Currently browsing the "Jane Campion" tag.

Review: The Power of the Dog

Set in the gorgeous wide open expanses of 1925 Wyoming, The Power of the Dog from Oscar-winning director Jane Campion (The Piano, Angel at My Table) is downright suffocating a lot of the time. This sure to be in the Oscar pool psychological thriller/western tells the story of a pair of rich ranching brothers, Phil and George Burbank, who are as different as night and day. Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch, TV’s “Sherlock”, The Courier) is the walking embodiment of toxic masculinity, violent and mean to everyone in his path. George (Jesse Plemons) is more gentle and less rugged. But when he marries the local widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst, Spiderman, Melancholia) and brings her and her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Road, X-Men franchise) home, Phil is anything but the welcoming brother-in-law, leaving no opportunity behind to ridicule them all.

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–//Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night//And watching, with eternal lids apart//Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite//The moving waters at their priestlike task//Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores//Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask//Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–//No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable//Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast//To feel for ever its soft fall and swell//Awake for ever in a sweet unrest//Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath//And so live ever–or else swoon to death. – John Keats (1819)