I missed The Lives of Others, a German film which surprisingly beat out Days of Glory and Pan’s Labyrinth for the best Foreign Film Oscar, at the Eveningstar but got a chance to rent it from Blockbuster (boo! hiss! I miss Bart & Greg’s) and was somewhat disappointed. The film is the story of a East German Stasi Agent (Weisler) who has been directed to monitor a prominent playwright whose girlfriend is lusted after by a high-ranking party member. The monitor becomes disillusioned with the monitoring process and hilarity does not ensue. One would think that the premise of the film would lend itself to a Breach-esque paranoid thriller, instead the film is a (very) slow-moving story of dissent. In my eyes, this failed because the characters were, frankly, not very interesting. This may have been caused by the language barrier, which has occasionally given me trouble while watching foreign movies, but I feel that the characters were simply difficult to relate too and that the film was far too talky. There was a distinct lack of “tense” moments in a film that deals with such a topic. Furthermore, Weisler’s change of heart was underdeveloped and his character was very hollow, although I feel some of that was the intention of the filmmakers. Finally, the main woman, who was supposed to be the object of desire for all these men, wasn’t even that hot. Anyway, the long and short of it is that I didn’t like the movie very much and it definitely shouldn’t have beaten Pan’s Labyrinth at the Oscars. Oh well.
Moving on to TV, the Stomp Tokyo Podcast recently recommended the British series Jekyll and I, having very little else to do, checked it out. It was actually a pretty good little series. (Mild spoilers follow) The Jekyll/Hyde character (here it’s Jackman/Hyde) is done extremely well by James Nesbitt (who I vaguely recognize but can’t figure out what from). He plays the two characters completely differently in every respect, almost to the point where you think it’s two different actors. The other actors are pretty solid too, I especially liked the antagonist of the first few episodes, who had a cool “smiling evil” thing going. However, that leads to my biggest problem with the show: it’s brevity (only six episodes). Of course British shows tend to have very short runs, but Jekyll could really have benefited from a few more episodes. We basically get 2 episodes of set-up and then bam! it’s into the finale. So, there’s not a lot of Hyde running around being sweet and various subplots are pretty undeveloped (especially the whole assistant falling in love thing, which was interesting but came out of nowhere). Anyway, it’s coming out on DVD in America in like two weeks and it’s certainly worth a rental.
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