Friday 8 May 2015

Ages Of Adeline Review

I guess I should say right at the start that I saw "The Ages of Adeline" very largely by accident. It was a Thursday (last Thursday as a matter of fact; my day out. It was fornicating down with rain. Neither of us wanted ti get wet... so we decided to go to the movies snd after some serious trolling of IMDB decided that "Boy's Choir" was the best choice of the paucity on offer. We didn't count on the effect that the rain had had on the roads howver and unexpectedly, well, somewhat expectedly found ourselves at  outer reaches of Randwick, in the theatre foyer while it pissed down with rain outside. "Boy's Choir" had started twenty minutes earlier. The "Randwick Ritz is a multiplex"Adeline started in 45 or so minutes> I suddenly switched to "Plan 2 from outer space; and we went for coffee and lunch while waiting for "Adeline" to start. to be blunt, it wasn'y that hard a choice. I'd read a bit about the film in the car on the drive over and the whole premise of the film interested me; besides liking the central idea of the film rather a lot(someone coping with immortality in modern society) the premise was pretty similar to something I'd already written and Bluntly, I was interested to see how someone else approached aspects of the same subject and, possibly more to the point, I felt it was a really *big subject to communicate in 100 minutes of screen time  , so there was a kind of sadistic interest in watching the film. It was a last-minute choice but one I approached with some appetite. true, my appetite was partly mechanistic, almost to the point of cannibalism, but I was ready to be entertained and I figured that it was all up to the scriptwriter to do that. as the lights went down in the auditorium I was happy. As I said before, the idea of how Adeline becomes changed so that she becomes immortal and stops ageing while everyone around her grows old and dies is a fascinating one but it is complex-to explain it inferentially, by cinematic action, the way someone like, say; Hal Ashby might would take up so much screen time that there would be little time for anything else. It was predominantly this that I was interested in. Instead, I was blown away. the film thros the putative "rule book" out with the bath water it has been soaking in. The script takes the core issue of the film, treats it as pure science fiction and bombards the audience with an information packed narration that is so filled with "scientific" goobledegook that I didn't have time to laugh. The audience is simply tol all the flapdoodle necessary to the plot and left to deal with it.The vast majority of the film's running time is then free to devote to the interesting stuff.I was astounded by the audacity of the technque to the point where I almost wanted to stand up(!) and applaud. Frankly Scarlett. I was impressed!To go into the film in any depth from this point would probably create inadvertent spoilers; Suffice to say that as far as "lovey-dovey"tearjerker type chick flicks go, I enjoyed it. I didn't cry, and was not overtly moved to but at the same time I was pleased that, as such films went, it was not overly manipulative. I was interested and impressed by the parallel the film drew between Adeline's predicament and "normal" people and the life of their pets.It was a poignant and telling analogy and one of many thingss that raised "the Ages of Adeline" above the common ruck of cinematic product. I found it moving intelligent, thought provoking, and well worth recommending.

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