cinematically inclined

I've been raiding the bargain DVD bins at Borders again. Also not to be overlooked are the DVD bins at Daedalus Books here in Columbia. Some movies I've seen recently, another eclectic selection:

~ The 2003 Norwegian-Swedish film directed by Bent Hamer, "Kitchen Stories." This might have been the rage in the arthouses a few years ago, but I missed it then. It's a quiet comedy with a lot going on under the surface. Very briefly: A Swedish researcher observes his Norwegian farmer subject's dietary habits as part of a larger research program. The fabric of the cosmos gets gradually ripped asunder as researcher and subject befriend each other and foil the scientific method. A bouncy Scandinavian pop song, heard mostly on the radio, provides much of the musical background.

~ "49th Parallel" (1941). As a wartime propaganda film (and exciting story, well-filmed), maybe this could be considered part of a trio with Olivier's "Henry V" and Errol Flynn's "The Sea Hawk." Olivier is also in 49th, and this movie also had a great composer to provide the score: Ralph Vaughan Williams. (This DVD is on the pricey art film Criterion label, and I don't think that ever gets put in the bargain bins.)

~ "The Brother From Another Planet" (1984). I know that I saw this one when it was first released. I'd forgotten much of it, but it was all the better to rediscover. There are a few familiar black actors from the 1970s and 80s here, but I was straining to remember the name of one of the actors playing the two white aliens. End credits revealed him to be the young David Strathairn. The film's director, John Sayles, plays the other alien joining him to recapture the escaped black alien, played sympathetically by a silent Joe Morton. Sayles and Strathairn are wonderfully weird as Morton's pursuers in Harlem. The interesting score includes Caribbean steel drums played a little differently from the way I've heard them before.

~ "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (instead of "Hellboy II"!). This Walt Disney wonder from 1959 must have had another theatrical release, for I remember seeing it at the cinema in the late 1960s. The Disney movie wizards achieved some atmospheric images and scary moments that have stuck with me since then. Albert Sharpe's Darby seemed fresh in my memory, but I never realized before that this was one of the first screen appearances by Sean Connery. You even get to hear him sing, but not too much. He apparently was bashful about doing that scene, but he doesn't sound bad. The Technicolor film looks painterly and does justice to a land of leprechauns and banshees.

P.S. While on the subject of movies with Irish settings: I gave "Into the West" another viewing a while ago. That's another foray into Irish lore, albeit with a more serious edge than the Disney movie. The two young brothers are played perfectly naturally by the child actors, and that magic horse is a superb actor, too. Quite a different movie set in the same country is "Breakfast on Pluto." I saw it in an arthouse cinema in DC on its release, and it's waiting near my DVD player now.