okpilak

Certainly a different type of movie, and few will be able to guess what is going on with this island. We meet Anna walking towards a cliff edge, and she throws herself off the cliff. Then she wakes up in a house, bandage on her head, pregnant, and was out for two weeks. She has amnesia. There is a kindly woman who assures her she and her baby are all right. And there is a photo album shown to her, that shows pictures of her. And her husband is there also. Later, a boat washes up, and a couple get off, hideously deformed in the head, asking if the island is safe. They are shot, and she is told approaching them caused her to be exposed, and stringent precautions are taken to decontaminate. It seems there was a disease that has killed almost the entire population, and this island is one of the few safe places left. But not is all that it seems, and the story picks up the pace. Not a particularly great film, intriguing to stick to the end to find out what is happening, but some may feel it isn't worth the time.

Quite a roster of actors. Linda and Chad certainly make a very goofy pair, thinking they hit the jackpot. Of course, Linda needed the money since her HMO would not cover the cosmetic surgery she wanted. Fun watching her on the phone, trying to connect with an agent. And Chad is a very dim bulb. So much going on, mainly goofy and loopy. Leave it to the Coen brothers to cook up a weird and delightful comedy. There are so many plots, subplots, and subplots of plots that soon you really don't care. Just sit back, grab some popcorn and enjoy.

We meet Mary, who lives with her mother Molly in a small town in 1840's England. Mary has a reputation as a superb fossil hunter and discoverer. But as a woman in a male dominated field, it counts for little, and her life is one of meager existence, scouring the beaches for fossils that may be washed up by the tides, or washed down from the hill side, selling small fossils to any tourists who come by the small town. Ammonite refers to a fossil creature. Her mother had ten children, most of whom died, and each death took something out of her. One day, along comes a man of means, and wants to learn from Mary, and will pay for the privilege. He has his wife Charlotte along, who is in poor health, and needs the sea air to recover. Married probably not for love, she does not want to recover. Her husband, off again to something else, offers to pay Mary to tend to his wife. At first she resists, but she needs the money, and after Charlotte gets very ill, Mary starts to care for her. And Charlotte gets better and better. They develop a relationship, but being from two different worlds, Charlotte does not understand where Mary is coming from. The movie is very slow paced, but the level of emotions packed in is very high, and one wonders if somehow both of them can benefit. In a scene where a man is offering to buy a fairly large specimen they found, and Mary painstakingly uncovered, Charlotte steps in letting the man know the price he was offering was much to low for the work involved. That shows the huge gap that exists between their two worlds. If one wants to watch a movie about the emotional level developing between two people, this movie is very satisfying.