3.2 - THE WEIGHT OF WATER (2000) & The Past

Season 3 continues with the next in our Kathryn Bigelow mini-season: 2000’s THE WEIGHT OF WATER. One of us is more in favour of the film than the other, but we settle into a good discussion of the representation of past events on film, novel—movie adaptation, and valuing ‘a valiant effort’ above ‘safe and uninspiring’ when it comes to films that don’t quite hit the mark.

This Week’s Media
SELFLESS (2015): Tarsem Singh, Ryan Reynolds, Natalie Martinez
GAME OF THRONES, Season 7 (2017): George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, Peter Dinklage
BLADERUNNER (1982): Ridley Scott, Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer

Recommendations
THE WOMAN IN BLACK (2012): James Watkins, Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds
21 GRAMS (2003): Alejandro González Ińárritu, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts
GO (1999): Doug Liman, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner
EDTV (1999): Ron Howard, Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman

Footnotes
We start with the obligatory Chekov’s gun (or ‘Chekov’s flaming bazooka’) link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun. Here a couple of interesting articles on the use of black and white photography in cinema: https://www.infoplease.com/features/movies-tv-and-music/movies-and-film-aesthetics-black-and-white-and-color and http://www.unl.edu/english/black-white-cinema-colorful-history-monochrome-movies. Rob uses the phrase ‘in medias res’ in passing, and if you’re not familiar with it this might be worth a look: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InMediasRes. Finally, this is an explanation of the Anita Shreve with which Bigelow was working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weight_of_Water (complete with reference to the Janeses’ ambiguously named child!).