Great movies

With the Oscar ceremony coming up pretty soon we would like to sum up some of our most recent movie experiences. After a somewhat dull autumn, the cinemas were almost flooded with promising films in December and we made an effort to actually go and see some while they were still showing. There is pretty quick rotation here - unless of course we’re taking blockbusters like ‘Spiderman 3’ or ‘The Kite Runner’ – so one should not hesitate too much. For instance, we completely missed ‘Margot at the Wedding’ since it only showed one (1!) week despite prominent actresses such as Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Now we hope to catch it via Netflix before we move.

The excellent movie season was sneakly initiated in October with a special showing of ‘Eastern Promises’ at the university followed by a session with David Cronenberg. Very interesting and despite expectations he was a very funny man.
When Lisbeth afterwards sought information on the movie, she discovered that when the movie opened on the Film Festival in Toronto, Viggo Mortensen had chosen to wear a red DBU sweatshirt (DBU is the Danish Football Association for you English readers) sweat shirt. Classy, hey?

The Coen brothers pleased by returning to earlier greatness in their ‘No Country for Old Men’ which is incredibly well casted, has very beautiful cinematography and is extremely thrilling (according to Tue it resembles ‘Blood Simple’). We had to swing by the local micro brewery for a beer or two before biking home in the dark.

The day before Christmas we had a lovely all-round cinema experience when we caught the bus up to a little art cinema in the part of Santa Barbara that kind of crawls op the mountain sides. We were to watch ‘The Savages’ starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, which in its own was a lovely movie. Highly recommended.

Since we had driven up into the heights in daylight on the last bus of the day, it was an extra pleasing element of the experience to leave the dark of the cinema and view Santa Barbara below covered in the light of the full moon. We also had to walk down which was very nice since a lot of the houses had Christmas decorations and happy people walked the streets.

Now that the winter quarter has commenced, the film clubs at the university are also starting again. Wednesday we watched ‘Into the Wild’ and later follows ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘American Gangster’ which means that by the time the Oscar’s is up we should be able to have an opinion on most of the nominated movies.