OK, Rian Johnson really needs to get out of my head. First he sets a film noir in a high school, creating one of the most original and charming genre blends of the past decade. It's one of those ideas that left everyone wondering why they hadn't tried that before. Now here he comes with a film that blends a classic con-game plot with the trappings of an aggressively quirky indie film such as those lovingly crafted by Wes Anderson.
Stephen and Bloom (whose last names are actually never given) are brothers who have made a career out of long cons. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has seen even one con-game film, one of the brothers wants out but is talked into one last con before retirement. The object is an heiress right out of Bringing Up Baby by way of Garden State. She is played by Rachel Weisz, a perfect choice for the role because she is a woman who can never seem dumb. Despite her character's inherent ditziness, she is never an object of our pity because her warmth and intelligence make her a believable target for con men.
The film is laugh-out-loud funny at times and quietly poignant at others. It suffers from the common con-game film reversals at the end which leave some audiences feeling cheated. However, anyone familiar with the films Johnson is referencing will realize that this is homage instead of derivation, and leave the theater with a smile on their faces at the lovingly crafted mashup that has resulted.
Showing posts with label 4.5 stars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4.5 stars. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Inglourious Basterds, 4.5 stars
Well, it's obviously been quite a while since I saw this film, and in the meantime I have been pleased to see an entire eloquent and vital web discussion spring up around the film. Strong arguments have been made on all sides, and while I happen to think the film is a masterpiece I can definitely see the points of view of those who disagree in whole or in part with that opinion.
The film itself is almost secondary to the controversies at this point, but this is not a "controversist" blog, so I will attempt to confine myself to the strengths of the film as I see them and only bring in other sources when necessary. The film is a revisionist World War II fantasy filtered through the lens of spaghetti westerns, Nazi exploitation films, and (of all things) The Wizard of Oz. The titular Basterds are a group of American soldiers who make a point of scalping and defacing Nazis wherever they may find them. In a parallel storyline, Shoshanna Dreyfus, the lone survivor of a Nazi massacre of her family, plans to murder all of the top Nazi officials during a premiere of a Nazi film in her theatre in occupied France.
I didn't realize until seeing "Basterds" how much Tarantino influenced the way I read films. I take his manner of reference as a default. When watching something by, for example, the Dardenne brothers, it is much harder for me to spot references because I am so accustomed to the way they are made in Tarantino. But the "Sunset Boulevard" and "Wizard of Oz" references in the theater inferno scene stood out to me instantly. Perhaps this is because Tarantino possesses all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But I like to think that it is because seeing "Pulp Fiction" at a pivotal and formative age prepared me to read his films naturally and that I have to work harder to understand a style too different from his.
But the question remains: Will you like this film as much as I did? Bizarrely, I believe the best litmus test for this would be your feelings about Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" (not coincidentally my second-favorite film of all time). If you feel that subjugating plot to a general atmosphere of love for the cinema is unfair and boring, perhaps you should skip it. If on the other hand you enjoy the feeling that you are catching Emil Jannings references before the rest of the crowd, and that the filmmaker has secretly planted these Easter eggs for you, the true cinephile, then you will be just as rapt as I was for the movie's perfectly paced running time. If the general idea of the film's alternate history offends you (this has been one of the main "controversies" to which I referred), obviously your time would be better spent elsewhere. For my money, this is one of the best films of the year, even including that Eli Roth..."performance". See it, love it, hate it, but I guarantee you'll have something to talk to your companions about afterward.
The film itself is almost secondary to the controversies at this point, but this is not a "controversist" blog, so I will attempt to confine myself to the strengths of the film as I see them and only bring in other sources when necessary. The film is a revisionist World War II fantasy filtered through the lens of spaghetti westerns, Nazi exploitation films, and (of all things) The Wizard of Oz. The titular Basterds are a group of American soldiers who make a point of scalping and defacing Nazis wherever they may find them. In a parallel storyline, Shoshanna Dreyfus, the lone survivor of a Nazi massacre of her family, plans to murder all of the top Nazi officials during a premiere of a Nazi film in her theatre in occupied France.
I didn't realize until seeing "Basterds" how much Tarantino influenced the way I read films. I take his manner of reference as a default. When watching something by, for example, the Dardenne brothers, it is much harder for me to spot references because I am so accustomed to the way they are made in Tarantino. But the "Sunset Boulevard" and "Wizard of Oz" references in the theater inferno scene stood out to me instantly. Perhaps this is because Tarantino possesses all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But I like to think that it is because seeing "Pulp Fiction" at a pivotal and formative age prepared me to read his films naturally and that I have to work harder to understand a style too different from his.
But the question remains: Will you like this film as much as I did? Bizarrely, I believe the best litmus test for this would be your feelings about Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" (not coincidentally my second-favorite film of all time). If you feel that subjugating plot to a general atmosphere of love for the cinema is unfair and boring, perhaps you should skip it. If on the other hand you enjoy the feeling that you are catching Emil Jannings references before the rest of the crowd, and that the filmmaker has secretly planted these Easter eggs for you, the true cinephile, then you will be just as rapt as I was for the movie's perfectly paced running time. If the general idea of the film's alternate history offends you (this has been one of the main "controversies" to which I referred), obviously your time would be better spent elsewhere. For my money, this is one of the best films of the year, even including that Eli Roth..."performance". See it, love it, hate it, but I guarantee you'll have something to talk to your companions about afterward.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Satantango, 4.5 stars
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.
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.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Revolutionary Road, 4.5 stars
I was pleasantly surprised by this film, which I should have disliked for several reasons. I read the book first and found several parts of it unfilmable without extensive voiceover. The character of April was underwritten, which did not prevent the book from being extremely involving but which could make for a lopsided and uninteresting film. Then I found out about the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank, which conjured up the unappetizing prospect of a whiny, one-sided film told entirely from the perspective of one of my least favorite actors.
And yet, here I am, giving it 4.5 stars. The unhappy side of 1950's suburban life has never been given quite so banal a face as those of Frank and April Wheeler. Intelligent but not gifted, they are convinced they are somehow "above" their neighbors, even as they burrow deeper and deeper into such an existence. They attempt to persuade themselves that suburbia is a stopover, temporary, just until the children grow up. Then they will live the bohemian lives they envisioned when they first got married. Of course, Frank finds being a "company man" more fulfilling than he ever imagined, and suddenly "excuses" begin to crop up and delay the family's move to Paris.
The casting of DiCaprio in this story has the (probably unintended) effect of making this April's story much more than Frank's, reversing one of my main quibbles with the book. Kate Winslet's performance as April is so far above DiCaprio's that we come away with a deep sense of April as a person, and exactly how her wants and desires converged to drive her actions. Even when she is listening in silence to others or drinking a martini in the background, her expressions tell us more than DiCaprio gives us during his few explosive scenes of emotion. At the end of the film, his strange complacency in the face of tragedy is no more inexplicable than any of his other reactions thanks to DiCaprio's youthful cipher of a face. It has a certain appropriateness, given how repressed men's emotional lives were at this time, but Winslet's grace and stubborn refusal to see the truth are the emotions we leave the theater with. As an evocation of its milieu of unhappy households and the myriad ways in which they differ and yet are alike, Revolutionary Road has no equal.
And yet, here I am, giving it 4.5 stars. The unhappy side of 1950's suburban life has never been given quite so banal a face as those of Frank and April Wheeler. Intelligent but not gifted, they are convinced they are somehow "above" their neighbors, even as they burrow deeper and deeper into such an existence. They attempt to persuade themselves that suburbia is a stopover, temporary, just until the children grow up. Then they will live the bohemian lives they envisioned when they first got married. Of course, Frank finds being a "company man" more fulfilling than he ever imagined, and suddenly "excuses" begin to crop up and delay the family's move to Paris.
The casting of DiCaprio in this story has the (probably unintended) effect of making this April's story much more than Frank's, reversing one of my main quibbles with the book. Kate Winslet's performance as April is so far above DiCaprio's that we come away with a deep sense of April as a person, and exactly how her wants and desires converged to drive her actions. Even when she is listening in silence to others or drinking a martini in the background, her expressions tell us more than DiCaprio gives us during his few explosive scenes of emotion. At the end of the film, his strange complacency in the face of tragedy is no more inexplicable than any of his other reactions thanks to DiCaprio's youthful cipher of a face. It has a certain appropriateness, given how repressed men's emotional lives were at this time, but Winslet's grace and stubborn refusal to see the truth are the emotions we leave the theater with. As an evocation of its milieu of unhappy households and the myriad ways in which they differ and yet are alike, Revolutionary Road has no equal.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Hurt Locker, 4.5 stars
This is quite possibly the most suspenseful movie I have ever seen, which becomes even more of an achievement considering that I was spoilered before going in. Hitchcock said that showing the audience a bomb under the table while innocuous conversation goes on overhead was suspense. I can report to the master that it is possible to show a procession of bombs, under all manner of tables and with all manner of conversation going on overhead, not all of which will go off, and create a nearly unbearable amount of suspense.
Our story centers on a bomb disposal expert in Iraq. I am spoiling nothing to tell you that his predecessor dies in the first fifteen minutes of the film in quite possibly the best-filmed explosion I have ever seen. This is not a film concerned with the politics or justifications of the second Iraq war. This is a film about a group of men who cannot choose the comrades they must work and possibly die with, who get through endless stretches of alternating boredom and adrenaline in the ways that men always have: wrestling, whiskey, and cigarettes. Jeremy Renner gives a performance of such subtlety that it at first seems out of place in such a loud, unpredictable environment. However, a man in such a situation would not wear his feelings openly. He would show us through movements of eyebrows or the corners of his mouth how he feels about the life he left behind. It is a common complaint that men wear a sort of armor over their emotions; a man who makes his living in a physical version of that suit would not be given to weeping or speeches. The supporting performances are equally strong; a moment when Renner's companions seriously consider "accidentally" killing him to prevent his foolhardy behavior could easily have drawn unintentional laughs. Instead it seems serious and affecting.
The verisimilitude of the film is remarkable. I know comparatively little about matters such as accents or whether the extras were actually locals. Suffice to say that this film feels more authentic than many documentaries I've seen which were actually filmed in Iraq. Nothing is spared for the audience's sake, and we come away with more understanding and empathy for the men on the ground there than after a confection like "Gunner Palace", which wastes time showing us soldiers' amateur rap sessions. A word about the direction of this film: I could write a separate entry about the implications of the fact that Kathryn Bigelow, a woman, directed this film. It can never again be said that a woman can't direct an action film. Perhaps I am being overly generous, but the attitude this film takes toward its characters feels distinctively feminine to me. Giving characters development and daring to ask us to care about them feels almost new for a film of this type. If this is the beginning of a new type of action film, someday to dethrone the testosterone-driven"Transformers" model, it would be long overdue.
Our story centers on a bomb disposal expert in Iraq. I am spoiling nothing to tell you that his predecessor dies in the first fifteen minutes of the film in quite possibly the best-filmed explosion I have ever seen. This is not a film concerned with the politics or justifications of the second Iraq war. This is a film about a group of men who cannot choose the comrades they must work and possibly die with, who get through endless stretches of alternating boredom and adrenaline in the ways that men always have: wrestling, whiskey, and cigarettes. Jeremy Renner gives a performance of such subtlety that it at first seems out of place in such a loud, unpredictable environment. However, a man in such a situation would not wear his feelings openly. He would show us through movements of eyebrows or the corners of his mouth how he feels about the life he left behind. It is a common complaint that men wear a sort of armor over their emotions; a man who makes his living in a physical version of that suit would not be given to weeping or speeches. The supporting performances are equally strong; a moment when Renner's companions seriously consider "accidentally" killing him to prevent his foolhardy behavior could easily have drawn unintentional laughs. Instead it seems serious and affecting.
The verisimilitude of the film is remarkable. I know comparatively little about matters such as accents or whether the extras were actually locals. Suffice to say that this film feels more authentic than many documentaries I've seen which were actually filmed in Iraq. Nothing is spared for the audience's sake, and we come away with more understanding and empathy for the men on the ground there than after a confection like "Gunner Palace", which wastes time showing us soldiers' amateur rap sessions. A word about the direction of this film: I could write a separate entry about the implications of the fact that Kathryn Bigelow, a woman, directed this film. It can never again be said that a woman can't direct an action film. Perhaps I am being overly generous, but the attitude this film takes toward its characters feels distinctively feminine to me. Giving characters development and daring to ask us to care about them feels almost new for a film of this type. If this is the beginning of a new type of action film, someday to dethrone the testosterone-driven"Transformers" model, it would be long overdue.
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