movies: casanova

Tonight's movie of choice was Casanova...

To be honest, I wasn't completely sure what to expect... I'd already seen the very brilliant Casanova miniseries, so I had some idea that it might be a similar story. Other than a couple of a couple of plot points (his mother leaving him, and him falling for a woman named Francesca), the two stories were very very different.

Of the two, I think I enjoyed the miniseries more... it certainly seemed more believable (for the most part) than the movie.

Casanova, the movie that is, is a good old fashioned farce more or less... some of the payoffs at the end are signposted pretty far in advance, but it's still quite an enjoyable movie. Lots of running around, lots of mistaken and assumed identities, a little slapstick, and a few laughs.

But I'm a sucker for that whole historical time period, all frock coats and powdered wigs and buckled shoes and sedan chairs and whatnot (also explaining part of the appeal of two of my other favourite movies, Dangerous Liaisons and Plunkett and Macleane)... I'm sure actually living during that time period would have been a whole other experience, what with the smell and the disease and whathaveyou, but visually I love it... so the movie gets big fat bonus points for that.

It's also no secret that I'm a Heath Ledger fan... and when we first see Casanova, the sight of Heath, all frocked up as mentioned above, plus eyeliner.... mmmmm Heath in eyeliner... well, obviously, I had a slight moment... but that was before the introduction of Charlie Cox as Francesca's brother... big brown puppydog eyes... quirky smile... ponytail... *sigh*... He's adorabley cute!

And I won't spoil the set up... but the final image of him in the movie, walking down the steps in the wig... *double sigh and whimper*

On the downside, other than some of the obvious gags and some of the slightly silly plot, there were about three spots where the film seemed to have been speeded up slightly for some unknown reason... all, I think, in spots that required comic timing to make them work, so whether they just didn't time things right and had to speed up just a couple of seconds to make it work, or what, I don't know... but it bugged me when it happened... and, to me at least, it was very obvious.

The other thing that stopped me from enjoying the movie to it's fullest was the two guys sitting near us... they kept talking during the movie, and I ended up shushing them three times, once just after the movie started and a couple of times towards the end.

People, if you want to talk during a movie, do one of two things... sit in a spot where there's nobody around you, specifically as far away from ME as humanly possible... or alternatively rent a damn video and stay home... then you can talk all the way through it to your heart's content.

These two idiots also weren't helped by the fact that the idiot closest to me was wearing some kind of plastic jacket... I never saw what it was made of, but it certainly wasn't any kind of natural fibre, because it made that kind of plasticy shushing sound that those kind of jackets make. And he kept fiddling with it... sitting forward in his seat, then sitting back, then sitting forward, then sitting back... and at one point he was playing with the zipper... He came very close to getting a punch in the face... stoopid stoopid people... Grrrrr...

What I really need to do is get some of these Movie Manners Courtesy Cards from Glarkware!

yani's rating: 2 powdered wigs out of 5