giving her up for adoption for some reason, and en route, her brother dies mid trip. It is the late 1930s, she is around 12, and she is already used to death.

Her new mother, Rosa (Emily Watson), and father, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) take her on, for reasons not really ever touched on. Maybe they can’t have kids of their own? No idea.

Either way, with a new home, she has the same old problems. Hans realizes she can’t read and takes an interest in her education. Once she learns to read, she can’t stop. Not even when the Nazi party marches into town and holds a book burning event for…some reason. She likes books so much that she saves one from the pyre when no one is looking. That little thief.

Her life gets turned even more upside down when Max (Ben Schnetzer) comes knocking. Max is a Jewish man looking for a place to hide, coming to collect on a promise made by Hans during the first World War. Can Liesel keep a secret, and can she keep a low enough profile to make sure no one starts to suspect their ruse? Will she ever give in to the temptations of her very Aryan friend, Rudy (Nico Liersch)? Will the Nazis win the war? No. No they won’t.

Like. Really, really, really Aryan.

Well, it turns out just because something is new and different, it doesn’t mean it will be amazing.

One of my movie pet peeves happens when a film is set outside of America. When this happens, there are two routes movie makers can go with. They can either do the entire movie in the native language, and give us subtitles, or they can just do it in English. I always assume that when it is in English, they are obviously speaking their native language (in this case German), but we can fully understand the German.

But I hate it when they decide to do a bit of both. Usually this is English with some native language words thrown in to go for “Authenticity,” when really it just confuses my ear drums. The Book Thief goes this route, but also one step further. They have entire conversations and scenes in German with subtitles, before switching back to English which is the majority language of the movie. And honestly, it makes absolutely no sense why they keep switching to German. It is a bad directing move. To make matters worse, sometimes words are written in German, and sometimes English. No continuity whatsoever.

The Book Thief is a movie where the acting is pretty great from everyone involved, but it fails to tell a useful story. About 4/5 of the way into the film, I realized that I have no idea what this movie wanted to be about, the messages it wanted to convey, or where it wanted to go. There was some conflict, but outside of the “World War II” idea, there wasn’t a main conflict for the characters in the film to really overcome. It literally was just a story of a girl over a few years during World War II, and that was it. All of the potential major plotlines ended relatively quickly after they were brought up.

So the film lacks direction. As you could tell from the plot outline, a lot of the details seem to be missing. Throw on confusing speech patterns for the characters, and you got a lackluster film.

I feel like this could have been a great story, and it probably was in the book form, but the movie really failed to deliver. With such great acting, I am disappointed the story felt so flat.  If I read the book, the movie might have been a lot better, but I shouldn’t have to read a novel first to enjoy a movie.

Somehow, when Steven Spielberg makes a movie, people take notice. But when I heard about War Horse? I thought meh. Whatever. Horse movie. Animal movies in general just seem weirder to me. And the last two Horse movies I saw (both racing) were incredibly boring to me.

That’s why for this movie, that I’ve had access to for a month, I am finally watching. Just never felt like the right time to watch it.

And you know, Horses a- aww look at it’s eyes.

The movie is about 140 minutes, and packs a lot in it. It starts from humble beginnings, the birth of the horse on the farm. Learning to walk and run. Once it is old enough it is taken to an auction in the city. Albert (Jeremy Irvine) convinces his dad (Peter Mullan) to bid on the horse, despite it being a colt and them really needing a nice plow horse. But when the landlord tries to drive up the price, the dad stubbornly out bids him, using all of their money (and making it hard to pay the landlord his rent). The mom (Emily Watson) is mad, but they agree to pay the full rent by autumn and want to plow an extra rocky field to make the money.

But first the horse needs training, and is trained to follow a call. Can’t jump well, but can run fast. If only he can teach it to PLOW though.

World War I comes about, and due to the rent circumstances, the horse is sold to the army. Albert is pissed, but the officer (Tom Hiddleston) claims he will protect it as if he did all the raising himself. In training with another officer, the horse meets another horse, a darker bigger horse, who might be going on the adventure with it.

The horses find themselves switching sides, to be cart bearers for the Germans (with Leonard Carow), an old man jam maker (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens), back to the German side to face the gruesome heavy artillery duty (under Nicolas Bro). Many close calls over the years.

But will he ever get to see Albert again as promised, who is now a soldier (with Robert Emms and Benedict Cumberbatch as other soldiers).

Horse BFFs.

This film is also based off of an old children’s book in the 80s, and a play that came out about 4-5 years prior. Not an original Spielberg picture.

But boy was it powerful.

The only thing I really knew about the tale was that it featured a “lot of different stories” and that made some people uninterested in it. Well, sure, quite a few plot points end up happening, but at least its all the same horse. Not a whole bunch of “War horse” stories (well, because it is in so many different horse positions, we get to see them all, but still one horse show). To me it felt like an entirely epic Homeward Bound, without talking, just how the horse changed so many lives.

I got way more into it than I would have guessed, even crying near the end. Sad things occur. Since you know, it is a war after all.

I do think that they could have put more effort into making sure we knew the many different characters, and how they related. I had to wiki some of the characters at the end, not knowing how they all mattered for the story. That was the landlord’s son? Oh okay.

Fireflies In The Garden is one of those movies that is finished and released to a festival in 2008, but takes over three damn years to come out on DVD. I hate those movies. Similar things happened for the movies The Joneses and Leaves Of Grass for me, prompting me to download them. Don’t worry, I bought them once they finally were released. But even if I had downloaded this one, I would for sure not buy the movie later.

Teen Angst and Hipster Glasses aside.

This movie is about a family, like so many are, and tells a story in the present and probably about 25 years in the past. The story is also mostly about Ryan Reynolds and his relationships with his parents, Willem Dafoe playing the dad, and Julia Roberts the mom. Childhood was rough. His dad was mean, belittled him a lot, and gave him unreasonable punishments. His mom didn’t like it, but she was powerless to stop it.

But in the present, he is now more successful and has a beard! He is a writer, of course, and people like it. But he has a new book coming out, a tale of a dysfunctional family and a tale of abuse. Oh man, reminds me of the plot of Peep World. On his way home, though, his mom dies in a car accident, but the dad is fine. Awkwarddd.

Ryan hates his dad, and it shows it. Lots of passive aggressive talk. His aunt of around the same age is also there, kind of awkwardly watching it go down. The aunt is played by Emily Watson, but in the past, was definitely Hayden Panettiere, who had to live with them for a month or so, making Ryan’s character have very impure thoughts.

Yeah, this picture is way weirder (creepier? awkwarder?) knowing that she is the aunt.

The movie conveys a lot of destructive behavior, throughout the movie. From catching of the fireflies (And then doing what you do to fireflies), to “fishing” (with explosives), there is a big expectation for a destructive final. But nope. It doesn’t happen. Just ends. It has an ending, the ending is just lamer than expected based off the clues of the movie. Super disappointing movie, almost makes you feel like the whole thing was pointless. I hate that feeling!

Now I know why it took three damn years, I guess. Technically the relationship conveyed between father and son is pretty powerful, and what becomes of it. But its not enough to redeem the movie for me.