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This is a rather strange film in a similar vein as Amelie and C.R.A.Z.Y., but instead of living up to the endearing first half and taking it to another level those two did, it falls apart into a quirky mess of a silly love story that is completely unrelated to the rest of the film. Had it either built that into the story earlier or found a different path to take, or perhaps found a more interesting guy for Alisa to fall for, I think the film could have been saved from itself and been a real find. But, as it stands, it’s an amusing fluff piece that wanted to be a better movie than it ended up being.
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I usually hate making sweeping statements about the Oscars unless it is in my annual prediction post, but Kristin Scott Thomas really does deserve some recognition for her role in this. The overall story I can take or leave, but she made it so I was unable to take my eyes away from the screen. Without her, this is a Lifetime movie of the week. With her, it’s an Oscar caliber film. That’s no easy feat.
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Here is exhibit A of why I hope Van Sant is done with his essays of nothing-much (Elephant, Last Days, Gerry and Paranoid Park). When he has a proper script in front of him and a proper cast to work with, he can still make a great film, and that’s what he did here with Milk. The only nitpicks I have is that the Jack subplot was not really that clear. He just shows up one day, and I don’t know what the hell happened, but no one except Harvey likes him and that extended out through the screen to me as well. The other is the timing of the release for Oscar contention rather than achieving an actual objective that Harvey would have been behind and releasing it before election day, when Prop 8 and a bunch of other despicable anti-gay laws were passed. It probably could have helped, but that Oscar is pretty important, too.
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Gus Van Sant’s love affair with using non-actors is getting towards the end of its course, hopefully. There is a reason no one uses non-actors, and whatever “real” quality he hopes get out of them ends up drowning in a sea of talentless water. It’s an otherwise decent film, aside from not having an ending, or seemingly a point for being made. Nothing learned by the characters, commented on by the filmmaker (except “divorce is tough on kids”… there is a new one) or gleaned by the viewer. It’s nice to look at and I’ve always loved watching skate videos (despite not liking skaters at all), so at least it had that going for it.
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My election mania has subsided lately, but turned sharply into a new WWII phase. Mostly documentaries, but I also ran through Band of Brothers again after Christmas. For one reason or another, I never watched this or Flags of Our Fathers when they came out last year, even with the hype for this one. Okay, I lied. The only reason I stayed away was my dislike for Paul Haggis’s storytelling. Even with Iris Yamashita writing the script for this (Haggis was in on the story), you can see the Haggis touches and they are maddening. He’s the football coach who doesn’t cover his mouth when he’s ordering the plays. Someone really needs to take him aside and have a chat with him about it. But now I’ve badly digressed.
Even having seen WWII films from the Axis side, this was a whole other thing. It’s truly disconcerting to see the Americans as the faceless enemy, which they are in this for the most part. It’s a good step though. Your supposed to be with the Japanese on this story. Maybe it’s just a bi-product of being a dual film, but I’m also glad Clint didn’t go and show scenes from the American side. My biggest gripe with Saving Private Ryan are snippets from the D-Day landing when you get the POV of the Nazi machine gunners from out of nowhere. I can’t watch a war movie and care about the people on the other side, so I don’t want to have anything to do with them, no matter how few frames of them there are.
I know the Iwo Jima story from the American side, and I don’t think adding motion to Rosenthal’s still photographs would add much, so I’m a little hesitant to watch Flags of Our Fathers.
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Ben Kingsley has been on a good run with this stoic version of himself, but it might be time to hang it back in the closet after this and find a new kind of character. I think he’s done all he can do with it, and I’d like to see some more range with him. He’s starting to look bored with it. Maybe that’s just the intent behind the characters, but even his cameo on The Sopranos, he had that hangdog “please shoot me, I’m tired of fame” look about him.
There really is nothing boring about this film, though, despite what the plot synopsis (older man falls in love with a student, upsets longtime girlfriend) would make you think. Isabel Coixet brought out the best in Kingsley, making you feel very deeply for him by the end of the film, and Penelope Cruz and Patricia Clarkson, well, they both sparkle, as usual. Dennis Hopper was a little bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s not jarring enough to derail the film.
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Well, the hype didn’t fail here. Rourke really is that good in this role, one he seems to have been born for. That’s really all there is to say about the film in this forum. The story is very ho-hum, kind of what you’d expect from an indie sports drama, but it’s told very well. I’d read the screenplay earlier, and the little touches Aronofsky added to the film were the genius touches I expected of him, but wasn’t sure he’d use them on this film. Randy’s walk from the back of the supermarket to the deli counter, this absolutely fantastic, simple, one-take steady cam shot, is probably more interesting and better executed than any of the other camera tricks and edit tricks he’s done in his previous films, and doesn’t come off as gimmicky, nor does it come off as a Scorsese rip off.
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I’m not exactly sure what I think about this film yet. Most of my thoughts are swirling around the fact that I felt somewhat betrayed by American Beauty when I went back and watched it a few years later and hated every frame of it. I’m wary of being suckered again by Mendes, which is the same reason I refuse to watch Road to Perdition again. I do wonder what it is about American suburbs that interest him so much, though. Maybe the challenge of making the least interesting thing in the world interesting. Maybe a souring trip to the Long Island outlet malls when he was a kid (I’ve been on those, and there is really not many things in the world that are worse).
The problem I’m having with it is that the film lost a lot of my attention when the move to Paris was scrapped in order to stick around in Nowhereville and watch the grass grow. Leaving would have been the braver choice and been the more interesting film, probably, and suburban marital descent just doesn’t connect with me. But the final image of the film is very arresting because I know that guy. Not the actor, but the guy who turns his hearing aid off or pretends to be asleep to get some peace and quiet. It turned what I had been thinking (great start, terrible finish) on its head and now I don’t know where I stand on it, really.
The other thing is that I’m not entirely sure I want to watch this again.
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Not a bad little movie, but it would have been helped so much had the extraneous side stories been left on the cutting room floor where they deserved to be. There was nothing of interest in any of them once Mizushima leaves the music awards venue. We got all of the little bits of backstory exposition that we needed for Mizushima and Lin Xi’s “one crazy night” in Shanghai where neither can speak the other one’s language. I realize watching this that I’m a little bit of a sucker for the “one crazy night” story, despite feeling that it’s been well worn out for years already. Zhang Yibai did an okay job with it and got his laughs, as Charlie Brown would say, and added one very nice sequence into Chinese film history when Mizu and Lin are writing out their stories on the street with lipstick.
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Happy birthday, Jesus, even though today wasn’t your birthday. I decided to hold off on logging this for a while… just because.
If you are familiar with Bill Maher, you are familiar with the style of this documentary. It’s his one man mission to, as sarcastically as possible, understand why people are religious. Like Maher, I’m also agnostic, so it’s a curiosity of mine as well. I tend to get offended when people put no stock in science, like a fair few people in this documentary, but I’ve also met Christians who are complete science nerds and believe in evolution and the big bang. People not unlike the crazily awesome Catholic priest Maher meets outside of the Vatican (after being ejected from the Vatican itself). If there were more priests like that guy, fewer people, I think, would find religion so hard to swallow, but he is an extreme rarity, and so it is that religious dogma is a very bitter pill to swallow with a straight face.
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This film is just ridiculously infectious. I can’t even describe it properly, but, while not the best film of the year by any stretch, it was probably the most satisfying to watch. That’s not to say it was an easy film with nothing to it, it had it’s dark, complex moments, and there is a lot to dig around in under Poppy’s happy exterior, but the slick cleverness and delivery of the writing made it a joy to watch. A.O. Scott mentioned in his podcast the other day (I can’t remember if it was about this or not) that making movies about misery is a cop out in some way, and this is the harder story to do. It’s true. It’s so easy to fuck this up with any minor hitch. It Poppy is cast wrong, it’s dead. If Scott is cast wrong, it’s dead. There is some leeway with the other characters, but still so much that could have went wrong, but it didn’t.
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Well, this is certainly the best South Korean film I’ve seen since The Host, and it keeps up the quality for about an hour and a half… and then it runs out of steam with a chase scene so long and so utterly unrealistic and, well, stupid, that I can’t help but wonder what kind of drugs Kim Ji-woon was taking at them time to make him think the last 40 minutes of the movie were the right way to go. The climax, so to speak, is taken from the same place the name is taken from, but it’s not nearly as suspenseful or well done, it’s basically a comedy piece. There are a few other little bits taken from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, none of which they really needed to use, even as homage. The only really bright spot (other than Jeong Woo-seong’s gleaming, pearly white teeth) was Song Kang-ho giving another brilliantly funny performance. He would seem to be the only bankable South Korean actor, or at least the only one I always look forward to.
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I admit that I wasn’t all that interested in Gran Torino based on the trailer or what I’d heard about it, but I went and watched it anyway. It only made me hate trailers that much more than I already do, because it’s a terrific film, and probably Clint’s best performance since In the Line of Fire. I didn’t see it as much of a parable about race or another sequel to Dirty Harry, but as a good story, well told and well acted and a nice fuck you to the overly politically correct.
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I never did get around to seeing Old Joy, but this looked much more appealing anyway. It’s a little hard to separate the film itself from the flood of bad memories I have about my own dogs, though film relies on user experience to be exploited to its fullest anyway, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It has a bit of a Kerouac feel to it. The Dharma Bums without the Dharma, sort of. It’s very serene and personal, and put in a similar setting that Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder end up in at various points in the novel, but with a sheen of sadness waxed over the story. It’s nothing if not sad, but it’s a very logical and slightly heroic conclusion despite being a kick in the gut.
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This is about on par with what I’d expect from the Arcade Fire, and it’s a good document of what being around them must be like, but it’s really incredibly unsatisfying because it’s not a single work, it’s a bunch of a half works. Half a tour film, half a making of, half art school thesis film. Too many halves, but that’s the problem I had with the film overall. I wanted a clear, linear work with a bunch of songs in the middle, but that is an unrealistic expectation with them, so I don’t know why I thought that to begin with. I’m sure I’ll warm up to it eventually, and the bonus disc hasn’t been released yet, so there is that.
