Elegy
24 October, 2008
Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper make out. I’ll repeat that, just in case you didn’t read it right the first time. Sir Ben Kingsley and Dennis Crazyeyes Hopper have a passionate, full tongue, seconds-long kiss that fills the entire screen. Dennis Hopper also brings Ben Kingsley breakfast in bed and feeds him eggs as though he were a child, making the choo-choo noise and everything. Oh, god, such absolute glee.
Anyhow. I’ve got that out of my system.
The film is superbly acted and almost incredibly good. I say almost because the ending is somewhat flaccid and lacks the zeal of the rest of the film, and a bad ending is near as disappointing as a bad beginning, and far more likely to stick with you. Peter Sarsgaard, as usual, is unexpectedly delightful; and sometime in the last year or so Penelope Cruz learned herself some acting skills. Hopper and Kingsley are, of course, brilliant.
Coixet shows incredible deftness, slipping into the male voice with an ease that most female directors lack- not to say that they are incapable of doing so, because to be a female director means to be capable of taking on a masculine persona, at least at this point in cinema. There is nothing tentative about it, and there is nothing in her approach that attempts to simplify the emotional life of men, which is quite frequently the failing point of many female directors- a tendency to reduce what they do not directly experience into something easily compartmentalized. The same thing that male directors frequently do with their female characters.
ANYHOW, after that unintentional sidetrack, all I really can say is the film is worth seeing. It is not perfect, but its imperfection is endearing and does not detract from the experience.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
19 October, 2008
The storytelling here is easy, the plot suggests itself. But visually, the Coen boys did something spectacular. There is such a supreme understanding of off-screen space. The frame is breached and re-asserted so many times it is difficult to keep track, the world within and beyond the frame is in a constant visual and auditory dialogue. There is very little wrong with the film, and it clearly served as exceptional grounding for their more serious recent work.
Nearly as impressive as their awareness of the frame is their awareness of their palette. The consistent muting of all colors, without playing tricks to make certain things pop, creates an overall more impressive effect than films in which the contrast between muted and bright hues serves to illustrate some superficial point. The subtlety of the color scheme lends an overall mood and an overwhelming sense of the general moral turpitude of every character in the film.
City of Ember
14 October, 2008
They make such pretty worlds, and then they freeze. They do not know what to do. So in these beautiful places they tell the same ugly stories- same winners, same losers. The stories never change. And the places tarnish, and are corrupted in the end, by the needs of the pocket and the public.
Mat i syn
12 October, 2008
In time all things pass. In time the moth, too, will die with the mother. The end comes with a scream and a sigh, lasts for a moment suspended forever. To remember her you forget yourself and you have been lost.
Blindness
6 October, 2008
I am sure there are technical issues here that I ought to discuss… the pacing was not quite right and I take issue with the inconsistent representation of blindness as either dark or light, though the cinematography is stunning. But that is all secondary. The deeper issue, here- even beyond the hastily thrown-together social discussion and the relationship building and the primal fear of sightlessness- is the idea of pathological compassion.
What is it that leads one to care for others, when there is no benefit to the self- when, in fact, there is only detriment? Is it love, or arrogance, or genuine empathy? Does it stem from a belief in or a disdain of those around you? Do you care, to the point of doing yourself serious harm, because you believe that they deserve it? Or is it because you believe you do not? Because you believe that they would not manage without you? Because you believe yourself to be superior? Why? Why bother?
The Proposition
4 October, 2008
Australia is a strange hell- an orange and green, oversaturated, overexposed, blinding-hot hell filled with demons of all breeds and in all shapes. Or so Nick Cave would have you believe.
The Western is never dead, though many proclaim it to be so. It simply requires re-imagining every so often.
Barry Lyndon
4 October, 2008
This is Kubrick at his most incredibly overindulgent. Lighting indoor scenes with candles, moving at a pace so deliberate and so very achingly tense as to make each scene almost an exercise in eroticized vision, borrowing lenses from NASA- the entire production is over the top. And the end product is so delicate, so easily disrupted, that a single scene in which the lighting is not exactly perfect is so distracting it takes several scenes to recover from it.
I love this film, absolutely and completely, because it is so overwhelmingly beautiful. That kind of beauty is precisely what is necessary when the brain reaches a certain point of tension.
Tell No One
27 September, 2008
Eighty percent good is not bad, I suppose. There are fabulous bits to this film, but it challenges naught, except the unholy devotion of the Hollywood system to flashy effects. Fun, though, and nothing wrong with that, I suppose.
Burn After Reading
27 September, 2008
The Coens hate everything. And have managed to condense that hatred into an hour and a half long film that seems, on the very surface, to be quite peppy and upbeat. If you’re an idiot. Which, then, would make you one of the things that the Coens hate. If you are a misanthropic recluse, like myself, you will laugh until your guts hurt. If you are not, you probably won’t get it or will get it and won’t like it.
By Coen standards, or really by any standards, the film itself is a piece of shit. Filmed indifferently, edited sloppily, acted in broad caricature. But this is deliberate, of course, because the Coens can get away with near anything, and because they are pointedly mocking films for which the standards here would be the apex.
Ultimately this kind of fluff is always a bit soul-wrecking, because to be affirmed in ones own hatred of everything seems an empty gesture.
Vicky Christina Barcelona
6 September, 2008
I hate Woody Allen, or at least recent Woody Allen. I went in to this film expecting to leave pissed off and completely disappointed that Javier Bardem had made yet another shit film.
And yet… Allen seems to have regained his stride. The film missteps once, with a signature Woody Allen terrible editing choice, but beyond that it is really exceptionally good.
Most striking is Penelope Cruz, who stalks the screen like an irrationally angry cat, and finally exercises the talent I knew she had to be capable of. Javier Bardem sharing a screen with her is quite something to behold, two people who are committed to their roles and utterly fluent in their expression of frustrated love.
All of the acting is superb, even from Miss Johansson, and everyone deftly handles the typically wordy Allen script. The familiar complex interrelationships are more gracefully awkward than they have been in an Allen film in quite some time, and the narration seems less grating and more friendly than I am accustomed to.
I suppose I will never love Woody Allen, but I do thoroughly enjoy this piece.
