Thursday, March 10, 2016

no lady, no van

The Lady in the Van (movie)

You know the setup. Maggie Smith plays an eccentric old woman who lived in a van she parked at Alan Bennett's house for 15 years.

Why did I not realize that this would make for one of the dullest stories ever told?

Had a couple of musical points of interest, however:
1) The old lady turns out to have been a pianist who played Schubert and Chopin;
2) One of Bennett's neighbors is Ursula Vaughan Williams;
3) The film music by George Fenton features a theme irritatingly close to a waltz by Shostakovich, the one used in Eyes Wide Shut (a movie I had the sense not to see). I kept wishing I was hearing the original.

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