As I've mentioned before here, the marketing department next door aren't too fond of the primordial swamp jams that come out of the New Weird America, and for the past couple of weeks they've been particularly aggravated by the new album by Sunburned Hand Of The Man.
SPIDER-MAN 2 IS THE best movie adaptation of a superhero comic since Superman 2—one each to Marvel and DC, then. Like that 1980 Christopher Reeve (R.I.P.) super-vehicle, here the eponymous character, played by Tobey Maguire with muscular sensitivity, is torn between saving the world and giving it all up for The Girl (Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane). This sets things up quite nicely for Peter Parker's biblical abdication of responsibility when the prospect of losing MJ becomes too great and inevitable return when he realises his true calling.
A double header, featuring two of David Lean's finest directorial efforts. Hobson's Choice (1954) sees Charles Laughton's magnificently overbearing Lancastrian patriarch butt heads with his equally stubborn daughter Brenda de Banzie, while John Mills is splendid as her husband, the worm who turns. The Sound Barrier (1952), in which Ralph Richardson attempts to devise the first faster-than-sound plane, sees stiff upper lips wobble as his efforts come to grief. It's also notable for some fine aerial sequences. Bravo, chaps!
Koyaanisqatsi is arguably the best stoner movie of all time, although Godfrey Reggio probably didn't realise that in '83. Aerial photography of forests, animals; etc, sweeps across to expansive time-lapse shots of factory complexes and nuclear power plants. The big country's poeticised and exposed to Philip Glass' insistent score. Powaqqatsi, the '88 sequel, explored Third World exploitation, but the original's the must-see.
Ang Lee's soulful swordfest is out on visually refined Superbit release with wispy hair shots and flashing blades all shimmer-free. Yet Lee's masterfully melancholic movie—with Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh as the unrequited martial arts lovers, Matrix choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping providing the aerial ballet, and high-kicking upstart Zhang Ziyi providing the feminist subtext—could work wonders in any format.
