Daniel Craig Movies Part 2

1997 Obsession

I really liked this movie. However as with ALL the English movies I have watched with Daniel Craig in them, the emotional arc feels strange. Let me explain this. Either there’s a different way of showing how an English character feels or I’m getting an edited version. It may be as simple as, (and I haven’t sat down and watched for this) closes up vs. standard shot. I feel like I’m watching a movie pretty much shot by someone with a camera in the same room, not by the cinematographer. So, the results for me are somewhat unsatisfying.

Also the movie ends unresolved. Or maybe that’s just me.

But this is a good movie, and I would recommend it to anyone.

.

1997 The Ice House D.S. Andy McLoughlin

This movie is so good. But the only DVD is region 2. Also the version from the library is edited down to G and I know this because the clips on You-Tube have some of the stuff that was edited out. The only bad thing I can say about it is, when D.S. McLoughlin (Craig) swoons from low blood sugar, it’s NOT good acting. Sorry Daniel, but I laugh every time I see it.

1998 Love Is The Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon George Dyer

This movie once again is shot very differently. Most of the friends’ scenes are shot looking at them though glasses and bottles (in a bar). Everything is viewed distorted, ugly, accept for George Dyer. As the title indicts, this is not a regular movie. It’s more like a collection of vignettes arranged in a chronological manner. But you do get to see Craig naked, before he bulked up for Bond. This is also edited (but not to G). There are clips of the cigarette hitting the skin on You-Tube, but in the version I have, that is replace by just seeing the cigarette in the air.

2000 I Dreamed of Africa Declan Fielding

Either Craig took this part so he could go to Africa or his scenes were edited out, and I am leaning towards the latter, as there is one scene that really doesn’t make sense. Craig plays Declan Fielding, the ranch manager. There is one scene where he brings the wife a microphone so she can talk to her husband on the radio while he is away. But, surprise, the husband is home and Fielding acts like he’s been trying to hit on the wife and has been caught in the act! There are no scenes to support this emotional reaction. So, I’m assuming they have been edited out. He only appears in about four scenes, a very small bit part.

2001 Sword of Honor Guy Crouch

I found this movie rather heart breaking. Essentially Crouch has childish fantasies about being a hero. Through the course of the movie, he’s forced in to seeing how different his belief in honor is from reality, and how no one else is the hero that Guy wants to be, but ends up being lauded as one, while Guy doesn’t. Everyone he cares about dies, sometimes by his own actions. At the end he’s left with the child of his ex-wife’s that he remarried to give the baby a name. I just know he will give the boy his heart (he’s doing so at the end of the movie), and that the biological father will find out about the boy and claim him, and poor Guy will be left with nothing. Apparently this movie is supposed to be darkly humorous.

Craig’s acting is very good in this. I know this because I spent the movie, pleading with Guy to grow up and get with the program.

2002 Sylvia Ted Hughes

This movie is so good. Craig’s acting in it is awesome. His character goes back and forth between talking and reacting. Craig recites a poem very rapidly in this movie, it would have given me nightmares to memorize it and I wonder if all the hand waving Craig does while reciting it is a physical reminder of what to say.

In the movie, Craig’s character becomes still when he has to deal with his wife’s desperate emotions. It’s hard to covey emotion while being perfectly still, but he does it. You know exactly how worried or fearful Hughes is about his wife’s emotional state while being perfectly still. This movie I will buy

The formatting is a little strange because I dragged this over from Word, and it won't let me change it very much. Where's the line break button?