Latest Films Seen

One reason I love to travel is the chance it gives me to catch up on films and this last trip was no exception.

On the flight back, I finally got the chance to see Dreamgirls with the famed performance by Jennifer Hudson. The film was good, though not wonderful. I love musicals. I love to sing along and it was extremely hard for me not to break out into the chorus of "And I am telling you." Jennifer Hudson was incredible and to think that this is her first movie role. I guess she's what they call an instinctive actor. Beyonce was incredibly beautiful in the film, as was Anika Noni Rose (who no one seems to remember).

On my first day in Cambridge, I walked past the Art House Theatre, I think it was called, and went inside. It was your typical artsy cinema with posters for films that hardly anyone has heard about; most of them subtitled. There were so many films that I wanted to see, but the timing kind of decided things for me. I saw Notes on a Scandal. I really like Judi Dench and wanted to see her as a really bad character. She's such a wonderful actress that it was difficult to see her as a total villain. She doesn't reduce her roles to 1-dimensional people, but rather portrays them as human beings with many conflicting emotions. She played a very lonely and love-starved woman who found it easy to prey on equally lonely women or women who she could exercise some measure of control over.

I would have loved to have seen The Last King of Scotland, but that did not work out at all. I hope because of the African connection, it will be shown at NuMetro cinema here (you can but hope).

I watched Because I Said So, a film about mothers and daughters. There were only two men in the cinema hall. It was an okay movie; funny and endearing. Anyone with a mother or daughter, I suppose, would be able to relate. I like Dianne Keaton normally, though she seemed rather more frenzied and screechier than usual in this role.

Then, last and kind of least, was The Good Shepherd. Can anyone say snoooooozefest? 'Interminable' is the pefect way to sum up the experience for me. I kept wondering when the damn film would end. It boasted a star-studded cast and it turned out that it was directed by Robert De Niro. Well, good actor does not mean good director. And what kind of job was his editor doing? I would have made the film at least an hour and a half shorter. Maybe his editor was sleeping through it too! This is one of those films where you can sleep off for huge chunks of time intermittently through the film, wake up and find that you haven't missed a beat. Okay, perhaps I'm being a tad bit mean. It was slow, though strangely compelling. After investing so much into the film, I had to stay to see what was going to happen at the end.