| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A |
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|
| Visuals: |
A |
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|
Highly Recommended for Egghead Types & All Others
by Bruce (movies profile)
Apr 2, 2008
71
of
74 people found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed this creepy movie. The director and the writer took some chances. The two main characters do unforgiveable inexcusable things, but I still cared what happened to them. I was pushed into uncomfortableness. No apologies. For example, one character sort of forces another one to let her(1) touch her(2). Her(2) says to stop. Her(1) protests until her(2) says "enough!" Very tense and uncomfortable. And a teacher has an affair with a student. They cast a real child in the role. He is a handsome boy, but he has this skinny child's body. It's creepy and twisted.
Judi Dench is just great as this awful, sad woman. I had so much sympathy for her even though she is kind of evil and hurtful. She (her character Barbara) straight out tells us how lonely and hopeless she is. She's mean to her family of old sisters, in-laws, etc as they try to get close to her. She's "good" at her teaching job if good means having all the kids be scared of you. Her journals, her sick old dying cat, cigarettes, cups of tea--that's her life. The performance made me laugh. Not quite in a "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" or "Mommie Dearest" way, but sort of and with more pathos. Laughing with the character who is wry and cutting much more than laughing at her.
She might be a lesbian but maybe not. She wants companionship. She says she is afraid of dying alone. She wants control. She wants to be touched but maybe not kissed. I hope she is not a lesbian, because if she is it's that stereotype of the evil, effete, jealous, bitter gay person. Her sister sort of encourages her to be a partnered lesbian and she gets all pissed off. Hard to say exactly what that means about whether or not she is one.
It had been a while since I saw a movie that satisfied me. I was wondering if it was just me. Maybe it was seasonal affective disorder or something. A lot of movies that other people were liking a whole lot were leaving me kind of cold: The History Boys, Casino Royale, Happy Feet, Dreamgirls... even The Departed. That's a broad range of movies and I was being critical of them all. They seemed clunky, fake, or pointless. But I thought "Notes" was great so maybe those other movies were shlock--although I admit not completely without merits. |
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