18 July 2003 23:54 [link]
the musketeer who wasn't there
Visiting Ed in Oxford. Sara kicked me out of the flat so that she and her friends could have a girl's night. (As it happens, plans changed and our flat ended up empty for the night. But being obliged to visit friends is no real hardship.)
Rather than going out and drinking, we decided to stay in and drink. Armed with a Chinese takeaway, beer, The Musketeer, and The Man Who Wasn't There we headed back to Ed's and settled down.
The beer was poor. We'd inadvertently bought Tetley's Original Bitter instead of the Smoothflow stuff. It wasn't all that good, but we drank it anyway. I'm out of the habit of drinking carbonated bitter.
The Musketeer was supposed to mix Dumas's classic tale with Hong Kong-style fight sequences. That would have been good. As it was, there might well have been Hong Kong-style fight sequences, but since they all seemed to happen in the dark, we couldn't tell. It was a very dark film generally, all in all. Everything seemed to happen at night. Tim Roth did well as Febre, but you got the feeling that his lines were grafted on to the script to give the punters some take-home quotes.
The Man Who Wasn't There, on the other hand, was excellent. Looked wonderful and, sitting in a darkened room, I had that feeling of immersion in the film that does away with the screen and replaces the camera with the eye; the credits were like waking up. I do seem to have a liking for films with narration.
* * *