I've been such a bad blogger for the past few weeks...okay, fine, since the very beginning. I just don't have much gas left in my blogging tank after maintaining a pair of blogs for work, but I need to adjust my attitude and make it happen. Blogging is like exercise: just set aside 30 minutes from each day & GO! So, in the wake of welcome renewal of movies-with-friends spirit in recent days, most notably last night's first of three consecutive weekly "Red Riding" movie nights w/ Rachel & Kyle Arthur, I am shaking off the gaslight blues. Fill 'er up!
I am rededicating myself to regular posts, and I've got a fat handful of fall movies to blog about so consider yourselves warned ("yourselves," as if I have a large plural readership in need of addressing). Rachel & I finally got our hands on The Red Riding Trilogy, the sprawling 5-hour crime epic originally made for British television but released stateside last February by IFC Films. It was a full year ago that Rachel first declared the trilogy a must-see for us. You see, Rachel & I have a special movie night relationship that goes way back, usually involving Werner Herzog and once also featuring Liz Burnell before she stood up in the middle of "Cobra Verde" and announced in no uncertain terms that she hates Werner and would not suffer even one more minute of our insufferable cinematic taste. (She did make equally clear that if ever we come to our senses & want to watch Twilight stoned in her bed, we are welcome to come on over.)
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| Andrew Garfield as a journalist up against bloody bad odds in "Red Riding: 1974" |
"Red Riding" comprises three separate but connected individual films, "1974," "1980," and "1983," each from a different director. I was extra stoked to watch "1974" last night because of the central presence of Andrew Garfield, the young actor next in line to play "Spider-Man" in Sony's inevitable back-to-high school franchise reboot. Garfield may well be 2010's MVP, with a likely Oscar nomination coming his way for "The Social Network," and an unforgettable performance in the bleak gem "Never Let Me Go" as a lovelorn schoolboy coping with the realization that he is, in fact, a clone. Yeah, pretty rough. On first impression, he's a bit young to play the headstrong newspaper reporter who takes on the pervasive corruption behind the brutal string of murders in "1974," but Garfield goes the distance, no sweat. He's probably the most promising actor to emerge into the mainstream since Ryan Gosling.
I will withhold further commentary and attempts at insight until we have completed the entire gritty saga a couple of weeks from now, but we were sufficiently hooked by "1974" enough to move forward with the remaining pieces of the criminal corruption triptych. The next entry is directed by James Marsh, who last made the exhilarating documentary masterpiece "Man on Wire." That said, I can't wait for "1980" to get here.
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