Good suprises happen

[chani]

I've got several free cinema channels for a month thanks to my cable provider, so I can re-watch films I liked or watch films I missed in theatres or that I wouldn't have wanted to see when they were out...

And sometimes good surprises happen. In this case Renee Zellweger...

I saw "Nurse Betty" last week and "A Price Above Rubies" today. "Nurse Betty" is probably a better movie, but Renee Zellweger was VERY good in "A Price Above Rubies". She played Sonia Horrowitz ' exasperation and desperation very well. You can feel how tortured she is, you can feel that fire burning inside and the sluggishness of the Hassidic community around her. That movie actually made me think of "Portrait of a Lady". It has flaws and I bet that many Jews would say that it isn't accurate, but it also has quite moving moments and  is mostly about Sonia's journey in a men's world and about the way she's struggling to belong somewhere, hence her "visions" and the ghosts she keeps talking to.

I liked the scene when she's breast feeding her baby but can't bear it, and at the same time gets rid of her wig (!), and I also liked the one in which she's hiding under a blanket ( scarf ?), thus mimicking men in synagogue, and sees her guide aka her dead little brother.

I wasn't sure that Renee could act (she mostly simpered as Bridget Jones), but now I'm convinced she has talent.

As for "Nurse Betty", the plot was just wicked. It could have been the usual American comedy, it was almost that, but actually it was much more subtle and more subversive, because the bad ones and the innocent ones might not be what they looked.

 Like Russian dolls, there are many Bettys and POV in that film. Betty-the-simple-housewife whose life is filled with a soap opera, Betty-the-lunatic who can't see that her husband has been scalped and killed and who hit the road without knowing she's chased by gangsters, the fantasy nurse who was engaged once with Doctor Charming on Betty's favourite show and whose lines were written by television people but that Betty-the-innocent speaks as they were her words and her memories, the dream-Betty whom Morgan Freeman makes up on his mind (doubling Betty's own fantasy about her romance with Doctor Charming),  Betty-living-in-L.A who does become a nurse and makes a friend, and eventually Betty-the-actress starring in her own show called "Nurse Betty"!

That was new version of the American Dream, quite satiric, and Renee Zellweger was the perfect actress to play the role!

Comments

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

This is so random, but A Price Above Rubies was on the telly here on Saturday. You weren't watching Flemish tv by mistake were you? I only caught a glimpse of it, because I wasn't really in the mood for film.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Nope. I don't have Flemish tv!LOL