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The only work by Oscar Wilde that I’ve read is The Picture Of Dorian Grey (1890), and I absolutely loved it. I’d heard good things about the movie Wilde (Brian Gilbert) and finally got around to renting it this week.

Its main stars are Stephen Fry (Wilde) and Jude Law (Bosie), and I think they both did an excellent job. One element that I found to be lacking was evidence of Oscar’s self-proclaimed brilliance. There is a lot of witty dialogue, and a couple of scenes where he certainly praises himself, but not nearly as much as I had anticipated. I was also under the impression that he began to have homosexual experiences much earlier than what was portrayed in the movie. (The movie shows him being seduced in his home while his wife was sleeping, and strongly suggests that it was his first indulgence.) Further, his works were merely alluded to either in passing or in short scenes rather than in any detail, which I thought would have been more interesting (to the literary crowd, at least).

I did a bit of research and it seems that the events in the latter part of the film are quite accurate, to the point of word-for-word dialogue in some points. I’m not surprised, as it just “felt” better than most of the scenes leading up to it.

All in all, I thought it was a good movie, but for some reason I was pretty restless while watching it and kept looking to see how much time had elapsed. I like period films, and the sets, costumes and dialogue were pretty convincing. And thankfully, most of the skin shots are not of Stephen Fry.

My friend Sharon introduced me to Flannery O’Connor a few years ago. I can’t remember the name of the short story that I read, but I was immediately struck by her bleak and realist style of writing. It was thus with great anticipation that I recently began “Wise Blood” (1952), her first novel.

This novel was, for lack of a better word, creepy. She brings us into the minds of characters who are obsessed with their own strong and differing religious convictions. I think that the characters are truly inspired, but so misguided and confused that the results are horrifying. I was especially affected by the fine line she drew between those who truly believe and those who don’t, and how similar their actions sometimes are.

I felt like she knew her characters too well – not to the point of distraction; rather, it felt uncomfortable to have so much of their inner thoughts revealed. This isn’t a complaint! I think that it’s completely brilliant that she had the ability to communicate the unpleasant in a way that is both fascinating and disturbing. I have read of this book being described as a “comedy of the grotesque”, and I think that is a great way to describe it.

I also watched O Fantasma (Jo?ɬ£o Pedro Rodrigues) on DVD with my friend Michael this evening. I saw part of it on Showcase a few years ago, but this was the first time I saw it in its entirety. It follows around Sergio, a young and attractive garbage collector, as he wanders around Lisbon, Portugal. We get to see him engage in some curious behaviour: stalk a handsome biker/swimmer, rummage through garbage (and then wear, and masturbate with, the speedo and gloves that he finds), masturbate in the lovely style of erotic asphyxiation, have random (and fairly graphic) sex, get handcuffed and basically molested by a tough cop (who I think is the same man he had earlier found handcuffed and gagged in a car, and performed a “favor” to, but left him there), break into his biker/swimmer’s house and dump him tied up and gagged out of a second story window, and last but not least: dress up in a skin-tight leather outfit and sneak dog-like around town, only to disappear into the wastelands which surround the city (but only after taking a dump on the floor). Charming!

So… yeah. I’m sure that one can draw a lot of deep and metaphorical meaning out of this film, but it seemed more to be rather self-indulgent on the part of the director. It was as if he has all of these fantasies and was getting off on subjecting others watching them (not to mention the poor actor who actually had to do them, and hasn’t made a movie since. I think he was excellent, though). We watched a few scenes with the director’s commentary on, and Rodrigues seemed as confused as I was (“Here is Sergio walking down the street. He is wearing a leather suit.” Uh… yeah, thanks.). I would have liked to find out how he got the handcuffs off, but the director was too busy placing artful lapses of silence into his commentary to reveal that information.

“O Fantasma”‘s English title is “The Phantom”. I think that the title is appropriate, as Sergio definitely to recedes into a ghost-like role as he roams the city unseen. Actually, perhaps he doesn’t exactly “roam”. He seems to know where he’s going next; it looks like he’s actually sniffing out a trail, which is an example of one of the dog-like traits that he adopts. Some of the reviews I’ve read suggest that the second act of the film, when he is in the skin tight leather suit, shows him acting in an almost uncontrollable psycho-sexual state that maybe have been caused by not getting what he “needs” from both his male and female lovers. It is as if his natural animal instincts are awakened to overtake and then dehumanize him. Hmm, that’s a lot of babbling on my part. I’ll stop now.

The DVD wasn’t very good quality. For most of the second half, it looked like they tried to digitally remove some kind of subtitle. There was a vaguely yellow smudge on the bottom of the screen, and when I moved up close to the television to check it out, I could make out some letters. Oh, well… at least it was widescreen.

I finally watched La Vita ?ɬ® bella (Life Is Beautiful) (Roberto Benigni). Wow… Now I know what my sister Irene meant when she said that she could never watch it again (I don’t feel the same way, but I get it). What a beautiful and heartbreaking story! Benigni certainly has a gift of communicating hope in the midst of despair. I laughed out loud on several occassions, which is something that I tend not to do (I’m fairly humorless). I even cried a bit at the end, but that could have been because of the wings that I was eating for dinner.

I just got home from AMC Kennedy Commons after watching Dark Water (Walter Salles). The only other film by Salles that I’ve seen is Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries) (2004), which I loved. Following the trend of many other recent “horror” films, this film is based all things Japanese: the novel by K?ɬ¥ji Suzuki (who also wrote “Ringu”) and the film by Hideo Nakata (who also directed “Ringu” and the Americanized version “The Ring”).

Overall, I liked this movie: I liked the way it looked and it was pretty entertaining. It wasn’t that scary, though, which was a bit disappointing, and the story was kind of hokey, but it was still pretty enjoyable. Jennifer Connelly was good, as was John C. Reilly, who I’m starting to really like. Tim Roth was pretty neat as usual, as was Pete Postlethwaite.

It was nice to see a horror movie that didn’t use a lot of obvious special effects. The water was pretty gross and cool but I would have liked to see it tie in more with Dahlia’s (Connelly) psychological issues. What I mean is, since water is so obviously important to the “horror” aspects of this story, I kind of expected some sort of relationship between what it does to the characters in the present and what it did to the characters in the past. I felt like the filmmaker wanted us to question how much of what we see was “real”, and how much was in Dahlia’s mind. If she had suffered some trauma having to do with water, then using water as the horror motif would make perfect sense, and could have been a clue as to whether these things were actually happening the way we saw them. The only thing that I can think of is that it was always raining during her flashbacks, but that could have been pathetic fallacy.

It was fairly creepy in some parts (though not scary) and with my cousin Ronnie grabbing my sleeve on one side and my aunt slapping my arm on the other, I think I had a pretty good theatre experience.

On a side note, I don’t like AMC theatres. On Saturday night when I was there to see Murderball, you could hear music leaking in from another theatre. Tonight, the sound was pretty bad and for a good chunk of the movie we could hear constant clicking as the surround speakers flickered on and off. They are also more expensive than the other theatres, so I’d expect their equipment to work.