Blackbyrde's birthday...

I'd give you Haldir as a birthday present if I could!

Last of the Mohicans...

The Sunday evening post-dinner movie entertainment was The Last of the Mohicans on DVD. It's been ages since I last saw it.

It was as beautiful and sexy as I remembered. It contains the most intense sexual tension I've ever seen in a het romance on film. It helps that I think both Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe are gorgeous.

All that running through the woods. Echoes of Aragorn - or, rather, The Lord of the Rings reminds me of this movie, for numerous reasons that reflect well on both movies. I suspect Peter Jackson appreciated this movie.

It's one of those rare things: a historically-based movie that feels really historical, really in-period. It is also (to my eyes) beautifully non-racist, a fairly balanced view of a nasty war with many sides, in which neither the First Nations people nor the Europeans (of any nation) has a monopoly on heroism or cruelty. People are individuals. And yet, the movie,thank goodness, doesn't stop to make any kind of a socio-political commentary from this: it's just a movie about these people and this situation.

The costuming is breathtaking. I am only partially thinking of Hawkeye's thighs here.

Funny to hear the name 'Ottawa' referred to - several times - as a reference to the enemy.

Seems to me that about fifteen years later, Edward Pellew was fighting a similar war in the very same neck of the woods - upstate New York.

It's the 'extended version' but I didn't remember the original movie quite well enough to be able to pick out new scenes with much certainty - once or twice, a scene was obviously longer than I recalled. There are no 'extras' at all, which was disappointing. It's too much to expect that movie-makers ten years ago would leave around footage for a medium that wasn't in use yet, but it isn't so long ago that they couldn't have found or done something. Michael Mann is still alive; I'd love to have heard a commentary from him, or an interview about his thoughts on the movie, or something. I've always admired his work.

This is one of the rare occasions when the movie version of a story is better than the book it was based on.