To turn a phrase from Kit Ramsey, one of Eddie Murphy's characters in Steve Martin's “Bowfinger”: “We've been watching films, not movies, lately.”
This week, we watched two interesting films: “The Good Shepherd” and “Cinema Paradiso”.
It took me a good 12-14 hours, eight of them sleep, to get past my disgust for the loss of life amongst some of the spies in “The Good Shepherd” to appreciate the acting of Matt Damon, in this Film Noir directed by Robert de Niro. I really did not like much of what the characters did in the film, but the acting that went into it was tremendous. For Matt Damon to be able to play his role as Edward Wilson, as straight as he did, must have been extremely difficult. The man shows zero emotion throughout the whole movie, except in a couple of fleeting instances, one being where he falls in love with Laura (played by Tammy Blanchard), the other being where he learns he was being taken advantage of by Hanna Schiller (played by Martina Gedeck), and realized he'd have to order her death.
Cinema Paradiso is a different story… obviously… but no less bittersweet. Put succinctly, it's a story of having to trade one's dreams of love for dreams of fame. Quite easy to see why this one won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in 1990.
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