bill-bell's Reviews

Bobbie's Girl (2002 TV Movie)

7/10

25 November 2005

My wife and I both enjoyed the movie. Nothing earth shaking, just a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a half. Since all we know of Ireland is what we can remember from having motored around the southern end of it roughly 300 years ago we aren't troubled by a knowledge of the reality of that country either.

I really wish that movies that come to Canada could bear ratings that reflect the accepted standards of this country. After all, marriages between women are now legal here and there was nothing in this movie in the least lascivious, so why such a misleading label?

I suppose that my only concern about suggesting such a thing is that it might bring back the silly days of the government censors.

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The Snow Walker (2003)

9/10

Film with some very Canadian themes

10 August 2005

Warning: Spoilers

Although the aboriginal peoples of Canada and newcomers have often been in conflict the aboriginals have time and again saved the lives of early settlers or showed them how to live in these new lands. This film is a reminder of the kind of generosity that is part of many of their cultures. With their help we have survived. Now we need to learn from them.

Farley Mowat, the author behind the scriptwriter of this film, may well be Canada's premier author because he writes about survival and that, according to Margaret Atwood, is one of our national fixations. There might be survival but there will definitely be a cost.

For, as Northrup Frye has suggested, we are not comfortable here in our meagre forest clearings. And we fear the barren lands even more. They lie below us, or better, hundreds of miles north of us, not just beneath us. They are nonetheless a presence.

Nor can we understand those people to whom we have given our diseases, physical and social, who used to make their homes there. We have the arrogance to dominate them. Yet each of them has the courage it takes to make way for another to live.

A lovely, lovely movie.

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The Champagne Safari (1995)

One dangerous project too many

25 September 2004

Although Bedaux was eventually arrested by American authorities on a charge of treason it is not in the least obvious that he was simply another Nazi collaborator. The truth is much more fascinating inasmuch as Bedaux seemed to feel a sense of duty or loyalty only to his wife and to his business projects. His blind pursuit of business and adventures on the scale of continents cost him his life.

Champagne figured prominently in Bedaux's semi-successful safari through subarctic bush and wetlands, and over mountain passes, from Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) to British Columbia in 1934. Indeed his entire life was a dazzling "champagne safari". He was famous for entertaining the world's richest people, including European and American business and political elites--and housing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor--in his renovated Loire chateau.

And he managed all of this having arrived from France in New York a couple of decades earlier with one dollar in his pocket.

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Nora (2000)

10/10

Actual lives--not a Harlequin romance

21 August 2004

At a superficial level the film is richly evocative of the physical and cultural settings of Dublin, Ireland and Trieste, Italy; and of the strong contrasts between the two places. Dublin's streets are gritty, dark and damp, its people dress in shades of black and grey. Trieste is bright and airy, and people find it natural that rooms should connect via exterior balconies. But unfortunately when James Joyce tried to escape Dublin he carried his Irish neuroses with him in his cases.

Nora Barnacle is hearty, strong, sensuous and highly adaptable. As a biography of her, this film concentrates on the generous support and protection that she gives, and promises to give, to a fearful, complicated man given to outrageous sexual jealousy--James Joyce.

Nora and James might seem poorly matched and perhaps it is the combination of her own jealousy for his letters--and their intense physical relationship--that binds them.

None of us could expect to predict a stable outcome, could we? Yet they lived together for their entire adult lives.

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