We rented 3 DVDs from the excellent Bay Street video this weekend:

Master and Commander was better than I expected. It had been built up so much, oscar nominations and all, that I half-expected Gladiator on water. But it steered away from cheesiness, for the most part, and the superhuman heroism was kept to a minimum. There were sections of dialogue that I missed completely, but the visuals more than made up for it. I was also surprised — pleasantly — by how the action in the movie was balanced with tension…single-ship naval battles back then were less like standing in and trading blows than they were like chases over hundreds or thousands of miles. A perfectly good weekend time-killer.

House Of Sand And Fog was bleak and beautiful. Or bleakly beautiful. Or beautiful because it was bleak. Or all of the above. Ben Kingsley seemed mildly over the top about 2% of the time, but spectacular the other 98%. Speaking of spectacular, Jennifer Connelly is becoming an excellent actor (I just didn’t like A Beautiful Mind, I guess, since I was never that impressed with her performance, nor with Russell Crowe’s, and she sucked in the Hulk), and she seems to have recovered from her heroin-thin stage to become ridiculously gorgeous again. She’s right up there with Salma Hayek now. Anyhoo, back to the movie: the ending was too contrived, but the first 3/4 of the movie were very good…even the visuals that broke up the scenes…shots of fogbanks rolling into San Francisco, clouds, ocean, sunsets…all gorgeous shots to break up the ugliness and misunderstanding. I could sympathize with both main characters, but also got angry at how they acted. Sounds like all the Israel/Palestine documentaries we watched last week…

The Cooler was one we wanted to see last year at the Film Festival, but it conflicted with something else. Alec Baldwin deserves all the accolades he got for his role, William H. Macy…is just always, always good. Always. And Maria Bello surprised me; all I could remember her from was Coyote Ugly, which wasn’t exactly The Godfather. In this, she seemed girlish and world-weary at the same time. Hopeful yet beaten.

All in all, a good movie-watching weekend (and a good weekend for movie watching…it’s been cold, grey and shitty outside all three days). And it was all topped off by a Team Canada comeback win against Sweden to claim the world hockey championship. The juggernaut rolls on…