向冀的随笔
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A 1944 classic with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly: great fashion, great music and great story.
This red dress is forever.
Love
Kiss
Love their dresses and hats…that age of everyday elegance
More toxic Hugh Grant from 1988 movie: the Liar of the White Worm.
My favorite Hugh Grant movie so far. It is based on a brilliant novel of the same name by French writer Pascal Bruckner.
Grant played a very itchy husband who's married for seven years to an elegant English woman. Aboard a ship to India for a holiday with his wife, Grant took fancy of a sensual large-sized French woman.
The French woman's American writer husband, strangely enough, urged Grant to advance on his dangerous adventure. The American writer knew all too well the weary marriage life beneath the English couple's polite exchanges and symbolic kisses, and had no trouble telling Grant to "crawl back to your matrimonial tomb."
In recounting his love story with his wife – a one-time dancer, the American writer reveals love's mysterious metamorphosis. From describing his first sight of her as "a glimpse of heaven" to "we are headed for sexual bankruptcy" to "I would pressed my lips onto hers like you would crush a cigarette butt in an ashtray" to finally making her life "hell so hot even she wants to get out."
The story is an anti-thesis to the Romeo and Juliet type. We all know that people die for love because they cannot be together. This film tells you that love kills when you have too much of each other.
Lastly, the beauty of this movie is that you genuinely don't know what's going to happens next or in the end. The finish is surprising but sort of perfect.
I've watched TWENTY Hugh Grant movies that it is getting sickening. Look at this long list:
Did You Hear About the Morgans (2010)
Music and Lyrics (2007)
American Dreamz (2006)
Bridget Jones Dairy: the Edge of Reason (2004)
Love Actually (2003)
About A Boy (2002)
Bridget Jones Dairy (2001)
Small Time Crooks (2000)
Notting Hill (1999)
Mickey Blue Eyes (1999)
Extreme Measures (1996)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
An Awfully Big Adventure (1995)
Nine Month (1995)
An Englishman Who Went Up A Hill, And Come Down On A Mountain (1995)
Four Weddings and A Funeral (1994)
Sirens (1994)
The Remains of the Day (1993)
Train To Hell (1993)
Bitter Moon (1992)
Impromptu (1991)
The Lady and the Highwayman (1989)
Champagne Charlie (1989)
The Bengali Night (1988)
The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Maurice (1987)
One of the less brilliant Hugh Grant movies (of which there are numerous), featuring memorable dialogues such as the following:
Woman: Your skin is so white. I want to be white too. But it's not possible, is it?
Hugh Grant: Maybe with some powder?
The character, an English engineer trapped in India, is possibly the least suitable role for the posh Hugh Grant. He is brilliant as Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Clive Durham in Maurice, William Thacker in Notting Hill and even Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones' Diary.
English nobleman and licentious skirt-chaser bring the best out of Hugh Grant. He should never appear in dirty basketball shirt out of city slums, nor inelegantly walking on a dirt road with pants obviously too short for him.
Equally discrepant is the plot. There is a crazy journalist character, and many times you are left clueless as to what a particular scene is trying to convey. In all, it is only for the sake of HG do one endure such a disastrous movie.
Can't-miss funny video of HG's earlier endeavors.
But Maurice is the complete opposite. Only 27 years old (though he looked as if he's 20), Hugh Grant plays a rich student at Cambridge in the early 1910s. Candle lite dinners, canoeing on river while talking about "the whole Western culture is based on the law of Christ, not Plato" and beautifully lying on green grass with his lover are the scenes that naturally bring home the charm of the Hugh Grant.
A minor note: like a blossoming flower, Hugh Grant's features transitioned from the dark hair and dark eyes in Maurice while in his late twenties to the sandy hair and blue eyes in Notting Hill in his late thirties (when his charm peaked).
Music and Lyrics (2007), Love Actually (2003), About a Boy (2002), Bridget Jone's Diary (2001), Extreme Measures (1996 – stay away from action movies, Hugh), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) are…ah, your regular romantic comedy, with varying degrees of mediocrity.
But the thing is, Hugh Grant himself was never buried beneath whatever role he's playing. We see a little, or maybe a lot, of Hugh Grant in the characters he plays. The juror's verdict is: the reluctant actor should retire to writing. Did You Hear About the Morgans should be his last movie. Otherwise, he risks the danger he so fears himself: becoming worse and worse by each film and fade out with no dignity.
Tags: about a boy, extreme measures, hugh grant, love acutally, maurice, music and lyrics, notting hill, the bengali night
Tags: hugh grant, notting hill
