Syhd (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} syhd) wrote,@ 2009-06-21 00:40:00 |
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1900
I was snared by my "Will Watch Almost Anything Tim Roth Stars In" mantra for 125 minutes, and was pleasantly entertained this afternoon.
IFC showed The Legend of 1900, a "fable" about an orphan who spends his entire life aboard an ocean liner. He's found by one of the boiler room crew after the latest boatload of Old World immigrants disembark. His adopted father names the boy 1900 after the year he was born. 1900 turns out to have a natural, prodigious talent for the piano and provides entertainment for the upper and lower decks. The point the film delights in dancing around is whether or not 1900 will ever get off the boat and live on land like everyone else.
Of all the scenes from the movie, the best one (for me) was how the narrator (a jazz trumpeteer who befriends 1900) first meets him. While the ship pitches back and forth on a stormy sea, 1900 walks straight across the deck like it's dead calm, because he's spent his entire life mastering his sea legs. There's more to the scene than that, but I'll leave the spoilerage to that.
A good movie that I would highly recommend if A) you'd like to see Tim Roth play a pleasant natured character for once; B) you like period movies about the early 20th century; 3) you like comic drama with a sense of pleasant unreality; 4) you enjoyed Cinema Paradiso, also by the same director. If you're looking for Roth to be his normal sardonic self, for deep insight into human nature, or for more than a light touch in dealing with the social issues of the time periods depicted, move along.
I was snared by my "Will Watch Almost Anything Tim Roth Stars In" mantra for 125 minutes, and was pleasantly entertained this afternoon.
IFC showed The Legend of 1900, a "fable" about an orphan who spends his entire life aboard an ocean liner. He's found by one of the boiler room crew after the latest boatload of Old World immigrants disembark. His adopted father names the boy 1900 after the year he was born. 1900 turns out to have a natural, prodigious talent for the piano and provides entertainment for the upper and lower decks. The point the film delights in dancing around is whether or not 1900 will ever get off the boat and live on land like everyone else.
Of all the scenes from the movie, the best one (for me) was how the narrator (a jazz trumpeteer who befriends 1900) first meets him. While the ship pitches back and forth on a stormy sea, 1900 walks straight across the deck like it's dead calm, because he's spent his entire life mastering his sea legs. There's more to the scene than that, but I'll leave the spoilerage to that.
A good movie that I would highly recommend if A) you'd like to see Tim Roth play a pleasant natured character for once; B) you like period movies about the early 20th century; 3) you like comic drama with a sense of pleasant unreality; 4) you enjoyed Cinema Paradiso, also by the same director. If you're looking for Roth to be his normal sardonic self, for deep insight into human nature, or for more than a light touch in dealing with the social issues of the time periods depicted, move along.
