Currently Listening Some Hearts By Carrie Underwood see related

Well the e-mail I sent myself with the rest of my post for yesterday showed up six hours after I mailed it.  Yeesh what is up with that? Anyway, here ya'll go:

Lori and I decided to go see The White Countess Wednesday night as kind of a last minute thing. It’s the last film the team of Merchant & Ivory worked on prior to Merchant’s death (they also did films like A Room With a View & Howards End, to name a few -- the latter containing the immortal cinematic moment when Sam West dies after being squashed by a bookcase). Before I talk about the unexpected humor Lori & I found in this film, I will do a serious review for a moment…because after all, this is a serious "art" film (it's supposed to be at any rate -- the previews that ran before this were just bizarre).  

The setting is Shanghai, 1936. Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), a blind & disillusioned American diplomat, meets Sofia (Natasha Richardson), a widowed Russian countess displaced by the revolution in her homeland. She works as a “lady of the night” to support her daughter and her husband’s surviving family, who ostracize her because of her illicit profession yet have no qualms about taking the money she brings in as their sole means of support. In Sofia, Jackson finds the muse he’s been searching for, the centerpiece and hostess he desires for when he opens his own bar (The White Countess). Jackson had gained fame as a key player at Versailles after the "war to end all wars" came to an end. After a series of freak & tragic accidents that take the lives of his wife, two children, and his sight (whew! horrible times!), he abandons himself to the life of a dissolute pleasure seeker and constructs his own world as an escape from the politics of outside that are rapidly spiraling out of control. Through Sofia, Jackson learns to love and live again, while through Jackson, Sofia rediscovers her self-worth.

Now to the comedic relief: I have to mention that Ralph Fiennes cannot do an American accent to save his life. Seriously, he was more believable as VOLDEMORT. Why couldn’t he have portrayed a British diplomat? That wouldn’t have altered the essence of the story in the least. Poor Ralph's accent was hysterically funny…especially when compared to all of the Russian accents in the film, which were excellent and very believable. Lori and I decided he was trying to evoke the typical hardened, fast-talking character that was at the center of so many film noir movies in the '40s and '50s. Ralph Fiennes or his dialogue coach (if he had one) really could've benefited from studying Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (actually this movie is very Casablanca-ish) or Clark Gable in Soldier of Fortune. But inspite of it all, we still love Ralph......he's just a little less a stuffy Brit and a bit more human now (especially considering the Oedipal implications of his recent breakup with his girlfriend of ten years...who was old enough to play his mother the Queen to his Prince Hamlet -- um...slightly strange to say the least...and that's all I'm gonna say about that).

Another thing…I really liked this movie and overall thought it was very well-written and put together; however, at times it appeared that the script was written by someone who did not know English as their first language. I am not sure if this is the case with Kazuo Ishiguro, the writer, but some of the dialogue was so…unwieldy that is appeared that way. And when it was unwieldy, it was oddly humorous.

Coming up next: CURLING ROCKS!!!!