Perhaps the McCarran airport after a week in Vegas was not the ideal setting for watching a literate, heartfelt exploration of love and lust. However, I think my opinion of Hal Hartley's sweet, lightly humorous romantic drama was actually improved by the louche hedonism all around me. Martin Donovan portrays a literature professor who enters an affair with one of his students, a Jean Seberg type who insists on discussing her feelings in eloquent, insistent monologues.
In a parallel storyline, Donovan's best friend enters a strange and impulsive romance with a street woman who proposes to any man who walks by. These opposite and complementary relationships provide a charming, featherweight commentary on the extremes of attraction and love. Hartley can be a filmmaker of very big hits and wide misses, and with this short film he pushes no boundaries but simply gives us characters who say the things we wish we could say to those we desire. The title is misleading; this is not a film to be survived but enjoyed minute by precious minute.
Showing posts with label 4 stars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4 stars. Show all posts
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
12 Angry Men, 4 stars
Well, don't I feel sheepish. Here I was, paying most of my attention to this movie and finding a well-acted but psychologically trite drama that, for its time period, I found to be well above average. Then I went to read the secondary literature on it and found that the director, Sidney Lumet, had subtly changed the focal length of his lenses to pull us more into the action and flatten out the frame as the film progressed to create a sense of claustrophobia. I had one of those forehead-slapping moments where I thought I should just be sent back to film analysis 101 until I learn to notice these things myself.
After forgiving myself, however, I did not alter my rating of the film. Its flaws are unimproved by this new knowledge about the lenses. While it is a taut drama that was probably quite daring formally for its time, the fact remains that the psychology of the film is suspect. It is unlikely that men with such strong personalities would change their minds in the course of an afternoon, and that they would reveal their psychological failings so quickly to a roomful of other men that they barely know. The film's strengths are many, however: the aforementioned "lens plot", the performances (Henry Fonda is rightly praised but the entire cast is deserving), and the formal daring required to set a film essentially in one room, in near-real time, and trust the script and performers to draw the audience into such a closed setting.
This is a classic film for those interested in the law, and I read with interest that a remake has been made in Russia which addresses the Chechen conflict there. I also note that this remake is nearly twice as long as the original. It will be interesting to see what "12" (the remake) does with such a tight, flawless conceit as the one found in the classic "12 Angry Men".
After forgiving myself, however, I did not alter my rating of the film. Its flaws are unimproved by this new knowledge about the lenses. While it is a taut drama that was probably quite daring formally for its time, the fact remains that the psychology of the film is suspect. It is unlikely that men with such strong personalities would change their minds in the course of an afternoon, and that they would reveal their psychological failings so quickly to a roomful of other men that they barely know. The film's strengths are many, however: the aforementioned "lens plot", the performances (Henry Fonda is rightly praised but the entire cast is deserving), and the formal daring required to set a film essentially in one room, in near-real time, and trust the script and performers to draw the audience into such a closed setting.
This is a classic film for those interested in the law, and I read with interest that a remake has been made in Russia which addresses the Chechen conflict there. I also note that this remake is nearly twice as long as the original. It will be interesting to see what "12" (the remake) does with such a tight, flawless conceit as the one found in the classic "12 Angry Men".
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
MASH, 4 stars
What is left to say about a movie so classic as this, and one whose reputation holds up upon viewing such a unique and humanistic film? I won't reiterate the plot; it is languid and multi-faceted and most people are familiar with at least some aspects through either this film or the T.V. show that followed. I will simply say that while it is impossible to imagine film now without the influence of this movie's laconic yet surprisingly sharp style, trying to imagine how influential it was is quite a thought experiment.
Robert Altman had been a director of shorts and television before this film brought his name to national attention. His style is instantly recognizable. Overlapping conversations, a roaming camera, and an improvisational spirit are already present, although he would refine these signature techniques in countless ways over the long career that followed. I was surprised when researching this film afterward to find that there was strife on-set and that Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould spent most of the movie trying to get Altman fired. Anyone seeing the finished product will wonder why The style, as well as being distinctive, is a perfect fit for the material and the performances are uniformly hilarious and appropriate. When a note of stronger emotion interjects, it is always handled perfectly and the overall tone of the film doesn't suffer. Why, then, only 4 stars for the film? While Altman's style is instantly engaging, there are minor pacing problems, and some of the characters seem underwritten (if you can stop laughing at them long enough to ponder such an issue). I am also grading on a sort of reverse curve, having seen later Altman films which show the heights to which he would take his unique filmmaking style. While this early example is terrific on its own merits, as an Altman film it hovers around second or third place among those I've seen. Still not one to miss at any cost; take it from someone who missed this film for 28 years and now feels relieved at remedying that oversight.
Robert Altman had been a director of shorts and television before this film brought his name to national attention. His style is instantly recognizable. Overlapping conversations, a roaming camera, and an improvisational spirit are already present, although he would refine these signature techniques in countless ways over the long career that followed. I was surprised when researching this film afterward to find that there was strife on-set and that Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould spent most of the movie trying to get Altman fired. Anyone seeing the finished product will wonder why The style, as well as being distinctive, is a perfect fit for the material and the performances are uniformly hilarious and appropriate. When a note of stronger emotion interjects, it is always handled perfectly and the overall tone of the film doesn't suffer. Why, then, only 4 stars for the film? While Altman's style is instantly engaging, there are minor pacing problems, and some of the characters seem underwritten (if you can stop laughing at them long enough to ponder such an issue). I am also grading on a sort of reverse curve, having seen later Altman films which show the heights to which he would take his unique filmmaking style. While this early example is terrific on its own merits, as an Altman film it hovers around second or third place among those I've seen. Still not one to miss at any cost; take it from someone who missed this film for 28 years and now feels relieved at remedying that oversight.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Moon, 4 stars
Yeah, if I were David Bowie's son I probably would have passed on using "Space Oddity" in this film also. The interest both the song and the film show in space exploration and its strange attractions seems to run in the family, and if Duncan Jones progresses as much through his fledgling film career as his father did through his musical career he will one day be an artist of great interest.
**SPOILERS FOLLOW**
In the meantime we have this, a directorial debut which Jones gets a story credit on. More experienced screenwriters were apparently trusted with the actual screenplay, which shows a remarkable ability to delegate that few first-time directors, drunk with newfound filmmaking power, are able to show. The story concerns Sam (Sam Rockwell) who is the lone employee of a mining base on the moon. He putters around the base doing the sort of vaguely pointless, repetitive activities that men alone in space usually do in films, until one day he crashes a moon rover and awakens back at the base, where a solicitous helper robot (Kevin Spacey) seems genuinely concerned for his recovery. Eventually Sam is up and about, suspiciously missing any injuries sustained in the crash. He goes searching for the missing rover and finds it...with his injured self still inside. What follows I will not spoil entirely for you. It combines elements of "Solaris" with elements of (of all things) "The Island". I leave it to you to decide which parts of which were placed where in this film.
Jones has a talent for directing. His ability to coax two fairly opposite performances from star Sam Rockwell shows promise with actors, and the fact that the audience is occasionally moved to laughter bespeaks a rare ability to change tones without inducing whiplash. He has hired the immensely talented Clint Mansell to score the film, although I was less impressed with Mansell's score here than I was with his work for Darren Aronofsky in "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream". The score wisely chooses to be silent at some pivotal moments and never stoops to the level of "goosing" the audience at surprising points. Jones' directing of the moon-surface scenes are the ones that stand out to me most, a week and a half after seeing the movie. It is sometimes hard to tell if we are seeing miniatures or full-scale moon rovers and antennae, but that adds to the otherworldly idea of a future where mining on the moon is so simple that one man can do it. This is an austere, haunting vision of a future which makes me wish we could clone Duncan Jones and replace so many careless, lazy directors working today.
**SPOILERS FOLLOW**
In the meantime we have this, a directorial debut which Jones gets a story credit on. More experienced screenwriters were apparently trusted with the actual screenplay, which shows a remarkable ability to delegate that few first-time directors, drunk with newfound filmmaking power, are able to show. The story concerns Sam (Sam Rockwell) who is the lone employee of a mining base on the moon. He putters around the base doing the sort of vaguely pointless, repetitive activities that men alone in space usually do in films, until one day he crashes a moon rover and awakens back at the base, where a solicitous helper robot (Kevin Spacey) seems genuinely concerned for his recovery. Eventually Sam is up and about, suspiciously missing any injuries sustained in the crash. He goes searching for the missing rover and finds it...with his injured self still inside. What follows I will not spoil entirely for you. It combines elements of "Solaris" with elements of (of all things) "The Island". I leave it to you to decide which parts of which were placed where in this film.
Jones has a talent for directing. His ability to coax two fairly opposite performances from star Sam Rockwell shows promise with actors, and the fact that the audience is occasionally moved to laughter bespeaks a rare ability to change tones without inducing whiplash. He has hired the immensely talented Clint Mansell to score the film, although I was less impressed with Mansell's score here than I was with his work for Darren Aronofsky in "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream". The score wisely chooses to be silent at some pivotal moments and never stoops to the level of "goosing" the audience at surprising points. Jones' directing of the moon-surface scenes are the ones that stand out to me most, a week and a half after seeing the movie. It is sometimes hard to tell if we are seeing miniatures or full-scale moon rovers and antennae, but that adds to the otherworldly idea of a future where mining on the moon is so simple that one man can do it. This is an austere, haunting vision of a future which makes me wish we could clone Duncan Jones and replace so many careless, lazy directors working today.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Last Life in the Universe, 4 stars
I thought this would be my first Thai film. I was wrong; that spot was taken by "Tears of the Black Tiger" two years ago. They are remarkably similar, however, in their shifts of tone and their global influences. "Tears of the Black Tiger" reached through space and time to be influenced by trashy genre films of all countries and decades; "Last Life in the Universe" takes place in the airport-like limbo of foreign service industry workers in many countries, understanding little and understood still less.
Our hero, if you can call him that, is a shy, depressed librarian who happens to witness a horrible car accident in which a beautiful woman he had seen earlier in the day is gravely injured. His concern leads him to follow the girl's less attractive but more interesting sister to the hospital, where the two initiate a bond that results in him becoming her reluctant roommate. The film borrows from a variety of classic plots: at times it veers into the "odd-couple" genre as the neat librarian and the sloppy-haired pot-smoker try to get along. Eventually it becomes the classic opposites-attract love story, but the film avoids a familiar feeling about any of this. Due to gentle, unexpected pacing and the charm of having the characters communicate in three languages (none very well), the film succeeds at creating and holding a mood and then simply allows its characters to wander through it. Magical realism intrudes at times, as in a house-cleaning sequence with unfortunate and probably unintended overtones of "Requiem for a Dream". The characters have room to breathe and explore in the environment of the film, and the effect is gratitude on the part of the viewer for being allowed to wander alongside these finely drawn, interesting souls for a few minutes.
Our hero, if you can call him that, is a shy, depressed librarian who happens to witness a horrible car accident in which a beautiful woman he had seen earlier in the day is gravely injured. His concern leads him to follow the girl's less attractive but more interesting sister to the hospital, where the two initiate a bond that results in him becoming her reluctant roommate. The film borrows from a variety of classic plots: at times it veers into the "odd-couple" genre as the neat librarian and the sloppy-haired pot-smoker try to get along. Eventually it becomes the classic opposites-attract love story, but the film avoids a familiar feeling about any of this. Due to gentle, unexpected pacing and the charm of having the characters communicate in three languages (none very well), the film succeeds at creating and holding a mood and then simply allows its characters to wander through it. Magical realism intrudes at times, as in a house-cleaning sequence with unfortunate and probably unintended overtones of "Requiem for a Dream". The characters have room to breathe and explore in the environment of the film, and the effect is gratitude on the part of the viewer for being allowed to wander alongside these finely drawn, interesting souls for a few minutes.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Dolls, 4 stars
Yes, this is directed by that Takeshi. Coming into this movie I knew its director as the man responsible for "Takeshi's Castle", a Japanese physical challenge show whose low points were then overdubbed MST3K-style by two American comedians to form the SpikeTV show "MXC". However, I had seen none of his films although I knew that he had a successful film career in Japan.
*THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS IN MY REVIEW. I CANNOT DISCUSS HOW AFFECTING THIS FILM WAS WITHOUT GIVING AWAY MAJOR PLOT POINTS.*
This film did not let me down, although the leap from fat men in ill-fitting helmets smacking their faces into giant logs to a stately, quiet drama about the absence of free will was not a small one. This was everything I was not expecting it to be and was instead a well-observed if slightly manipulative meditation on loss and choice. There are three storylines, each dealing with a character who has failed to act decisively at a crucial moment. The first storyline deals with a young man who is very much in love and engaged to the woman he cares so much for. However, he bows to pressure from his parents and breaks up with her to marry the boss' daughter for business reasons. On his wedding day, he hears that she has attempted suicide and does not recognize anyone now. He takes responsibility for her, and as her instability causes them to become more and more outcast, they begin wandering the countryside tied together with a length of red rope. In one of the film's most moving moments, when the couple stands outside the house where they announced their engagement, the girl makes a gesture to show that she recognizes her former love as the man who has been caring for her all this time. I actually gasped aloud a little at the simplicity and tenderness of this moment and how it was handled.
The second, and most moving for me, of the stories concerns an aging yakuza boss who had made a fateful decision years ago to abandon a woman he loved because he felt he could not give her the life she deserved. She tells him she will wait for him every day on a certain park bench and bring a lunch for him in case he ever decides to join her. From the looks of the characters 20 years or more pass, and then the boss decides to see if his former love still waits for him. To his surprise, she has apparently been lunching on the same park bench in the intervening years, still awaiting his return. The moment when he sits beside her and she does not recognize him was for me the most affecting in the film, a nearly perfect reversal of the moment I described above in the first story.
The third and least successful story concerns a Japanese pop star who is blinded one day in an accident that may have been caused by a daydreaming fan of hers who happened to be a traffic cop at a busy intersection. The fan blinds himself in a final effort to be closer to his idol, and one day manages to finagle a meeting with her at last, when he can no longer see her.
The film is gorgeously shot and could serve as a primer in a class called "Shooting Autumn Leaves Attractively Yet Ambiguously". The first two stories are quite affecting and all three make very good points about the role of choice in happiness. This was quite a pleasant surprise considering that I was expecting a crime film, or failing that, a straightforward film of any type. Instead I found a elliptical, nonlinear gem that also opens and closes with two moving scenes of bunraku. While all characters in the film become dolls in their own indecision, the film's effect on us is anything but, reminding us how to be more human than the characters Kitano has created.
*THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS IN MY REVIEW. I CANNOT DISCUSS HOW AFFECTING THIS FILM WAS WITHOUT GIVING AWAY MAJOR PLOT POINTS.*
This film did not let me down, although the leap from fat men in ill-fitting helmets smacking their faces into giant logs to a stately, quiet drama about the absence of free will was not a small one. This was everything I was not expecting it to be and was instead a well-observed if slightly manipulative meditation on loss and choice. There are three storylines, each dealing with a character who has failed to act decisively at a crucial moment. The first storyline deals with a young man who is very much in love and engaged to the woman he cares so much for. However, he bows to pressure from his parents and breaks up with her to marry the boss' daughter for business reasons. On his wedding day, he hears that she has attempted suicide and does not recognize anyone now. He takes responsibility for her, and as her instability causes them to become more and more outcast, they begin wandering the countryside tied together with a length of red rope. In one of the film's most moving moments, when the couple stands outside the house where they announced their engagement, the girl makes a gesture to show that she recognizes her former love as the man who has been caring for her all this time. I actually gasped aloud a little at the simplicity and tenderness of this moment and how it was handled.
The second, and most moving for me, of the stories concerns an aging yakuza boss who had made a fateful decision years ago to abandon a woman he loved because he felt he could not give her the life she deserved. She tells him she will wait for him every day on a certain park bench and bring a lunch for him in case he ever decides to join her. From the looks of the characters 20 years or more pass, and then the boss decides to see if his former love still waits for him. To his surprise, she has apparently been lunching on the same park bench in the intervening years, still awaiting his return. The moment when he sits beside her and she does not recognize him was for me the most affecting in the film, a nearly perfect reversal of the moment I described above in the first story.
The third and least successful story concerns a Japanese pop star who is blinded one day in an accident that may have been caused by a daydreaming fan of hers who happened to be a traffic cop at a busy intersection. The fan blinds himself in a final effort to be closer to his idol, and one day manages to finagle a meeting with her at last, when he can no longer see her.
The film is gorgeously shot and could serve as a primer in a class called "Shooting Autumn Leaves Attractively Yet Ambiguously". The first two stories are quite affecting and all three make very good points about the role of choice in happiness. This was quite a pleasant surprise considering that I was expecting a crime film, or failing that, a straightforward film of any type. Instead I found a elliptical, nonlinear gem that also opens and closes with two moving scenes of bunraku. While all characters in the film become dolls in their own indecision, the film's effect on us is anything but, reminding us how to be more human than the characters Kitano has created.
What's New Pussycat, 4 stars
You can just tell that Woody Allen wanted the lead role in this film for himself. It is a blessing for the audience that he did not get it. Allen wrote this sex farce himself and makes his film debut in it, but the lead goes to the great Peter Sellers. Allen should probably sue Sellers for copyright infringement for so successfully impersonating the Allen persona that has been the linchpin of Allen's film career since "Annie Hall".
Sellers is a therapist whose patient (Peter O'Toole) is constantly beset by women wanting to sleep with him. Why this is a problem is never fully explained. O'Toole acquits himself ably here, in the first role I've seen him in that requires humor. Sellers and O'Toole eventually wind up at a country chateau with their respective women, and a slapstick farce of the highest order occurs. Of course Ursula Andress shows up in a bikini. Of course there will be bizarre, brightly-colored mid-60s decor everywhere. Of course there will be a scene resembling a bumper-car ride (it is Woody Allen, after all).
The plot of the film takes a backseat to slapstick, wordplay, and an overall tone resembling an early Marx Brothers film plopped down into the swinging '60s. Bosley Crowther, a man completely in tune with films of this period, said that it is as though "the characters were all disturbed children engaged in violent, sex-tinged water-play". To me this was a reason to like the film; I will let you decide for yourself.
Sellers is a therapist whose patient (Peter O'Toole) is constantly beset by women wanting to sleep with him. Why this is a problem is never fully explained. O'Toole acquits himself ably here, in the first role I've seen him in that requires humor. Sellers and O'Toole eventually wind up at a country chateau with their respective women, and a slapstick farce of the highest order occurs. Of course Ursula Andress shows up in a bikini. Of course there will be bizarre, brightly-colored mid-60s decor everywhere. Of course there will be a scene resembling a bumper-car ride (it is Woody Allen, after all).
The plot of the film takes a backseat to slapstick, wordplay, and an overall tone resembling an early Marx Brothers film plopped down into the swinging '60s. Bosley Crowther, a man completely in tune with films of this period, said that it is as though "the characters were all disturbed children engaged in violent, sex-tinged water-play". To me this was a reason to like the film; I will let you decide for yourself.
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