Colin Firth

B

| Paul Wake Baker

teresa wright & dana andrews - the best years of our lives 1946The Best Years of Our Lives

The stark reality of surviving life after war is best faced with the aid of friends and loved ones and that is story that is told in this 1946 film which remains one of the best films ever made.

The-Big-Sleep Bogart BacallThe Big Sleep

This 1946 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novel remains one of the best films ever made for a variety of reasons.  Start with Chandler’s novel, written in a unique voice and style, that delved into the underworld of big city vice, using dangerous and edgy behavior that were normally hidden from the public eye: pornography, promiscuity, and homosexuality.

 Hitchcock The Birds 02The Birds

I was thirteen years old in 1963 when I went to a movie theater to Alfred Hitchcock’s latest move, The Birds, and I can still remember the effect it had, the tension it engendered, the thrill of fright, and my jangled nerves when I left the theater and stepped out into the sunlight.

 the-blind-side-22-550x366The Blind Side

The Blind Side, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, is a biographical drama that tells the story of how Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a rather large African-American, gets adopted into a white family, defeats his educational issues, and goes on to develop into a terrific left tackle on the football field.

Breakfast ClubThe Breakfast Club

Yelling one minute, giggling the next, while cool music plays throughout.  Welcome to The Breakfast Club, John Hughes’ 1985 comedy-drama about five teenagers confined to a Saturday detention in the Shermer High School library in Shermer, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

 renee zellweger bridge jonesBridget Jones’s Diary

Based ever so loosely on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this 2001 British romantic comedy directed by Sharon Maguire is full of hits and misses.  The hits are all punches thrown between the two men who seek Bridget’s attention and the misses are all those single women who wish they had a choice between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.

bright-star cornish and wishawBright Star

Written and directed by Jane Campion and based on the John Keats biography by Andrew Motion, this 2009 film is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen and it captures one of the most touching romances in history.  It takes its title from one of Keats’ most moving poems, “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.”

Broken Arrow Stewart PagetBroken Arrow

This 1950 movie was one of the first to portray western Native Americans in a balanced manner and carries as its message racial equality and peaceful relations between Indians and Anglos.  Based on the popular novel, Blood Brother, by Elliott Arnold, the film adaptation by Michael Blankfort dramatizes the historical relationship between Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) and Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise (Jeff Chandler).

Bridget Jones’s Diary

| Paul Wake Baker

renee zellweger bridge jonesBased ever so loosely on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this 2001 British romantic comedy directed by Sharon Maguire is full of hits and misses.  The hits are all punches thrown between the two men who seek Bridget’s attention and the misses are all those single women who wish they had a choice between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.

Adapted by Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, and Richard Curtis from Fielding’s popular novel of the same name, the movie tells the story of Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger), a single woman in her early thirties looking for love. She works at a publishing house in London, under the direction of Daniel Cleaver (Grant), a real hottie that she’d like to get her hands on.  Over Christmas, her mother tries to set her up with former childhood neighbor Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Get it? Darcy. Firth. Nudge nudge wink wink. Of course, he very aloof and disdainful and she dislikes him immediately.

Right from the beginning, you know it isn’t going to be anything like Pride and Prejudice. Bridget is drunk half the time, smokes constantly, burbling, bumbling, and making a fool out of herself every five minutes. NOT Lizzy Bennet.

Setting her sights on her boss, she begins wearing short skirts and see-through blouses and exchanging flirtatious emails with him. He, of course, responds. When they see Darcy at a party, Daniel tells Bridget that Darcy once stole his fiancée from him. Wickham, eh? They go away for a weekend and there’s that darned Darcy again. On the verge of meeting Bridget’s parents, Daniel abandons her, explaining that he has important work at the office. Not so. He’s actually having an affair with a woman from the New York branch of the publishing company and Bridget finds the woman at his flat.

She dumps him and there is Darcy, immediately interested.

Parts of the movie are quite funny, but most of the humor depends on Bridget’s putting herself in embarrassing situations, which she does over and over. Personally, I don’t care for that kind of humor, just as I don’t care for novels that depend on the stupidity of their protagonists to make a plot. It was hugely popular for a variety of reasons, but mostly for the sophomoric humor and the beautiful people. It didn’t win any major awards, although Zellweger was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award. (It’s funny that British actors routinely play American roles without getting props for how expertly they handle the accent, yet when a Texan plays a Brit everyone makes a big fuss about it. Frankly, I didn’t find it as believable as everyone else. Kind of like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, there was something that just didn’t completely ring true.)

The supporting cast is wonderful. I loved Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent as Bridget’s parents. Embeth Davidtz, Shirley Henderson, James Callis, and Lisa Barbuscia are all excellent and add to the fun.

There is one other carry-over from the great BBC Pride and Prejudice besides Colin Firth: the screenwriter for that masterpiece, Andrew Davies, collaborated on the script for Bridget Jones’s Diary.

At 98 minutes, it’s a funny, entertaining evening, without having to exercise the brain at all.

Shakespeare in Love

| Paul Wake Baker

Written by Tom Stoppard (author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) and Marc Norman, this 1998 film is both a comedy and a romance–and it is very successful at both.

Viola and Shakespeare in bedUsing the premise that Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare’s breakthrough drama, the movie begins with Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) as a poor player in Lord Chamberlain’s Men struggling to write a comedy for Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), owner of the Rose Theater, to be called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. As was the custom in those days, they began to cast the play before it was completed–or in this case–even started. Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, disguises herself as a man so she can audition. When Shakespeare sees her, he chases after her and follows her back to her palatial home, remaining to watch the ball, hoping to get a glance at the boy who had impressed him. When he sees Viola dancing, he insinuates himself into it and falls hopelessly in love with her. Viola, however, is slated to marry Lord Wessex (Colin Firth) and go off with him to the new world where he plans to run a successful tobacco plantation. Shakespeare, now deeply in love, changes his play from a comedy to a drama and renames his heroine Juliet.

The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress and Judi Densch won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth. The cinematography is terrific, as are the costumes, and the set, which was built specially for the movie. The direction by John Madden is tight, with terrific editing.

But the star of the movie is the script, which incorporates hilarious scenes, counterbalanced by wonderful romantic scenes. It is extremely witty, incorporating quotes and references to Shakespeare’s life and inspirations throughout, and liberally sprinkled with quotations. Although Norman had the original idea, it was Stoppard’s masterful rewrite that makes the movie work. The marvelous parallel of Romeo and Juliet with the tragedy of Will and Viola works like a charm, as many of the scenes between the young couple actually make it into the play. The final and most wonderful element is the substitution of Viola as Juliet, performing before Queen Elizabeth, in a time when all women’s roles were played by men. Equally powerful is the idea at the very end that Viola inspired Shakespeare to write Twelfth Night in her honor. Although most this story is completely made up–and abounds in historical inaccuracies–it remains a wonderful movie and it inspired me to go back and reread some of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.

I highly recommend this movie to everyone!