some velvet morning

Andrew Pulver at The Guardian's film blog offers Anthony Minghella's greatest clips.

I love Anthony Minghella's films, though there are a few I haven't seen. Among his fine adaptations of novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley stands out for having made Tom Ripley into a more compelling, but no less troubling character than he was in Patricia Highsmith's book. When it came out I remember talking to a friend who was outraged that someone should have somehow "gotten away with it" when it was abundantly clear to me that some punishments for our crimes are emphatically of our own making.

Minghella most recently appeared as Briony's interviewer at the end of Atonement which I thought in its type of film very much followed in the tracks of The English Patient. A nifty bit of casting for a director who probed so deeply into his characters.

Then there's Minghella's first film Truly, Madly, Deeply, about which I've nothing to say, because it's simply the joy and ache that it is.

We watched Margot at the Wedding last night which hit the spot for quirky and appealing in an alienated kind of way. Erm, which is good, I think, because it's not an easy movie to write about.

( Margot at the Wedding )

Yeah, it was a few days ago and I managed to hit mute or run out of the room for all the nominated songs except the one from Once which was actually worth hearing....

Surprises are always nice, including Tilda Swinton's Best Supporting Actress win, since she's been sinking her teeth into some terrific performances for a while now. My favorite of her movies still remains Orlando, Sally Potter's 1992 gender bending (remember those?) film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel.

And while I'm late getting around to plugging movies, I have to mention this year's BAFTA and last year's Oscar Best Foreign Language film, Germany's The Lives of Others. It was one of the best and most haunting movies we rented last year, in large part because of Ulrich Muehe's performance as a hardline Stasi officer who's set to spy on a popular but "questionable" East German playwright and his actress girlfriend and finds the observer can't remain unaffected by what he observes. Muehe, who died last summer, discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall that he himself was the subject of a secret police file.