20:42 Friday, August 08 2009

before the rains, one week

I saw Before the Rains tonight. The film took place in India, a few years before its independence from Britain. It told the story of the after effects of a forbidden affair between a married British man and his Indian housekeeper. Overall, it was decent, but not spectacular in any way. The plot was a bit slow, and tedious at times, but I don't have any big complaints.
Afterwards, I watched One Week. This was the story of a newly engaged Canadian guy who found out that he had stage 4 cancer, and how he spent the following week coming to terms with it. The Canadian bit wouldn't have mattered except that he spends much of the week driving across Canada to the west coast, so its basically a road trip film with some fairly weighty themes. If there's one part that I really disliked, it was the narration, which was bordered on bizarre. I couldn't tell if the narrator was supposed to serve as a comic foil, or what his purpose was exactly, but he distracted from the story more than anything. Overall, I liked it, although it would have done far better not trying to force the profound themes down my throat on regular intervals, and rather allowed the story to do its job.