Hanoi Life

Movies!!

Back when we were avid tournament bridge players, whenever someone's explanation of why he took a particular action was unbelievable, his cohorts would shout out "movies!!" as in it could only happen in the movies.

While TV here in Hanoi is pretty dismal, we do have access to all of the latest films on DVD.  for example, we have seen 4 of the nominees for Best Motion Picture.  Sad to say, we were not overly impressed.

We must admit that we are not critics.  Well, we may be critical, but we have no idea of what a producer or director actually does or what makes a film "great."  When we take photographs, we point and shoot so editing and cinematography are also skills we do not appreciate, let alone possess.

We tend to rate films on a two point scale:  I like it; I don't like it.  Generally we watch a movie to be entertained.

"Little Miss Sunshine" was actually quite entertaining.  We were turned on to it by our friends, Ralph and Lea Basch,who knew the band that provided the music for the score.  We're not sure that a "nice little movie" is worthy of Best Picture, but we did enjoy it.

"The Departed," "Babel" and "The Queen" were a different story.  Put them all together and you have a great cure for insomnia.  The view from here says that "Departed" was overlong, derivative, predictable and way too violent. It somehow managed to be both predictable and incomprehensible at the same time.

"Babel" was also overlong, boring but had the additional quality(?) of being disjointed, seeming to have little or no continuity.

We yield to no one in our admiration for Helen Mirren and she did a great job portraying Elizabeth II, or at least of portraying our stereotype.  The film though was a "mockumentary."  It was overlong(anyone sensing that we are ADD?) disjointed and not very entertaining.

Scorsese is said to be a great director and he should have an Oscar.  So now he has one. 

In closing let us tell you we watched "Breakfast at Tiffany's" the other day and it was the right length, a nice story, although the character of Holly is so much softer than Capote's original, and did we mention we love Audrey Hepburn?  Now there's a film that should have gotten "Best Picture!"

We know, don't bother writing.  Of course it did!

We know much more about orchestras so we will blog on the three concerts we will have seen by week's end.  Oh also, Ira's review of the Wagner Gala in Hong Kong will appear in the New York Wagner Society's newsletter.  We can't wait for our copy to arrive.

Films R Us

One of the worst things here in Hanoi is the TV programming.  We do not have a dish so we are locked into whatever the cable at Sofitel Plaza has to offer.  Of course TV should not be one's primary form of entertainment and even though we used to schedule our lives around "M*A*S*H" and "What's My Line," we are better off reading a book or playing chess or doing Sudoko(we have no idea but Carol's father, Earl does).

That said, TV is a comfortable form of entertainment and is easy to operate.  Here at Sofitel Plaza, we benefit from hotel services that are far beyond the usual apartment services.  However, our cable TV is geared to hotel guests, so it is heavily weighted towards news channels and a smorgasbord of languages.  Entertainment shows are difficult to find and Star TV, the Hong Kong based channel, thinks that people enjoy seeing tycoons with bad hair abuse prospective employees and total non-singers howling in an effort to get a recording contract.

Fortunately, we have access to very cheap DVD's.  Their provenance may be suspect but the price(about a buck) is certainly right.  We can get the latest films as well as all of the classics and full sets of American TV Series.  We are currently re-watching one of our favorites,  "The West Wing," and our friends, Ralph and Lea introduced us to "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Some of the DVDs are defective while others do not have English titles, but by and large they are watchable, even with the large variance in volume, ranging from deafening to inaudible, forcing us to keep the clicker in hand at all times.

We have a large selection of titles, from "Casablanca"  BEST FILM EVER, well there's also "The Third Man"(Has any author's work been made into film more than Graham Greene?) to "Borat" and "Crash."

Last night we struggled through "The Departed."  We have never liked Jack Nicholson very much, dating back to the days when he was the face of the LA Lakers, taunting our Celtics during the playoffs.  In this film, he played(what else?) a bad guy with a foul mouth.  We did just find out that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are not the same person, though we only found this out after over two hours of violence and plot twists.  If this is representative of Scorsese's best work, perhaps there is a reason why he hasn't won an Oscar!  Anyway, it is difficult to know what we will like until it is actually on our screen.

Feel free to send us suggestions as we are always on the lookout for movies that can entertain us for a couple of hours.

Well, if no one can help us, we can always take up Sudoko!

"We came to Hanoi for the wonderful TV shows."  "But Hanoi has no wonderful TV shows."  "We were misinformed."