When reading others' thoughts on this amazing and completely unique film, I came across the notion (I fear I have forgotten where) that this film was a slap in the face to the "easy" art-house movies that were coming to America in droves in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Loads of family-friendly or unchallenging dramas and comedies were released and were essentially interchangeable at art-house cinemas.
Bela Tarr threw down an unmistakable gauntlet with this 7.5-hour, black-and-white long-take masterpiece. It is a very nearly perfect film, suffering only from some very minor problems with pacing. Honestly, when pacing something this long, it would be a miracle for a director and editor to have absolutely no moments which lag, no moments which make the viewer consult his watch. But for the most part it is madly successful, telling a deceptively simple story of a con man who comes to a collapsing communal farm in an attempt to con the residents out of their savings. Essentially this describes the plot. But the map is not the territory.
The story is told in fragments, dancing around the story like the tango for which the the movie is named. Various perspectives and time changes occur between the movie's 12 portions. 8 and 9 minute unbroken takes are commonplace. This is truly a film which redefines what it means to watch a movie. During some of these takes we at first grow impatient. Then we begin to search the scene for additional points of interest. At some point after that we are simply in the room, drinking and dancing or arguing with the characters. The transition is so subtle that we only realize it when the scene changes and we have the sense of having just left a room ourselves.
This is probably the most humanist film I have ever seen, in a pure and simple interpretation of the word. Tarr clearly knows and loves humanity, and has tried to recreate it as closely as possible while telling a story that is so bleak that it barely allows for love at all. These marvelous contradictions are given room to breathe and develop within Tarr's expansive canvas, and the result is a gift we can only humbly accept and offer murmured thanks.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
Julie & Julia, 3.5 stars
A bland crab cake of a movie like this is disappointing on many levels, because it has such potential. The plot follows Julie Powell, who in a year cooked all 500+ recipes in Julia Child's French cookbook, and Julia Child herself, who is shown discovering her passion for food in postwar France. The movie clearly should have been a conventional biopic of Child, whose life is rich enough for two movies and doesn't need the sagging support of the underdeveloped and somnolent Julie Powell chapters. It seems simply unfair to throw Meryl Streep and Amy Adams together as the protagonists of parallel stories and expect the stories to stand up as equals. The effect the movie leaves is of having been in a room papered half in red leather and half in garish children's wallpaper, and being flung between the halves regularly for two hours.
You can't really blame Amy Adams too much for doing her best with what is clearly an underwritten afterthought to the Julia Child story. Adams makes Julie as appealing as possible (the facts we are given through the screenplay make it impossible to see her as much more than a spoiled child out of her league). The Paris scenes with Child, however, sparkle with a wit and sense of place that the movie's other half lacks. It is encouraging to see Julia and her husband living with gusto and verve and remaining sexually active for their entire lives together, a portrait of marriage not often seen in a conventional Hollywood film. If this had been Julia's movie, it would have been encouraging, new and fresh. However, much like Julie's versions of Julia's food, I can't help feeling that her chapters are a lame and uninspired rehash.
You can't really blame Amy Adams too much for doing her best with what is clearly an underwritten afterthought to the Julia Child story. Adams makes Julie as appealing as possible (the facts we are given through the screenplay make it impossible to see her as much more than a spoiled child out of her league). The Paris scenes with Child, however, sparkle with a wit and sense of place that the movie's other half lacks. It is encouraging to see Julia and her husband living with gusto and verve and remaining sexually active for their entire lives together, a portrait of marriage not often seen in a conventional Hollywood film. If this had been Julia's movie, it would have been encouraging, new and fresh. However, much like Julie's versions of Julia's food, I can't help feeling that her chapters are a lame and uninspired rehash.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Waltz with Bashir, 5 stars
How rare and wonderful it is to find a much-hyped foreign film, or animated film, or foreign animated film, that actually lives up to what people have said about it and more. Yet here is Waltz with Bashir, an animated film attempting to tease apart one man's complicated emotions about his participation in the Israeli war against Lebanon in the 1980's. It is just that, and it is as serious as a plot summary implies, but it is so much more.
Immediately the film draws you in with its unusual animation style, something akin to rotoscoping but without the unmoored, handheld feeling that rotoscoping seems to have. I was watching this on a much smaller screen than I normally use, and I was still instantly afraid of the opening scene, a nightmare involving a pack of dogs. My heart pounded along with the narrator's. It seems redundant to praise editing in an animated film, since frames that aren't needed simply aren't made in the first place But this sequence is proof that editing in animation does exist, and needs to. The film only goes uphill from there.
The director, Ari Folman, animated interviews of his friends and comrades in an attempt to remember his actions during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, memories which he has repressed and is now attempting to reconstruct. Many tones mingle side-by-side here, which is often the way wartime experience can really feel. When the strains of OMD's "Enola Gay" began to play in a flashback of Ari's comrade partying on a luxurious boat, I couldn't help laughing. Of course the soundtrack would use the best (and as far as I know, the only) synthpop song to deal with mass murder. At other times, however, the film is quietly heartbreaking. One of the most touching moments, for me, was when one of his fellow soldiers tells him he can record their interview but not film it. What Folman has created is so much more truthful, in its way and about these events, than film could ever be. Many of the actions described would not be filmable without extensive and costly reconstructions of battles and explosions. By intercutting excerpts from interviews with animated reconstructions of the actions being described, Folman makes his point equally if not more effectively. This is proven by the footage of actual victims of the invasion which closes the film. After all that had come before, I actually found the footage dry, a method of presenting the material which has lost its effectiveness in a media-saturated world. Folman's friend should have told him, "You can film all you want, but just don't draw."
Immediately the film draws you in with its unusual animation style, something akin to rotoscoping but without the unmoored, handheld feeling that rotoscoping seems to have. I was watching this on a much smaller screen than I normally use, and I was still instantly afraid of the opening scene, a nightmare involving a pack of dogs. My heart pounded along with the narrator's. It seems redundant to praise editing in an animated film, since frames that aren't needed simply aren't made in the first place But this sequence is proof that editing in animation does exist, and needs to. The film only goes uphill from there.
The director, Ari Folman, animated interviews of his friends and comrades in an attempt to remember his actions during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, memories which he has repressed and is now attempting to reconstruct. Many tones mingle side-by-side here, which is often the way wartime experience can really feel. When the strains of OMD's "Enola Gay" began to play in a flashback of Ari's comrade partying on a luxurious boat, I couldn't help laughing. Of course the soundtrack would use the best (and as far as I know, the only) synthpop song to deal with mass murder. At other times, however, the film is quietly heartbreaking. One of the most touching moments, for me, was when one of his fellow soldiers tells him he can record their interview but not film it. What Folman has created is so much more truthful, in its way and about these events, than film could ever be. Many of the actions described would not be filmable without extensive and costly reconstructions of battles and explosions. By intercutting excerpts from interviews with animated reconstructions of the actions being described, Folman makes his point equally if not more effectively. This is proven by the footage of actual victims of the invasion which closes the film. After all that had come before, I actually found the footage dry, a method of presenting the material which has lost its effectiveness in a media-saturated world. Folman's friend should have told him, "You can film all you want, but just don't draw."
The Perfect Getaway, 3.5 stars
If studios were still in the business of specializing by genre, this is precisely the sort of taut, efficient entertainment that Warner would have turned out. It takes the typical mistaken-identity thriller and sets it under the friendly blue skies of Hawaii, a welcome change of scene for a genre that tends toward claustrophobia. Then it simply winds itself up, does its dance and bows to applause for a job perfectly well done.
Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn are our entrance into this film, a a couple vacationing in Hawaii when another young couple is killed there. They encounter two perfectly opposed couples on their way: a pair of grungy hippies with a threatening air, and another composed of an Iraq veteran and his sunny southern girlfriend. When the second couple joins Jovovich and Zahn on their trek to a secluded beach, strange clues begin to surface. Or do they? The southern belle certainly is skilled at disemboweling animals, and her boyfriend insists on traveling with an uncomfortably large knife and lecturing people about never disregarding their surroundings.
For once I refuse to spoil the ending of a film I'm reviewing. You don't need to know the ending to appreciate it, and a simple reflection on what went before will suffice to make everything clear after the film ends. This is a movie that ties up all of its loose ends, and a second viewing will reveal no details which don't add up in the light of the twist ending. Along the way enough jitters and jumps are generated to keep the viewer perfectly entertained by what seems to be the primary mystery. An exemplary example of a lean thriller, the type of tight little B-picture that no one (except apparently David Twohy) is interested in making anymore.
Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn are our entrance into this film, a a couple vacationing in Hawaii when another young couple is killed there. They encounter two perfectly opposed couples on their way: a pair of grungy hippies with a threatening air, and another composed of an Iraq veteran and his sunny southern girlfriend. When the second couple joins Jovovich and Zahn on their trek to a secluded beach, strange clues begin to surface. Or do they? The southern belle certainly is skilled at disemboweling animals, and her boyfriend insists on traveling with an uncomfortably large knife and lecturing people about never disregarding their surroundings.
For once I refuse to spoil the ending of a film I'm reviewing. You don't need to know the ending to appreciate it, and a simple reflection on what went before will suffice to make everything clear after the film ends. This is a movie that ties up all of its loose ends, and a second viewing will reveal no details which don't add up in the light of the twist ending. Along the way enough jitters and jumps are generated to keep the viewer perfectly entertained by what seems to be the primary mystery. An exemplary example of a lean thriller, the type of tight little B-picture that no one (except apparently David Twohy) is interested in making anymore.
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