attyfam

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Reviews

The Bookshop
(2017)

Time Frame and Sound Quality
The film is set over several years, not one. It must begin about 1955, as Florence says that she has spent already six months arranging the purchase of the property. After she has fully established the business, North approaches her with Vladimirr Nabokov's "Lolita", which was published in 1956. She refers to it as just published on more than one occasion. Later in the film, she mentions that she has been involved in the business for five or six years. So, the story runs until at least 1959 if not 1960.

Sound quality. The sounds of nature, with the rustle of the wind, is given free rein, except that, when people begin to speak, the outdoor sounds (or outdoor sounds howling through a house) are suddenly completely shut out. This makes what people say easier to understand, but it is jarring. Better would have been to have two soundtracks and keep the nature sounds on one and subservient to the talks of the characters on the other.

Don Quixote
(2015)

Based more on the musical than the novel
This version of Don Quixote, though it carries the subtitle of the novel itself, is based more on the musical "The Man of La Mancha" than on the novel. I admit that no film of the usual length could ever capture the richness and complexity of even Part 1 of the novel (Part 2 being ignored by most interpreters). A mini-series would be required to attempt to do justice to the novel. But the plot line here really aligns more with the musical than the book.

One thing that drove me crazy from the start: The letter "o" in the word "Don" is, throughout, pronounced like the "o" in the first syllable of "Donald", rather than like the "o" in phone. "Don" in Spanish is a title (like "Sir"), not a name. They could at least have pronounced it properly and not thereby announced the American origins of the film linguistically.

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