I enjoyed Darjeeling, but must confess that due to the fact that the characters, three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) spend roughly half of the film on a train, The Darjeeling Limited, I assumed that the film would eventually wind up in Darjeeling, India. I had thoroughly enjoyed my time in Darjeeling on my first trip to India and would love to go back. No such luck. For most of the film I was actually trying to pinpoint where in India they actually were. I still have no precise idea, but most of it was pretty barren. Still, it was a rather colorful film--in more ways than one.

A much more sumptuously visual film is Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The costumes and set design were all fabulous. Cate Blanchett reprises her role as Elizabeth I as she contends with both her half-sister Mary and Philip II of Spain who threatens both Elizabeth and England with his Armada. As a completely irrelevant aside, the actor who plays Philip has terribly spindly legs. Just an observation. As if this wasn't enough for Elizabeth (or the story itself), there's also a half-hearted love triangle between Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh and Bess, one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting. I say half-hearted because they all seemed to be half-hearted about it--perhaps due to the energy needed to deal with their wardrobes. Still, Clive Owen plays Walter Raleigh, so I was willing to go along with all the personal shenanigans for the sake of seeing him get more screen time. Cate Blanchett, as always, was excellent. Her costume and hair even more so. I kid you not. I'm still greatly impressed by her various wigs--she has at least half a dozen wigs throughout the film and all were very spectacular. Her gowns too. I remember reading an article about the filming that related the fact that they actually had to forgo filming in a few of their originally chosen locations because her gowns were so wide she wouldn't be able to walk through the door. Still, overall, I thought the film forsook depth to present a stunning visual.

We finally come to Ben Affleck's directorial debut, starring his younger brother Casey. Gone Baby Gone is not horrible. It's actually pretty good but the middle part drags a bit and the ending was a tad depressing. Which was not unexpected, but I thought it was more of a "good grief the world is a terrible place" kind of depressing rather than "oh dear, heartache and death" type of depressing. For his first film I thought it to be decently impressive but not tremendously fabulous. One should always aim for tremendously fabulous. It's set in Boston and never goes near Harvard which I appreciated and the accents were fascinating. To me, anyway. By the end, however, I felt very downtrodden, though that could have been because I had just spent a little over 6 hours in various darkened movie theater with very little time to recover from the previous film I had seen.

As always, one of the best things about going to the movies are the trailers. Some films that I'm greatly looking forward to are Juno, No Country for Old Men, and Be Kind Rewind . I think the lull in releasing uninteresting films is coming to an end. Phew!

On a somewhat related note, I would like to bring to everyone's attention that tomorrow (10/27) is World Audiovisual Heritage Day. Let's all celebrate! If you're interested you can see a short trailer, Planet Earth: From Place to Space which is compiled of short clips sent from archives around the world. The trailer can be viewed here and then clicking on the link for the trailer.