{"id":1409,"date":"2006-05-05T09:13:00","date_gmt":"2006-05-05T16:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2006\/05\/05\/the-constant-gardener\/"},"modified":"2006-05-05T09:13:00","modified_gmt":"2006-05-05T16:13:00","slug":"the-constant-gardener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2006\/05\/05\/the-constant-gardener\/","title":{"rendered":"The Constant Gardener"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s get the geek joke out of the way: no, it&#8217;s not a biography of American recreational mathematician <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Martin_Gardner\">Martin Gardner<\/a>.  (Though that could also be a good movie, especially if it focused on his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csicop.org\/bibliography\/display.cgi\/158\">debunking of psychics<\/a> and other pseudo-scientific nonsense.)<\/p>\n<p>Rachel Weisz&#8217;s performance in this movie won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and it&#8217;s well earned.  I still can&#8217;t quite forgive her for some of that <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Mummy Returns<\/span> silliness, but I don&#8217;t suppose I&#8217;d pass up a co-starring role with Brendan Fraser, either.  And she does some truly heartbreaking work in <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Gardener<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>The movie has some flaws, but is beautifully lit and photographed.  There are two scenes in particular, at the beginning of the film, where the lighting changes within a single shot to illuminate a different character or background.  They&#8217;re not typically &#8220;spectacular&#8221;, but they are gorgeous in their own right.  It only increases my desire to see <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">City of God<\/span>, an earlier film by the same <a href=\"http:\/\/imdb.com\/name\/nm0576987\/\">director<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/imdb.com\/name\/nm0153263\/\">cinematographer<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Favorite inside joke: the movie production company is named <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Potboiler Productions<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s get the geek joke out of the way: no, it&#8217;s not a biography of American recreational mathematician Martin Gardner. (Though that could also be a good movie, especially if it focused on his debunking of psychics and other pseudo-scientific&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}