Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[mousepod]

After returning, disappointed, from PotC 3, I decided to cleanse my palate with a selection from my unwatched DVD pile.

So I cracked the plastic wrap on my copy of Alex Cox's Revenger's Tragedy, which I picked up for a couple of bucks at the Tower Records "Going Out of Business" sale, and popped it in my DVD player.

What a fun flick. The source material is the Jacobean revenge play of the same title originally published in 1607 - and much of the dialog comes straight from the play. Cox updates the setting to a near-future dystopian Liverpool, and by doing so gives himself license to pay homage to all of his favorite genres and directors, like Sergio Leone's westerns and Ken Russell's twisted sex sci-fi fantasies.

The mostly outstanding cast, featuring Christopher Eccleston as Vindici, the Revenger of the title and Derek Jacobi and Eddie Izzard as the father and son objects of Vindici's plot, respectively, eat up the script and spit it out in an over-the-top fashion which rarely verges on ham (and even then, it's reminiscent of Derek Jarman's Jubilee, so that's ok).

In all, a 109 minutes well-spent.

[flippyshark]

Originally Posted by mousepod

In all, a 109 minutes well-spent.

Sounds like my kind of fun. I'll have to put it in the queue.

I saw Pirates 3 last night at the Silver Moon Drive-in of Lakeland Florida. The lot was packed, and the night had a festival atmosphere, to which the movie was almost secondary. Even with lo-fi sound and state-of-the-eighties projection, I think I liked the movie better this way, rather than in a tightly packed modern movie-house with ear-splitting digital sound. I was able to hike around, socialize a bit, stargaze and watch trains go by, and occasionally pay attention to POTC III.