Manoel de Oliviera made The Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl when he was 100-years old (he's now 102). He started making movies in the 1930s in the silent era and is still working today. None of this really really means anything significant, but it's impressive as hell - especially considering how good a movie this is.
More than anything, this is a visual pleasure to behold. Oliviera's use of color, texture and scale is absolutely masterful, making this one of the most beautiful works I've seen in a long time. Based on a short story by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz, the 19th Century Portuguese novelist, this movie basically plays like a short story at only 64 minutes long. And like a good short story the economical use of dialogue, explication, detail and atmosphere is the key here.
Macario is a young accountant who works in his uncle's fabric store. At work above the shop one day he looks out the window and sees a girl in the window facing him across the street, Luisa, keeping cool by waving a fan on herself. At first he notices the fan, but then he notices the girl. She's only a few years younger than he is and is absolutely gorgeous. Immediately he falls in love with her.
After meeting her and meeting her family, he wants to ask her to marry him, but his traditional uncle doesn't want her to distract him from his work. The very conservative man feels that it is inappropriate for the two to date and also worries that he is not very good at his work and throwing a woman into his life might make him make more mistakes. He must prove to his uncle and to Luisa's family that he is a good, honest man who can take care of himself financially and use good judgment.
One thing that is a bit surprising about the film, but something that I really liked, is that the story is basically not updated at all from the old-fashionedness of the short story. We basically are watching a 19th Century story played out in modern times. The very mannered acting and dialogue underlines this point and shows how that much has changed in the world in the past 200 years, still some similar things remain.
There is a gorgeous quality to the photography here (by Sabine Lancelin) that has incredibly rich colors in each and ever shot - turning each set-up into a beautiful painting. This is not super intense colors, like you might find in a Fassbinder film, but rather single bold colors that fit in naturally to the other tones of a room or landscape. In some cases it's just a simple yellow curtain by the window in the corner, in other cases, it's the pinkish tone of a building exterior.
It seems like as much time went into showing amazing textures to us as well. One of my favorite elements in the film is the nearly-tactile travertine frame around the window that Luisa stands in. This beautiful texture meshes amazingly with the plaster wall of the building that surrounds it. Making this whole set-up even more wonderful size of the window (almost bigger than human-sized) and the frame the window creates within the overall shot. It's a simple thing, but it's absolutely gorgeous. If this were a painting in a museum it would be a masterpiece.
There is an interesting element of memory and idealization in this film that is very important. We see many wide-angle shots with incredibly deep focus. This reminds us of how deep memories go and how for Macario beautiful things (beautiful girls) can be idealized and remain perfect forever.
I appreciate how small and gentle this film is. It is technically tremendous but also has a beautiful, simple story as well.
Stars: 4 of 4
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Made in Dagenham (Monday, September 27, 2010) (124)
Made in Dagenham has been described as the British version of Norma Rae, and that's basically exactly what it is. The film follows the story of Rita O'Grady, who in 1968 led a strike by the women in the Ford factory in Dagenham, England to get equal pay for their work. The plant was one of the biggest in the world and the center of Ford's European production center.
The 140-or-so women who worked there were considered unskilled laborers for their work sewing vinyl seats for the interiors of all the Ford cars produced in the factory. With such a classification, they were paid less than people with semi-skilled or skilled titles. The problem, however, was that even if the women got the semi-skilled designation, they would still be paid less than men at the same level.
O'Grady (played by the bright and sunshiny Sally Hawkins), with the help of her union organizer, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), got the women to strike for several months, ultimately resulting in a shut-down of all car production at that factory, as they couldn't complete cars with no interior seating. O'Grady had to deal with the constant onslaught by male factory workers who didn't see the labor issue similarly as well as a growing friction with family and friends. Her loving husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) struggles with wanting to support his wife and her causes and feeling emasculated that she is the boss of the house (and keeping the factory idle as well).
This is a very nice story filled with all sorts of wonderful tearful moments where women assert themselves and demand equal pay, but it is banal and somewhat lifeless. O'Grady is a very important woman in world labor history, to be sure, but there's not much here other than some rather dull history.
To make matters worse, the script, by Bill Ivory, is much too long and complicated and the directing, by Nigel Cole, is rather styleless and badly done. The film should have been been no more than 90 minutes, rather than the 113 that it clocks in at. There is a lot of time wasted on side stories, like the lady who led the women's section of the union before O'Grady and how her husband is an dusty old war vet, or the hot-stuff young woman who is a symbol of '60s sexual liberation while trying to fit into the old factory mindset.
Cole really does a terrible job of letting us know exactly what will happen to characters three scenes ahead of time. When one character gives a passionate speech about how proud he is of the women strikers, it is clear in context that he is going to die in the next few minutes. The most upsetting is that once the women's demands are basically met and the Minister of Labor (who is a lady) agrees to a pay hike for them, we get a horrible back and forth between O'Grady and the Minister about the clothes they're wearing - because they might be important union and labor people, but at the end of the day, women just love talking about clothes. Ugh.
These things are not all that terrible, though. The film is OK and not brilliant - but not terrible. It's not as good as Norma Rae, because there's just too much going on, but it's nice and inoffensive.
Stars: 2 of 4
The 140-or-so women who worked there were considered unskilled laborers for their work sewing vinyl seats for the interiors of all the Ford cars produced in the factory. With such a classification, they were paid less than people with semi-skilled or skilled titles. The problem, however, was that even if the women got the semi-skilled designation, they would still be paid less than men at the same level.
O'Grady (played by the bright and sunshiny Sally Hawkins), with the help of her union organizer, Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins), got the women to strike for several months, ultimately resulting in a shut-down of all car production at that factory, as they couldn't complete cars with no interior seating. O'Grady had to deal with the constant onslaught by male factory workers who didn't see the labor issue similarly as well as a growing friction with family and friends. Her loving husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) struggles with wanting to support his wife and her causes and feeling emasculated that she is the boss of the house (and keeping the factory idle as well).
This is a very nice story filled with all sorts of wonderful tearful moments where women assert themselves and demand equal pay, but it is banal and somewhat lifeless. O'Grady is a very important woman in world labor history, to be sure, but there's not much here other than some rather dull history.
To make matters worse, the script, by Bill Ivory, is much too long and complicated and the directing, by Nigel Cole, is rather styleless and badly done. The film should have been been no more than 90 minutes, rather than the 113 that it clocks in at. There is a lot of time wasted on side stories, like the lady who led the women's section of the union before O'Grady and how her husband is an dusty old war vet, or the hot-stuff young woman who is a symbol of '60s sexual liberation while trying to fit into the old factory mindset.
Cole really does a terrible job of letting us know exactly what will happen to characters three scenes ahead of time. When one character gives a passionate speech about how proud he is of the women strikers, it is clear in context that he is going to die in the next few minutes. The most upsetting is that once the women's demands are basically met and the Minister of Labor (who is a lady) agrees to a pay hike for them, we get a horrible back and forth between O'Grady and the Minister about the clothes they're wearing - because they might be important union and labor people, but at the end of the day, women just love talking about clothes. Ugh.
These things are not all that terrible, though. The film is OK and not brilliant - but not terrible. It's not as good as Norma Rae, because there's just too much going on, but it's nice and inoffensive.
Stars: 2 of 4
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Enter the Void (Sunday, September 26, 2010) (123)
I only know writer/director Gaspar Noé from his 2002 film Irreversible, which got a lot of attention at the time for it's unusual structure and the very, very violent rape scene with Monica Bellucci. I guess I was prepared for Enter the Void to be a difficult film, but I could have never expected what I got. Watching this film is a totally arduous experience. Noé uses bright, flashing lights and odd focus tricks, unusual moving cameras, sudden and loud noises and some of the most direct sexual and violent material I have seen in recent years. Beneath these elements, the film is rather dull as the underlying story is banal and difficult to connect with.
The basic story is of American loser and waistoid Oscar who lives in Tokyo for some amount of time. At a certain point he begins to deal drugs in the expat clubbing community. His younger sister Linda visits him and falls in with a Japanese pimp. Ultimately when a drug deal goes bad, Oscar is killed by the Japanese vice squad. From there we see backwards, how Oscar got to that point, and forwards, about what his sister does after his death.
The main focus of the film is the unusual points-of-view of each of the three acts. The first act (about Oscar dealing drugs and getting iced) is interestingly shown from his subjective point-of-view - as if we were looking out of his eyes and hearing in voice over his internal thoughts. There are some clever camera tricks use here (like when he looks in a mirror at one point). When Oscar takes some drugs, we go into his brain to see what he is "seeing" internally - which is basically some trippy psychedelic stuff reminiscent of the third act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mostly this is showy and annoying (it's basically a long hand-held camera shot with some Windows 95 screen-saver computer animation in the middle).
The second act is told from behind Oscar's head (sorta like the shots of Olivier Gourmet in the Dardenne Brothers' Le Fils). We are following Oscar as he goes about doing and dealing drugs and fucking all sorts of whores and girlfriends (heckuva life, buddy).
The last act seems to be from the point-of-view of Oscar's spirit or soul (ugh, even writing that makes me sorta sick). Everything is shot from above with a very "floaty" camera. We go through walls and fly around the city from one sinful location to another seeing what Linda after he's gone. Not to ruin anything, but we get to go into Linda's vagina as she's having sex and see her male partner's penis pushing toward us and ejaculating. Uh. I don't know what to say about this, other than it's totally unnecessary and pretty fucking dumb.
But that's really the whole movie. Oscar and Linda are really boring characters who are never sober and have nothing to say of any interest (there's a back story that they were orphaned when they were young when their folks died in a bad car accident). Their expat friends are lowlifes. The drug stuff is boring and only style with no substance.
I got rather motion sick watching this, with all the moving cameras and drug-addled views of the world. There is a recurring thing where Oscar remembers the car accident that killed his parents - which means that at just about any moment there could be a tremendously loud and sudden car crash into the middle of the screen (just in case we were getting comfortable in our seats as we're getting jizzed on by gigantic cocks). The script structure is just as showy and unnecessary as the drug visions and camera work. Big deal that it's not linear. That makes it annoying, not interesting. I guess I give Noé credit for being brave enough to do what he wanted to do - I just didn't particularly like it.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
The basic story is of American loser and waistoid Oscar who lives in Tokyo for some amount of time. At a certain point he begins to deal drugs in the expat clubbing community. His younger sister Linda visits him and falls in with a Japanese pimp. Ultimately when a drug deal goes bad, Oscar is killed by the Japanese vice squad. From there we see backwards, how Oscar got to that point, and forwards, about what his sister does after his death.
The main focus of the film is the unusual points-of-view of each of the three acts. The first act (about Oscar dealing drugs and getting iced) is interestingly shown from his subjective point-of-view - as if we were looking out of his eyes and hearing in voice over his internal thoughts. There are some clever camera tricks use here (like when he looks in a mirror at one point). When Oscar takes some drugs, we go into his brain to see what he is "seeing" internally - which is basically some trippy psychedelic stuff reminiscent of the third act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mostly this is showy and annoying (it's basically a long hand-held camera shot with some Windows 95 screen-saver computer animation in the middle).
The second act is told from behind Oscar's head (sorta like the shots of Olivier Gourmet in the Dardenne Brothers' Le Fils). We are following Oscar as he goes about doing and dealing drugs and fucking all sorts of whores and girlfriends (heckuva life, buddy).
The last act seems to be from the point-of-view of Oscar's spirit or soul (ugh, even writing that makes me sorta sick). Everything is shot from above with a very "floaty" camera. We go through walls and fly around the city from one sinful location to another seeing what Linda after he's gone. Not to ruin anything, but we get to go into Linda's vagina as she's having sex and see her male partner's penis pushing toward us and ejaculating. Uh. I don't know what to say about this, other than it's totally unnecessary and pretty fucking dumb.
But that's really the whole movie. Oscar and Linda are really boring characters who are never sober and have nothing to say of any interest (there's a back story that they were orphaned when they were young when their folks died in a bad car accident). Their expat friends are lowlifes. The drug stuff is boring and only style with no substance.
I got rather motion sick watching this, with all the moving cameras and drug-addled views of the world. There is a recurring thing where Oscar remembers the car accident that killed his parents - which means that at just about any moment there could be a tremendously loud and sudden car crash into the middle of the screen (just in case we were getting comfortable in our seats as we're getting jizzed on by gigantic cocks). The script structure is just as showy and unnecessary as the drug visions and camera work. Big deal that it's not linear. That makes it annoying, not interesting. I guess I give Noé credit for being brave enough to do what he wanted to do - I just didn't particularly like it.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Howl (Sunday, September 26, 2010) (122)
Howl is a multi-form film about Allen Ginsberg around the time he wrote his masterpiece poem and about the obscenity suit that was brought against the publisher for it. Apparently, we are told, the dialogue all comes from interviews with Ginsberg and the courtroom transcription from the trial.
There are four threads that mix and cut through this piece. In one we see Ginsberg (played by James Franco) in his apartment in 1957, about two years after the piece was published talking to an interviewer (in color). Another one is the courtroom (in black and white) with David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Jon Hamm as the defense attorney and Bob Balaban as the judge. There are several "literary experts" brought to testify about the value of the poem and whether or not it is obscene. In another thread, we see (again in black and white) Ginsberg (again Franco) reading the poem to a crowded nightclub with his crushes Jack Kerouac and Neal Casssady and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky looking on. The final section is an animated expression of the poem playing out with Franco's voice (as Ginsberg's voice) reading the poem on top.
The impressive thing about the film is that it presents the entire poem in a way that becomes rather easy to understand through all the different ideas that swirl around it. Just as you hear one section in the animated part, you see a discussion of that part by the courtroom "experts" and then see Ginsberg explaining it himself to the interviewer. Sometimes his stand-up reading of it gives more tone to that section, so we once again understand it better.
On top of this, we see a good amount about who Ginsberg was at the time. He was a very sad gay man who was constantly in and out of mental hospitals. We get the sense that he was sent to these places not necessarily because he needed it, but because he was weird and gay and many doctors didn't know how to deal with him (he might have had some anxiety disorders, though he was never particularly crazy). We see how his love for a few men (straight men) like Kerouac and Cassady was a painful burr in his side through much of his 20s. He was able to hook up with them once in a while, but never felt that he got the same love he gave them.
This is a very interesting movie and a very clever, creative presentation. I have always appreciated the poem, but always found it a bit cumbersome and dense. The formal elements of the film help to break down the wall I've always had with the piece and make me appreciate it more. In the end, though, it is very small and just about a single poem. That's a bit unfair of me to say, I know, but it doesn't have a tremendous amount of depth beyond some interesting insights in to Ginsberg's life.
Stars: 3 of 4
Buried (Saturday, September 25, 2010) (121)
Rodrigo Cortes' Buried is a great example of a tremendous idea that is terrible executed and how the end result is pretty horrible. The film opens with a black screen and a some panting and fumbling from a man. After a few agonizing minutes (it might actually only be a few seconds, but it feels like it's going on forever) a Zippo lighter is lit and we see a man (Ryan Reynolds) who is tied bound and gagged in a shallow coffin, dirty and bleeding. He screams and tries to push is way out, but he seems to be buried under sand.
After a few minutes a mobile phone rings near his feet. He reaches down to grab it and misses the call. He begins calling numbers he knows: his wife in Western Michigan; 411 information; the FBI field office; the company he works for. He is a contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, and it seems that his convoy was hit by an IUD. He blacked and and all he knows is that now he is where he is. (We find out later that it is October 2006.)
Ultimately he gets a call from the kidnappers who tell him they need $5million by 9pm or they will let him die in the coffin. It is about 7:30 at this point. He calls the State Department and they put him through to a hostage negotiating team in Iraq and a guy who can help to find him or at least try to calm his nerves. It seems he's not only running out of time on the clock, but his phone is running out of batteries and he might also be running out of air.
The premise is great and sorta reminiscent of a clumsy Hitchcockian idea (actually the poster and the opening titles are clearly inspired by Saul Bass and give a very Hitchcockian feeling even before the film begins). But the execution of the film is nothing even close to Hitch. At nearly every turn Cortes makes bad decisions and goes more for the shock/thriller aspect of the story than the interesting psycho-terror-drama aspects of the story that Hitch would have certainly enjoyed more. Basically the script is full of cheap gags and a bunch of unexplainable details.
At one point Reynolds is told by the hostage helper guy that he should conserve his phone battery life by putting the phone on a sound ringer rather than a vibrate. He doesn't do this- and for no particular reason. Later he takes a brief nap and wakes to find a black snake in his pants. Huh?! How did a snake get in his pants? We see the snake slither out of a hole in the side of the coffin (a hole that was never there before) - so are we to believe that the snake came into the box, found the leg of his trousers, went up one side and then down the other side and then out the hole again? Smart snake!
I am impressed that the entire film takes place inside the coffin with the camera only on Reynolds for 95 minutes and doesn't get particularly dull, but this feeling is tempered by the absolute idiocy of most of the writing. Reynolds frequently gets furious and yells a people he calls when they don't understand the situation he's in. I totally get that he's frustrated and panicky, but at some point shouldn't he figure out that he can get more help if he's calm than if he's worked up?
I would love to see this done again with a better script. Screenwriter Chris Sparling clearly has horror movies on his mind more than good suspense films and I think this does the film a disservice. I know this concept can be done better.
Stars: 1 of 4
After a few minutes a mobile phone rings near his feet. He reaches down to grab it and misses the call. He begins calling numbers he knows: his wife in Western Michigan; 411 information; the FBI field office; the company he works for. He is a contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, and it seems that his convoy was hit by an IUD. He blacked and and all he knows is that now he is where he is. (We find out later that it is October 2006.)
Ultimately he gets a call from the kidnappers who tell him they need $5million by 9pm or they will let him die in the coffin. It is about 7:30 at this point. He calls the State Department and they put him through to a hostage negotiating team in Iraq and a guy who can help to find him or at least try to calm his nerves. It seems he's not only running out of time on the clock, but his phone is running out of batteries and he might also be running out of air.
The premise is great and sorta reminiscent of a clumsy Hitchcockian idea (actually the poster and the opening titles are clearly inspired by Saul Bass and give a very Hitchcockian feeling even before the film begins). But the execution of the film is nothing even close to Hitch. At nearly every turn Cortes makes bad decisions and goes more for the shock/thriller aspect of the story than the interesting psycho-terror-drama aspects of the story that Hitch would have certainly enjoyed more. Basically the script is full of cheap gags and a bunch of unexplainable details.
At one point Reynolds is told by the hostage helper guy that he should conserve his phone battery life by putting the phone on a sound ringer rather than a vibrate. He doesn't do this- and for no particular reason. Later he takes a brief nap and wakes to find a black snake in his pants. Huh?! How did a snake get in his pants? We see the snake slither out of a hole in the side of the coffin (a hole that was never there before) - so are we to believe that the snake came into the box, found the leg of his trousers, went up one side and then down the other side and then out the hole again? Smart snake!
I am impressed that the entire film takes place inside the coffin with the camera only on Reynolds for 95 minutes and doesn't get particularly dull, but this feeling is tempered by the absolute idiocy of most of the writing. Reynolds frequently gets furious and yells a people he calls when they don't understand the situation he's in. I totally get that he's frustrated and panicky, but at some point shouldn't he figure out that he can get more help if he's calm than if he's worked up?
I would love to see this done again with a better script. Screenwriter Chris Sparling clearly has horror movies on his mind more than good suspense films and I think this does the film a disservice. I know this concept can be done better.
Stars: 1 of 4
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Friday, September 24, 2010) (120)
OK - so this film is the sequel to Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street - but rather than calling it Wall Street 2 (or Wall Streetest?) Stone gave it a long title that basically means nothing. I never considered money to be able to sleep, so that now I find out it never sleeps I'm sorta like, "No duh, dude". Oh - and this movie is set during the 2008 Wall Street collapse, because, you know, there were greedy people then who made a lot of money on things failing and stuff. Ugh.
This is a pretty complicated story, so bear with me. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) works as a trader in an investment house that is basically Lehman Brothers. His father-figure and mentor is and old guy named Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) who also has a seat on the New York Fed Board (or something). His company is going down the tubes because of toxic assets and the Board is trying to help him sell it. Ultimately he jumps in front of a subway train and dies. Jake, a bit lost and sad because his girlfriend, Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan - yay two Carey Mulligan movies in a row!), is out of town working on her blog.
Jake meets Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas again) when he's on a book tour and gets to talking to him. It seems Winnie doesn't like her dad because he's an asshole and was locked up in jail when she was growing up. Gekko wants to get back with his daughter, so he makes a deal with Jake that he will help Jake take down Bretton James (Josh Brolin), a guy Gekko says led Zabel to kill himself (and also a guy Gekko himself had dealings with in the Bud Fox days). There are a bunch of crosses and double crosses and proposals and bankruptcies and pregnancies and nothing all that incredibly exciting.
This is really one of the worst scripts for a movie I can remember in a long time. Every line sounds like a canned cliche ready-made for a fortune cookie - not that that was not the case with the first Wall Street movie ("who am I?," Bud Fox asks looking off his midtown balcony).
The acting here is also pretty terrible, from LaBeouf, Douglas, Mulligan, Brolin, Langella - everyone. Because Stone is such an egomaniac, he has himself in two small cameo moments as well as Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. (Was that a deal to get good press from VF? Ridiculous.) In the most surprising performance, Susan Sarandon, as Jake's mom who is under water on three houses on Long Island (Get it?! Oh, I get it!) is terrible and ridiculous beyond words here. She has a silly New Yawk accent and looks jittery and unhinged. Very sad.
Somehow Stone thought that we would forget what city the movie was set in, as every single scene begins with helicopter overhead shots of Manhattan (in the day, at night, downtown, uptown, midtown). It's really dumb and amateurish.
The only mildly good element in the film is that most of the music is from David Byrne's last album "Everything that Happens will Happen Today". It's weird to credit a director for using music from a two-year-old album, but it is good stuff and sounds better than the dialogue, so I guess we should be grateful.
Other than the use of old music, there is nothing good here. It's a sequel that is so dumb it ruins whatever good memories I have from the original (which was, honestly, not all that brilliant either). It would be like making a sequel to Citizen Kane if Rupert Murdoch were to die. I'm not interested in how you can oversimplify financial info, Oliver. Just tell a good story. I don't care that you think you once created this Harry Lime-like super-villain; Gordon Gekko is at best two-dimensional and not very interesting (if anything, Bud Fox was the interesting character in the first film, not Gekko). This is basically just big-scale public masturbation by Stone and not worth ever watching.
Stars: .5 of 4
This is a pretty complicated story, so bear with me. Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) works as a trader in an investment house that is basically Lehman Brothers. His father-figure and mentor is and old guy named Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) who also has a seat on the New York Fed Board (or something). His company is going down the tubes because of toxic assets and the Board is trying to help him sell it. Ultimately he jumps in front of a subway train and dies. Jake, a bit lost and sad because his girlfriend, Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan - yay two Carey Mulligan movies in a row!), is out of town working on her blog.
Jake meets Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas again) when he's on a book tour and gets to talking to him. It seems Winnie doesn't like her dad because he's an asshole and was locked up in jail when she was growing up. Gekko wants to get back with his daughter, so he makes a deal with Jake that he will help Jake take down Bretton James (Josh Brolin), a guy Gekko says led Zabel to kill himself (and also a guy Gekko himself had dealings with in the Bud Fox days). There are a bunch of crosses and double crosses and proposals and bankruptcies and pregnancies and nothing all that incredibly exciting.
This is really one of the worst scripts for a movie I can remember in a long time. Every line sounds like a canned cliche ready-made for a fortune cookie - not that that was not the case with the first Wall Street movie ("who am I?," Bud Fox asks looking off his midtown balcony).
The acting here is also pretty terrible, from LaBeouf, Douglas, Mulligan, Brolin, Langella - everyone. Because Stone is such an egomaniac, he has himself in two small cameo moments as well as Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. (Was that a deal to get good press from VF? Ridiculous.) In the most surprising performance, Susan Sarandon, as Jake's mom who is under water on three houses on Long Island (Get it?! Oh, I get it!) is terrible and ridiculous beyond words here. She has a silly New Yawk accent and looks jittery and unhinged. Very sad.
Somehow Stone thought that we would forget what city the movie was set in, as every single scene begins with helicopter overhead shots of Manhattan (in the day, at night, downtown, uptown, midtown). It's really dumb and amateurish.
The only mildly good element in the film is that most of the music is from David Byrne's last album "Everything that Happens will Happen Today". It's weird to credit a director for using music from a two-year-old album, but it is good stuff and sounds better than the dialogue, so I guess we should be grateful.
Other than the use of old music, there is nothing good here. It's a sequel that is so dumb it ruins whatever good memories I have from the original (which was, honestly, not all that brilliant either). It would be like making a sequel to Citizen Kane if Rupert Murdoch were to die. I'm not interested in how you can oversimplify financial info, Oliver. Just tell a good story. I don't care that you think you once created this Harry Lime-like super-villain; Gordon Gekko is at best two-dimensional and not very interesting (if anything, Bud Fox was the interesting character in the first film, not Gekko). This is basically just big-scale public masturbation by Stone and not worth ever watching.
Stars: .5 of 4
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Never Let Me Go (Sunday, September 19, 2010) (119)
I will be very careful here with the film Never Let Me Go, as I never read the highly regarded book and don't have any emotional connection to the story, beyond what I saw on the screen. I will say that one thing that baffles me about the film is that the trailer totally gives away the entire story and even some important details that are only revealed in the last ten minutes. I really don't know why they did this - I don't think knowing major plot points going into the thing enhanced my viewing experience. Mostly I was just waiting for these revelations to happen, thinking the whole time that somehow the trailer was cut in such a way that it was not as straightforward as the marketing department made it look. Alas the film was exactly as simple as the trailer.
The story here is about an orphanage for kids who we quickly find out are part of a national organ donation program in Great Britain (in some alternate space-time universe). They are all clones of people living in the world and the idea is that they will be able to donate three or four organs before their bodies expire and they die. The story follows three kids, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly), who are friends and sometimes lovers. Tommy and Ruth hook up early, though Kathy and Tommy probably have a closer connection. The three remain friendly for about a decade until they grow up and grow apart.
The structure of the story is pretty simple: The first act has the kids in their school, Hailsham; then the second act has them moved to a sort of half-way house where as young adults they live in a cottage in the countryside preparing to either become organ donors or caretakers of organ donors (like Kathy, who will also donate her organs ultimately); finally the third act has them out in the world either getting cut up for their organs or helping others.
Throughout the film they are constantly looking to see if they can find the original person whose genetic material they are based on. This connects to the rather boring theme of whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are real people (or simply organic things that grow organs for transplants). I gotta be honest and say this was not at all compelling or at all original. This could have been some SciFi film from 60 years ago about whether or not a robot was human because it too had some sort of emotional life. Who cares?
Director Mark Romanek's work here is really pretty terrible as he telegraphs the emotions and the symbolism of each and every moment with the most ridiculous objective correlatives. We see garbage blowing in the wind just after Ruth goes on a long rant about how they are "modeled on trash and garbage" (oh - I get it!). When Kathy feels isolated in the cottage, we see her in big, wide shot sitting alone in the middle of emptiness. Ugh.
There is the root of an interesting discussion here - a post-modern question that comes up in the first act (and rather fades away by the end) about what is the nature of these kids existences if they are just created to be destroyed. They are given only certain amounts of information about their situations and are given a very limited language set to better control them. This is very similar to what Giorgos Lanthimos does in Dogtooth, but it's a lot simpler and dumber. By the time the film ends, it doesn't really matter that there was this interesting opening.
This is an interesting concept for a story, but it's done so ham-handedly and so boringly that it's really not all that interesting. On top of this, if you watch the trailer, you basically see the entire film - and that's only two minutes long! There is almost no depth in this film and no real emotional interest in the characters. Ruth is always a bitch; Kathy is always a smart geek who is emotionally distant; Tommy is sorta dim and child-like. They are like this as kids and they remain like this as adults. They don't grow at all. Maybe this is what the story is about - being denied the tools of socialization, they are emotional outsiders. But that's not really all that interesting either.
Stars: 2 of 4
The story here is about an orphanage for kids who we quickly find out are part of a national organ donation program in Great Britain (in some alternate space-time universe). They are all clones of people living in the world and the idea is that they will be able to donate three or four organs before their bodies expire and they die. The story follows three kids, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly), who are friends and sometimes lovers. Tommy and Ruth hook up early, though Kathy and Tommy probably have a closer connection. The three remain friendly for about a decade until they grow up and grow apart.
The structure of the story is pretty simple: The first act has the kids in their school, Hailsham; then the second act has them moved to a sort of half-way house where as young adults they live in a cottage in the countryside preparing to either become organ donors or caretakers of organ donors (like Kathy, who will also donate her organs ultimately); finally the third act has them out in the world either getting cut up for their organs or helping others.
Throughout the film they are constantly looking to see if they can find the original person whose genetic material they are based on. This connects to the rather boring theme of whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are real people (or simply organic things that grow organs for transplants). I gotta be honest and say this was not at all compelling or at all original. This could have been some SciFi film from 60 years ago about whether or not a robot was human because it too had some sort of emotional life. Who cares?
Director Mark Romanek's work here is really pretty terrible as he telegraphs the emotions and the symbolism of each and every moment with the most ridiculous objective correlatives. We see garbage blowing in the wind just after Ruth goes on a long rant about how they are "modeled on trash and garbage" (oh - I get it!). When Kathy feels isolated in the cottage, we see her in big, wide shot sitting alone in the middle of emptiness. Ugh.
There is the root of an interesting discussion here - a post-modern question that comes up in the first act (and rather fades away by the end) about what is the nature of these kids existences if they are just created to be destroyed. They are given only certain amounts of information about their situations and are given a very limited language set to better control them. This is very similar to what Giorgos Lanthimos does in Dogtooth, but it's a lot simpler and dumber. By the time the film ends, it doesn't really matter that there was this interesting opening.
This is an interesting concept for a story, but it's done so ham-handedly and so boringly that it's really not all that interesting. On top of this, if you watch the trailer, you basically see the entire film - and that's only two minutes long! There is almost no depth in this film and no real emotional interest in the characters. Ruth is always a bitch; Kathy is always a smart geek who is emotionally distant; Tommy is sorta dim and child-like. They are like this as kids and they remain like this as adults. They don't grow at all. Maybe this is what the story is about - being denied the tools of socialization, they are emotional outsiders. But that's not really all that interesting either.
Stars: 2 of 4
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