:::: MENU ::::

A movie and book review blog

  • Reading films, watching books,....
  • Mind candy in the dark
  • All the books left to read...

Aug 30, 2003

The Shipping News 



New Foundland is America's answer to Europe's mysterious celtic ways. Lasse Halstrom's movie 'The Shipping News', is set in New Foundland with Kevin Spacey, as Quoyle, the protagonist. Quoyle is typical example of a so-called life's loser, as he says at the start of the film, someone nobody notices. He'd have continued his nameless faceless existence somewhere in great vastness of suburban America had not he married a very promiscuous woman, who later dies in a car wreck and had not his aunt on her way to salvation (which by the way is her native NewFoundland) not stopped by to steal his father's ashes and had not these both events coincided.

Well the story makes a turn, and there goes Quoyle with his aunt and his daughter to NewFoundland, which supposedly has Artic climate in May????(We have higher average temperatures in Alaska in May than New Foundland, hows that possible??) Anyway, in his ancestral village(or town?), Quoyle lands a job as Shipping News reporter with the local paper and the story goes on. The charecterization is good, maybe should thank the author of the book from which this movie is adapted, Annie Proulx's Shipping News. Cinematography is haunting, doing justice to NewFoundland's frigid but sweeping landscapes and wind swept shores and it does have some surrealistic shots like the line of people tugging the great house across the snowy expanse. Its a nice movie to watch, don't expect much action,there isn't any.Its more like warm chicken soup, filling and homely, lie back, relax and watch.

0 comments:

Take me to the top of the page BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY