Saw two movies with the Wife

Last Sunday.  One of them I kind of sneaked in there while Renee was working on dinner, and snacks.  By the time we might have had a chance to start our intended main feature, Renee was already engaged with my foreign pick and it was nearly over.

My movie was an Italian psychological thriller entitled The Double Hour.  Despite an ambiguous ending, and a couple of gratuitous sexytime scenes, the film was a decent little entertainment.  It reminded me of Repulsion a little bit, and the big twist near the end of the second act is actually quite ingenious, totally believable, and fun.

Here's the trailer:

Our main feature was Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, and it was a whopping disappointment.  I actually enjoyed the theatre setting for the story, all the sets, and the costumes were indeed v lovely to look at.  The problem was not even Keira Knightly (not one of my faves, really), but the subject matter.  I just did not really give a fig about Anna's tragic story.  It seems she brought it all on herself, and she was going to have to pay.  I just did not get the sense of any real danger or guilty tragic passionate love between her and Vronsky.  That is not just the actors, the whole direction for the film seems detached, as if observed from an arch distance.

I am a big style over content kind of guy, but this film definitely could have stood to have some grounding.  The stakes desperately needed to be raised for these characters to make this work.  It is a flipping melodrama already.

I can sum up the Wife's feelings about Anna Karenina with one sentence, something she said out loud near the end of the film, "Is everybody in Russia named Alexei?"

Next time you are idly cruising Netflix check out The Double Hour.  Stay away from the most recent Anna Karenina.  (I am going to check out some older film versions.  I have absolutely no desire to read the book.)












Mwah, ...