BEFORE: Another 150 movies, about 5 months' worth, and then I'm taking a break - and I definitely need one. I feel like I've been stuck in a slew of merely average movies, and I wonder if that's because I hit the best movies already in Years 1 + 2, or if it's my perception toward movies that's changed - some kind of mental movie burnout. Anyway, here's the third in the trilogy of period films starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
THE PLOT: Three trappers protect a British Colonel's daughters in the midst of the French and Indian War.
AFTER: This was not bad, pretty action-packed from start to finish. And it made me want to learn more about the book by James Fenimore Cooper, and also the French and Indian War. If only there were some kind of network of collective human knowledge that I could connect to and use for researching these things - it's a shame, really. There ought to be a way.
It was a little confusing for me since the Native Americans seemed to be helping both sides, the French and the English, at different times - and some were pretending to help on side while actually helping the other. I guess different tribes acted in different ways?
Part of the action in this film takes place at Fort William Henry, at Lake George, north of Albany, NY - which interests me since we took a road trip up to Lake George last October, even visited that exact fort. OK, so we visited the gift shop, the admission price to the fort itself seemed outrageous for a weekday. But we also took a cruise on the lake, it's really gorgeous up there - though it looks like they filmed this movie in North Carolina, not upstate NY. Makes sense, it's a little too developed up there to pass for Colonial times.
So the siege of Fort Henry was a real event, the movie gets that right - but it also drastically changed the storyline of Cooper's novel (which honestly sounds even more confusing) - but it works as an action film, so despite being mostly against the Hollywood-ization of classic literature, this is one time where I'm going to allow it.
Also starring Madeleine Stowe (last seen in "Impostor"), Russell Means, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi (last heard in "Avatar"), with cameos from Terry Kinney (last seen in "Devil in a Blue Dress"), Pete Postlethwaite (last seen in "Alien 3"), Colm Meaney (last seen in "The Commitments") and Dylan Baker (last seen in "Head of State").
RATING: 7 out of 10 tomahawks
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