But Paul Thomas Anderson's new film plays only twice a day at the so-called Mega Place amusement center in Chania, and both those times are problematic for my schedule. One is at 7:30, which takes me right out of dinner with my family, and the other is at 9:30, which leaves me stumbling out of the cinema at well after midnight, not really knowing if either of the buses needed to take me back to my Air BnB will still be running at that time.
So, I'm forgoing what I hoped would be the third and final theatrical viewing on my six-week holiday. I had hoped to fit in one every two weeks, but I guess I should be glad that I worked out the first two without bending my wife's good will out of shape. I'll probably catch it the day after I get back, this Sunday.
Instead, let me tell you about a movie I watched with Greek subject matter, which I decided to do a couple nights ago when I couldn't figure out anything else.
I'd tried to watch Before Midnight, whose Greek coastal setting has given me some of my ideas of what Greece might be like when I got here. But it's not on Neflix, and I'm somewhat arbitrarily limiting myself to Netflix on my tablet while I'm gone. I could probably figure out how to fire up Amazon Prime but I just haven't bothered.
So then I searched for Greek content on the streamer, and I gotta tell you, there ain't much.
Most of what's offered are TV shows. However, Netflix does carry a series of movies in a franchise called Loafing and Camouflage, most of which are from the last decade or so, but the first of which actually came out in 1984. A Greek language movie from 1984? Sure, why not?
The only trouble with that one was: No English subtitles! I could put on Greek subtitles, but they are obviously for the Greek hearing impaired as the dialogue is also in Greek. So that one was over before it even started.
I landed on a movie from 2012 I'd never heard of, despite the presence of three prominent actors: Sebastian Koch, Catherine Deneuve and John Cleese. I assume you know the second two. If you aren't familiar with the first, Koch is the German actor who starred in The Lives of Others and Never Look Back. Turns out he can also speak English, which is indeed the default language of this film, as you might expect with Cleese as a star.
The movie is called God Loves Caviar, which should also indicate that there is a Russian aspect to it. And might suggest, from that title, that it's a comedy, but it is not. A little bit of a bait and switch there.
Koch plays Ioannis Varvakis, a real Greek man who straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and stumbled into a way to preserve caviar, allowing it to be shipped around the world and making him a fortune. There are some slightly whimsical scenes surrounding that comparatively small aspect of the story. For the most part, though, this is a fairly sober film about a man who abandoned a daughter and her mother (not his wife) to travel the world and spent most of that time on the high seas in service of the Russians, though he also returned to fight for Greek independence near the end of his life. Independence from what? Well, I don't remember that part.
It's not a bad movie. But I think I was hoping for a bit more of a comedy, given that part of the bait and switch is that John Cleese's role in it is not a comedy role in the slightest. And it did seem like a fairly minor historical figure on whom to base an entire biopic.
What did I tell you about slim pickings for Greek cinema?
No comments:
Post a Comment