Adrift

I went to see Adrift during a Thursday preview and I thought it was a pretty good, if typical, survival story.  Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) is a free spirit who is working odd jobs in order to travel the world.  While working at a marina in Tahiti she meets and falls in love with Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), a yacht owner sailing around the world.  He asks her to join him but first the two of them take a job sailing a luxury yacht from Tahiti to San Diego and on the way they run into Hurricane Raymond.  The movie begins when Tami wakes up in the wreckage of the yacht after the storm and can't find Richard.  When she sees him floating, severely injured, on a dinghy in the distance, she makes repairs to the yacht as best she can and sails towards him to rescue him.  The action moves back and forth between their romance on Tahiti and their intense struggle to survive with a plot twist that I didn't see coming but should have.  The cinematography is stunning and the wide shots of the tiny yacht in the middle of the ocean are incredibly effective in conveying their isolation and the camera work is very immersive, so much so that there were many times when I found myself holding my head up to keep above the water.  The storm sequences are absolutely thrilling.  Shailene Woodley is hit or miss with me but she gives a fantastic and believable physical performance here as a woman determined to survive and Claflin is always nice to look at.  I think the flashbacks in the narrative take away the tension and the sense of peril at times but I liked this movie and would recommend it.

Summer Reading: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

The first selection on my summer reading list was Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave and I was eagerly anticipating this novel (hence the reason I began with it).  Unfortunately, it fell a little flat for me (as did Little Bee, another novel by Cleave). Mary North is an eighteen year old London socialite who signs up for a job at the War Office on the day that war is declared in 1939. She wishes to be useful but she is also motivated by a need to rebel against her wealthy family. When she is assigned to be a teacher of students left behind in the evacuation, she meets and falls in love with Tom Shaw, a school administrator. She also meets Alistair Heath, Tom's roommate, and her feelings for him complicate her relationship with Tom, especially when Alistair is stationed on Malta during a brutal blockade. A romance set in war-torn London seems like it would be right up my alley but, honestly, I had a hard time engaging with the story. I would pick it up for a few minutes and then set it down again and it was a struggle just to finish it. The story felt very episodic rather than a cohesive narrative. It was mostly vignettes about Mary in London and Alistair in Malta with lots of secondary characters and secondary plots that seemed to go nowhere. The romance seemed like an afterthought rather than the focus and the reunion between Mary and Alistair (which is why I kept reading, to be honest) was disappointingly anticlimactic. While Cleave's prose is incredibly beautiful and descriptive, the dialogue between the characters is unrealistic.  They engage in witty banter rather than heartfelt communication and that made the characters rather one-dimensional and kept them at a distance. I suppose Cleave's motivation for this device was to show the British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity but it backfired with me because I didn't really care about what happened to the characters. In the end, this novel didn't really appeal to me and I wouldn't recommend it.

Note:  Have you read Everyone Brave is Forgiven?  What did you think?  I seem to be in the minority on this one.

Solo

It was really hard for me to wait so long to see Solo: A Star Wars Story (particularly since so many of my friends were seeing it before me) but my Dad made me promise him that I wouldn't see it without him!  I'm glad that I kept my promise because he took my family to see it on Memorial Day and we had such a good time together!  We all loved it because it is such a fun and entertaining movie, perfect for the holiday weekend!  The galaxy is ruled by competing crime syndicates and a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) teams up with Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) to procure a valuable resource, coaxium, for Crimson Dawn, a syndicate run by the ruthless Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).  Along the way he meets the wookie Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), wins the Millennium Falcon in a card game from Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and makes the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs!  The story gave me everything I was looking for and I think it does a good job explaining how Han Solo got to be the rakish smuggler we meet in the original trilogy.  Ehrenreich is more than up for the challenge of playing such an iconic character but Glover steals the show as Lando Calrissian.  I laughed and laughed at the scene where he records the "Calrissian Chronicles."  The action sequences and special effects are really what make this movie so much fun, particularly a spectacular high speed train robbery and the infamous Kessel Run!  I still think that Rogue One has more depth and pathos but this addition to the Star Wars Anthology is well worth a visit to the theater!  Go see it!

1945

Yesterday I spent a rainy afternoon at the Broadway seeing a compelling foreign film called 1945.  In a rural village in Hungary just after World War II, two Orthodox Jews get off a train and arrange for two large trunks to be taken into the town by wagon.  News immediately spreads throughout the village and everyone reacts with alarm, wondering who they are and what they want.  We slowly learn that many of the villagers were complicit in denouncing a prominent Jewish family before the war and that many profited, unethically, from their arrest.  Intermingled with these frantic scenes of chaos are long shots of the two men slowly following the wagon into town which is a bit menacing as the villagers await their arrival.  As guilt plagues the villagers, with catastrophic results for many of them, we learn the innocuous reason for their visit.  It reminded me a lot of High Noon because the town is anticipating, not gunslingers, but two strangers walking into the town while nervously peering out from behind lace curtains as events unfold in real time.  This is, ultimately, a profound portrayal of guilt and how you cannot escape from the consequences of your actions forever and I am sure that I will be thinking about it for some time to come.  The cinematography effectively uses high contrast black and white to create unbearably beautiful images and the jarring score does much to add to the tension.  It is in Hungarian, and some Russian, with English subtitles and many of the characters look and dress alike (particularly the women) so I had a difficult time following the action at first but I found the images on the screen to be riveting.  I would definitely recommend this film.

Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2

Last night my friend Angela and I went to the final Utah Symphony performance of the 2017-2018 season and it was such an amazing concert!  In my opinion a performance featuring Rachmaninoff was a great way to end what has been a fantastic season!  The orchestra began with a piece commissioned by the Utah Symphony called Reflections by Tristan Murail.  It is very modern but, as explained by Thierry Fischer, it is a contemplative piece where the instruments mimic the tides and the wind and their ability to withstand adversity.  I found it to be very soothing.  Next Concertmaster Madeleine Adkins was the featured soloist in a performance of Korngold's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.  I had never heard this piece before and I thought it was beautiful.  I especially loved the third movement because it was very lively and the violin sounded a lot like a fiddle.  Adkins gave a spectacular performance (I really like her and I like the fact that the Concertmaster is a woman) and she received a thunderous standing ovation.  After the intermission the orchestra played Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.  Rachmaninoff is one of my favorite composers so I enjoyed this immensely.  I think that the fanfare played by the horns in the second movement is so quintessentially Russian and I think that the main theme played in the third movement is especially romantic.  It was such a lovely concert and it was a great way to celebrate the end of the school year!

Note:  I am really looking forward to seeing the Utah Symphony perform in some outdoor venues this summer, particularly a performance with Sutton Foster at Deer Valley!