Review

Okay, so I still have a ton of stuff on my to do list (actually only 4 things, but it includes 2 papers and a main idea log, so it isn't the quickest), and I have a few spare minutes I'm granting myself before going onto my next English paper. Not much happened today, as I was working on another paper all day, so here's a review of a movie I watched yesterday.

I took a nap yesterday afternoon, at after finishing my German homework at about 1 AM, I still wasn't tired. Figuring I'd just watch a little bit of The Crow to put me to sleep, I went on YouTube only to find that I couldn't immediately find the movie watching channel I usually referred to. Thus, I turned to Wikipedia, and after a bit of clicking around, found myself on Vincent Perez's page (He was Ashe Corven in the second Crow movie). His filmography was pretty impressive, though most of them were in German, Spanish, French, or Swedish. Apparently, he's multi-lingual.

The only other movies in English that I could find were Queen of the Damned, I Dreamed of Africa, and Swept from the Sea. I watched the trailers to all three and read up on the synopsis and figured that, though it seemed the most well-known and probably best, Queen didn't sound like a movie I wanted to watch at 1 in the morning. I Dreamed of Africa, though it seemed interesting, had horrible reviews, and even won the Razzie Award for Worst Actress. That left Swept from the Sea, which had favorable enough reviews, and a synopsis consisting of "Someone is shipwrecked knowing how to play chess, not how to speak English."

I really was surprised at how good it was.

The music, one of the first things I noticed, was phenomenal. It was by John Barry, who also did Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves. The cinematography was wonderful, and the location (Cornwallis, England) was complete eye candy.

The acting, of course, is what sold it. For a good third or half of the movie, Vincent Perez's character, Yanko, speaks Russian or nothing at all. Even without subtitles or lines, he managed to portray someone completely lost and alone in somewhere completely different. This was the first Rachel Weisz movie I've seen, and I'll probably look into others. Anything with Kathy Bates or Ian McKellan is bound to be amazing, so putting them both in the same movie (and often in the same scene) was cinematic perfection.

I'm currently looking for it on DVD, as it instantly became one of my favorites. Though the title originally threw me off (It reminded me too much of a certain "By The Sea"), it was a prime example of how you can never judge a book by its cover.