Half-Assed Movie Reviews

February 10, 2010:  The Last Station

How many freebies do I get during Oscar season?  What I mean is, for how many decent movies do I get to go totally half-assed with my reviews, in order to save my time and sanity, when I’m 20 reviews behind?  It’s hard enough to see 2-3 movies a day, much less write them up, while holding down a full-time job and actually having a family and a life and all that as well.  It makes for some short nights.

The Last Station is a film which covers the final months in the life of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer and icon.  I haven’t read anything he’s done, and I knew nothing about his life and his followers, but the film was nominated for two acting awards – Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor as Tolstoy himself, and Helen Mirren as Best Actress for portraying his wife.  They battle over whether to keep or give away his money and copyrights, as they are pulled in all directions by the inhabitants of their compound, including Paul Giamatti who remains convinced that Mirren is insane, and James McAvoy who’s not so sure that it isn’t Giamatti who is the crazy one.  Is Mirren over the edge, or is she the only sane one?  It’s hard to tell.

And that’s about all there is to it.  See it if you like.  When I saw it, there were projection issues, including a big out-of-focus spot in the top left-hand-side area of the screen, and the aperture plate wasn’t placed correctly so the corner of the frame could be seen in the top right, and it was slightly out of focus througout.  Still, the overwhelmingly green and white colour palette came across nicely, with a lot of white clothing and time spent outside at the estate which was either lush green or wintry white.  The characters as depicted mostly had British accents, I suppose for simplicity, with written words appearing in the expected cyrillic characters.  I’ll leave a deeper analysis to someone who knows the literature.  The nominated performances were solid, but alas, they are in categories which are already all but locked up.

Maybe I should do some reading.