It's the Archers movie I've been least eager to see.
I'm not quite sure what happened. Given how deftly the Archers handled folklore and fairy tale in movies like A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes and the fantastically weird in The Tales of Hoffmann, I was surprised that elements of A Matter of Life and Death fell as flat as they did—I found much less wonder in its afterlife than a sort of cardboard whimsicality. Part of it might have been the props, stiff white wings, a heavenly bureaucracy, the courts of all the assembled dead that include only those nationalities pertinent to the protagonist's trial, that would have worked better for me in a satire than in a serious film. The other world was too much like this one for me to believe in its awe, whereas the real-world scenes with their odd touches like a naked goatherd on an English beach, the camera obscura with which Roger Livesey's Dr. Reeves watches the town around him, and an amateur rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream, worked beautifully. I don't categorically dislike angels, either; I love Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). But here, the magic failed.
beautiful sets and costumes, but apparently it was edited down from Powell's original thirty minute cut, and it has a distracting, redundant narration.
I felt about as positively toward that narration as toward Philip Glass' score for Notes on a Scandal, which made me pray that the DVD would come with a "no soundtrack" option. But the costuming for the man made from the broom, the owl and the raven, and the dancers who perform the water that fills up the house, was wonderful.
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I'm not quite sure what happened. Given how deftly the Archers handled folklore and fairy tale in movies like A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes and the fantastically weird in The Tales of Hoffmann, I was surprised that elements of A Matter of Life and Death fell as flat as they did—I found much less wonder in its afterlife than a sort of cardboard whimsicality. Part of it might have been the props, stiff white wings, a heavenly bureaucracy, the courts of all the assembled dead that include only those nationalities pertinent to the protagonist's trial, that would have worked better for me in a satire than in a serious film. The other world was too much like this one for me to believe in its awe, whereas the real-world scenes with their odd touches like a naked goatherd on an English beach, the camera obscura with which Roger Livesey's Dr. Reeves watches the town around him, and an amateur rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream, worked beautifully. I don't categorically dislike angels, either; I love Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). But here, the magic failed.
beautiful sets and costumes, but apparently it was edited down from Powell's original thirty minute cut, and it has a distracting, redundant narration.
I felt about as positively toward that narration as toward Philip Glass' score for Notes on a Scandal, which made me pray that the DVD would come with a "no soundtrack" option. But the costuming for the man made from the broom, the owl and the raven, and the dancers who perform the water that fills up the house, was wonderful.