Movies

Ethan Hawke was the well-known name that we were watching for here, and he didn’t disappoint.  This was a surprisingly interesting story based on the folk artist Maude Lewis from Marshalltown, Nova Scotia.  This looks like a crossroads, near Digby.

Maudie answers an ad placed by fish seller Everett, and ends up staying.  She is fleeing a hostile family environment.

She starts painting, and bit by bit, paints her entire shack.  She gains some fame, in part with a CBC documentary, but not enough to lift her from poverty and her tiny house.

Isabelle Huppert is great in this movie, with her blunt dialogue, but you have to like essentially plotless French films.  Fortunately, I love them.  It starts off as her husband of many years announce he is moving in with another woman.  They are both philosophy teachers, with a great love of books.

The film meanders through other events.  The most interesting is her visits to a former student and protegé in the countryside, where he is hanging out with a group of anarchists.  But it is not a romantic liaison, just a visit.  Just as it would be.  And life goes on.

This film was a more typical choice for Telluride, and had a promising storyline of a policeman chasing Neruda as he flees a fascist Chilean regime.

I was surprised by the adulation that Neruda received, and the character’s popularity with women even though he is a paunchy, bald middle aged fellow.  When I dug into Wikipedia, it turns out that the actor does resemble Neruda.

I loved how Neruda espoused Communist ideals in support of the working man, while acting most of the time like a lazy aristocrat, exploiting all those around him.

The strange part, and where the movie failed, was the wasted Gael García Bernal.  He played the strangely named Oscar Peluchonneau, an inspector who doggedly tracks Neruda through the remote country side.  He maintains an interior monologue speculating on if he is a character in his own story, and it never seemed to fit.

Another unusual Telluride candidate: a musical.  The opening scene was a treat, a slow opening in a traffic jam evolving into a huge song and dance fest.

Emma Stone was a strong lead, with a somewhat wooden Ryan Gosling.  Great colors, and a fun story, although her meteoric rise was a bit exaggerated.

Part of Telluride at Dartmouth.  I knew this was a science fiction film, which was unusual for Telluride, so I was looking forward to this one.  And I wasn’t disappointed.

This was a strange movie, that was hard to follow, and you can’t really connect the pieces until the end, when it does all come together.