Friday Film Recommendation

I read film scripts for a living and there aren't many that capture my imagination. Two movies I recommended my clients buy are coming out tomorrow. You should go see them.
When I read The Bay, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It's a terrific found footage film about an ecological disaster.  Barry Levinson is the director. Michael Wallach wrote it. The distributor is positioning it as a horror movie, but I'd call it more of a disaster movie. If the movie is half as good as the script, it'll be worth your entertainment dollar.
From the trailer, it looks like the marketing campaign is really pushing a sort of Paranormal Activity vibe and that's not the way it was originally written. But I'll be in line.
I also read and loved A Late Quartet, which is a very different film and Oscar-bait for sure. It stars Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Wallace Shawn.  It's so uncommercial it's not even funny but a movie filled with great performances. It's a story about the coming of age and tensions among friends and all in all, it's a movie for grownups. Check it out.

Turning Shakespeare Inside Out--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I first saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on stage in the 80s, but Tom Stoppard wrote it in 1966. I loved it.  I loved it not just for the clever way that the playwright inserted his characters' point of view into the story, using a sort of theatrical kaleidoscope that showed something completely different (a technique used in later plays like Wicked) when the view shifted, but also for the language.  R&G is very much a play about language. The play is full of quotable lines--"Who is the English king?" Rosencrantz asks. "That depends on when we get there," Guildenstern responds. The Player has a great speech about the kind of entertainment he and his players provide, offering up love, blood and rhetoric in various combinatins, but always with blood. ("The blood is compulsory," he says.)

In 1990, Stoppard directed a film version of his play starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon himself). Both men look impossibly young (Roth was 29, Oldman was 32) and Oldman actually has a scruffy Heath Ledger-in-the-Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus-thing going on.   Oldman plays Rosencrantz as an innocent fool,  with Roth playing the only slightly more savvy Guildenstern. The two play off each other really well, especially in an early scene when they're trying to remember what they're doing riding toward Elsinore and when they're trying to figure out exactly what's going on with Hamlet. 
The movie is currently streaming live on Netflix, or you can buy it used from Amazon for less than $5.