Change Your Image
rosepol
Reviews
Incendies (2010)
Manichaean
If you liked Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns, this is the film for you -- it's very slow, with lingering shots of unimportant symbols, mentions moralist truisms at the end that have nothing to do with the movie, highlights desolate scenery, features endless graphic gore, turns on revenge, and celebrates stone-faced acting.
Plus, in the film, women are good and men are bad. In Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps were good and Christians were amorally ethnocentric in trying to uphold traditional values. War is bad, except when it is the topic of a film, in which case it leads to self-discovery, which is good.
Flickan som lekte med elden (2009)
good material, mindless direction
Part of Lisbeth's attraction is the combination of skill, emotional frigidity, and defiance. This attraction is downplayed in the film, which instead features more traditional emotional reaction shots -- Salander as female victim. Indeed, two of the book's highlights (spoiler alert), her take-out of the motorcycle thugs and her escape from the grave, are treated perfunctorily rather than built up to and onto as evidence of character. Instead, we get invented visuals such as sex and fire that do not add anything to the movie.
But this implies more consistency than exists in the direction. In the first movie, thought went into what to show and what to omit from the book, leading to a downplaying of the Millennium role, a de-emphasis on the ideology of oppression, and a moderate portrayal of the hero's sexual attractiveness. Here, there is little strategy to the presentation. (Spoiler alert) Blomkvist's affair with his editor is revealed to no end, Millennium activities are presented without being understood, the connection between sex trafficking and murder is omitted, and the dynamics within the police are at most hinted at. So many elements are presented but few are explored.
If the third movie is as poorly directed as this second one, then neither is worth seeing. If the third returns to the level of the first -- and the book's material promises even greater potential -- then both are worth seeing, as we need the second to understand the third.
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Best movie in several years
Stranger than fiction starts out like post-modern literary snob snot -- anyone good with numbers must be dull and obsessive -- and never entirely leaves the genre. However, the acting brings the script to life (when Maggie Gyllenhaal enters, it is like switching on the sound). And the nuance and wit elevate the movie above its plodding peers such as Endless Sunspot Mind and Malkovich Bees John. The transformation from sneering tragedy to feel-good comedy is self-aware, leaving the characters and audience satisfied but ambivalent. To what extent should we be willing to exchange humanity for art or vice-versa in this instance, a movie?
I'm left at the end with a sense of the triviality of the fiction and movie business. Just as the script exalts baking over academe, so it says that you shouldn't take your entertainment too seriously.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
Good scenes, poor characters and plot
The movie improves on the book in several respects -- visually powerful (especially for Aslan, battles, and fauns), more focused and coherent, with the seeming factual nature of film bolstering credibility. Aside from those, the movie is a junk shop of what are presumed to be children's desires -- to be powerful, good, admired and magical. However, the movie is a wicked witch, offering a few short-term pleasures in an attempt to seduce the young. Let me mention as an illustration the main plot assumption: all good-hearted creatures are unified by the desire to put four bickering children on thrones as co-rulers of a non-human world. There is never a hint of why this fantasy might be an undesirable reality, because anything undesirable can be removed with a potion, prophecy or an attitude adjustment.
Sideways (2004)
critic's fantasy life
Overweight, unattractive would-be writer steals from his mother and lies to women -- foxy women just find him irresistible. This film is someone's jerk off fantasy -- though perhaps overweight, unattractive male critics will find it "realistic." For women, there is a fantasy reprise of Thelma and Louise where Sandra Oh beats the crap out of an unresisting cad.
If these fantasies don't do much for you, the movie doesn't offer much else. It is a slight story with forgettable characters. The star is wine, and the best dialogue is chatter about wine -- oh, did I forget to mention that part of the film's realism is the wine expertise of the economically marginal?
The mass audience may stay away, at least if they have any taste.
The Aviator (2004)
Gravitas
There is casting and then there is acting.
The Aviator is well acted, with Cate Blancett in particular turning in an outstanding job.
The film is poorly cast because few of the actors have the heft necessary to portray their characters. DiCaprio is a boyish lightweight. Ava Gardner had a presence that her imitator lacks. Hepburn was born to privilege, Blancett merely acts. Alan Alda is charming but not believable as a powerful man. Alec Baldwin, in contrast, suggests the seriousness, complexity, and deviousness of a major business player in the 1940s.
What does it mean that the actors of today cannot convey the actors of yesterday? Maybe Errol Flynn is beyond imitation, but I think not. Perhaps preferences for both actors and acting styles now discourage larger-than-life figures. The earlier era valued beauty, boldness, willfulness, and wit, none of which are in vogue.
Sharpe: Sharpe's Battle (1995)
50% stayed thru it
Lots of (sometimes incoherent) plot, modest characterization, indifferent acting, stilted dialogue -- at no time does this appear vaguely realistic. Basically a 50s 'B' adventure movie: colorful uniforms, fighting but little gore or agony, melodrama, and characters whose words strangely mismatch their deeds (Spoiler:Sharpe calls Loup a murderer just before Sharpe has enemy soldiers killed in cold blood). What came to mind as I watched was that the director was on budget and the writer had a bad drug or alcohol problem, On the other hand, I spent much of my childhood watching TV shows no better than this. My wife and son walked out, as the plot twists and turns weren't interesting enough to make up for the speeches and cheesy action.
Callas Forever (2002)
Opera formula: soap and music
True to opera's formula, this movie's plot is a dramatized excuse to hear the music, which is a Callas sampler. The music makes the movie, much as was the case for the recent "Ray" and "Chicago." The situation is of an aging diva, the world's best in a medium in which age is the enemy. The film raises some questions but in the end it is all about the music, which is the movie's answer both implicitly and explicitly.
Ardant's performance carries the film. Perhaps it is not much of a reach for an actress to play an opera star, as long as she doesn't have to sing. Irons is wonderful at the beginning, then lapses back into his standard long-faced nebbish. Joan Plowright is completely unbelievable as a reporter.
By focusing on the troubled later Callas, the viewer's indulgence is gained for the over-the- top tempestuousness that marred our appreciation of Callas at her peak.
Pretty Woman (1990)
Not enough gore
This movie is not realistic, not enough like Lord of the Rings, Shawshank Redemption, the Godfather, and Spiderman. Nobody gets killed; though there is a punch thrown, it's just not the same as Mortal Kombat or Saving Private Ryan. I mean, characters develop rather than just staying put. And I am offended at the send up of salespeople at upscale stores -- they have rights, too, you know! Trying to put businessmen as the leads is quite a reach -- these guys are never important in real life, as you can tell by watching all the other films. Fortunately, women will never go for a prostitute as the female star; even that "sex worker" stuff from the women's movement can't make a dent in that attitude!
Blow-Up (1966)
Memorable scenes from a boring movie
I recently rented the DVD, having seen the movie when it came out and recalling some of its scenes. The memorable scenes -- vivid photos, snappy lines, and quirky acting -- are by far the best part of the film. The worst part of the film is the worrying away at embodying a few simple ideas about perception. As with the dancing bear, the applause has not been for directors who have good ideas but for those who have any at all. Dancing bears are, to me, boring bears. I prefer them doing more bear-like things, which for directors includes building visual scenes upon a writer's script and actors' personifications. And Blow-up has a lot of wonderful bits, from Redgrave's tense murderess and Hemmings' voyeur to the dead rock audience that comes alive only when a destroyed guitar is tossed from the stage(the director's overkill on this scene comes when Hemmings fights for a share of the wreck only to discard it as worthless after he escapes with his prize). The best parts of the film are largely irrelevant to the plot (not to mention reality), such as the dynamics by which the photographer ends up having sex with two teenage model-wannabes, the pot room at a cocktail party, and the main character's refusal to go beyond immediate self-interest in dealing with people, especially with women. In each case, it is the visual specifics that are memorable, not the embodiment of an idea.
Vozvrashchenie (2003)
Boys coming of age
There are two perspectives in the "The Return." The camera seems to offer an objective interpretation, revealing surface reality without comment. We see subtle clues offered by the shots as if they were happenstance that we, clever, can figure out. The film is also from the perspective of two young (teen and preteen) brothers. It is their conversations, actions, and emotions that dominate the film, for which the adults provide the occasions.
This movie starts in childhood, with peer-testing of boyhood ability to overcome fear, with motherly comfort, and with sulky, willful resentment. The world is a hard to understand given. Only the peer culture is clear. And the world gets harder to understand with the return of the long-gone father. Little is explained, so the youths spend a good deal of time trying to interpret the return, the father, the family situation and to decide among courses of action. For the childish brother, the chosen reaction is denial and rejection. For the adolescent brother, the reaction is imitating an adult role model, coming to grips with choices, leading to both resentment of demands to toughen up and welcoming of those directions. This growing up is not a happy celebration but a struggling emergence from a cocoon.
The rough edges of this coming of age story are provided by the lack of familiarity between father and sons, not only individually but also as types. The father is a man unfamiliar with boys, the boys are unfamiliar with men, much less fathers. The boys' peers similarly lack any manly notion of combining demands for performance and emotional support. The father wants to step immediately into a parental role defined by norms of males living a hard life. As the film progresses, he learns to make accommodations for youth, but always continues to test and train his sons to be men. The boys learning is more obvious, and much of it could have happened long ago. Only slowly do the boys -- and hence the audience -- learn that the father's initially incomprehensible demands stem from a desire to make them better.
(spoiler) The movie is incomplete, the relationship broken, and the coming of age process left hanging. As with many aspects of the film this might be taken symbolically or simply as a story of a particular family. It leaves the movie available for multiple allegorical purposes, some of which are illustrated in other reviews and comments (Russia's childish willfulness leads to the demise of fatherly Western attempts to help...).
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait
"Eternal Sunshine" displays vivid scenes from a wonderful/terrible relationship. The first hour was a total waste -- slow, sentimental, shallow-- and I considered walking out several times. The movie has long stretches where nothing much happens but picks up when it becomes a chase, with the hero and heroine attempting to elude the memory erasers and preserve/ create the best moments of their relationship. At no point did I care much about the characters or the pretentious plot, so action and bright flashes were appreciated. The end of the movie focuses on the question of whether they (we) would begin a new relationship knowing that it would end badly, exposing our vulnerabilities and character weaknesses, but that it would include some peak moments and enlargement of ourselves as well.
Cold Mountain (2003)
Pointless degradation
There are good moments and scenes in this film: when the lovers eventually get together, when Ruby gives the farm the once-over, when deserters and farm women share a small hoedown, and when Inman carefully shares a bed with a woman who has lost her husband. For the most part, though, the movie moves from pointless gore to meaningless degradation, scene after scene. I understand very well that there are times and places in which that's what life mostly is. And if this movie were an exception to an overload of happy films, who could object? But it is not. It is simply the dramatization of suffering for the purpose of making the rich richer. And we already have plenty of that.
21 Grams (2003)
No awards deserved
Critics, actors, and film fans may love this move, but viewers in touch with the real world do not. The movie is superficial in every respect and technically excellent in most aspects. As usual, the actors and fans are drawn to a plot and characters they believe to be realistic and dramatic, a delusion easy to sustain if your point of reference is Fargo, Tarantino, and Michael Douglas.
The characters are not believable and we care nothing about them. They lack coherence and individuality. The college professor has no personal characteristic or outlook that could be grounded in a life of research and teaching -- how many college professors are still completely addicted to cigarettes? The happy housewife who is an ex-addict has no connection between what led to her addiction and what led to her domestic bliss. The ex-con who got religion has a problem with impulse control but that has no connection to his angst or faith. The film merely juxtaposes different qualities within a single individual, but real people blend opposites in complex and individualized ways. This movie just combines stereotypes. Moreover, the lack of a coherent story line or sequence is an attempt to hide the incoherence; it provides an intellectual hook but not an emotional one.
The film's message is both trite and somewhat odd. Delusions (religion, drugs, cigarettes) provide temporary pleasure but are no basis for lasting happiness, which stems from human relationships. However, most relationship are unsatisfactory because of faults in individuals, faults that can only be corrected fictionally in the rushed ending to an entertainment.
Big Fish (2003)
The One That Got Away
BusterLA speaks for me. I like happy films & happy endings but they have to be grounded in characters you care about, and none of the characters in this movie are interesting, attractive or even make sense. The ensemble actors cope very well with their caricatures, lending weight to what otherwise would be a flimsy movie. Still, you need a writer and an actor and a cameraman, and the writer is missing. (Spoiler) Like the son, we are led from an initial suspension of disbelief to skepticism based on impossible and unlikely aspects of the father's stories. While the
impossibilities are never removed, some of the unlikely aspects are later presented as true. So what? These never speak to the issue of the father's character, and so the son's (and our solicited) conversion to trust and love of the father is unpersuasive. No crisis, no resolution, no catharsis.
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Mary Tyler Moore Buys a House
Was this an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show that I missed? A bunch of laughable loser guys provide an opportunity for our heroine to make faces and be ineffectual -- as in every other episode. In this one, Mary's louse-in-chief isn't shown on screen, providing more time for female bonding. Then Mary buys a house and hires some guys to fix it -- what do you think the writers did with that? Right.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Disappointing
As a fan of LOTR before it came out in paperback and of the first film, I was disappointed in the sequel. Tolkien gets lost in all the mugging for the camera, uglified folks, and computer-battle scenes. It is sort of the antithesis of Tolkien, who presented hobbits as admirable for their simplicity and courage. The wrong aspects of seventeen- year-old boys are being appealed to here.
Holes (2003)
Great Escape
Just what an escapist movie should be. I have not read the book,
but the emphasis on interconnection and the meaning behind
apparent happenstance works here to encourage initiative. The
characters tend to compulsive repetitions -- indeed, that is what
makes them identifiable here. Those who get beyond their
compulsions are heroes.
Tully (2000)
Intelligent movie about men
This is one of those few good movies about men. The others --
Talk to Her, Smoke, for examples -- have male directors and
writers. Not this one. The director carries the movie -- except for
Julianne Nicholson, who deserves at least an Oscar nomination.
The focus is on men: family relations, ties to work, handling of
women, difficulty in expressing or handling emotion, resort to
physical outlets. All of which seem natural and understandable in
the context of the characters and setting of the movie. It is a
coming of age movie about a young adult male.
Despite the lack of car crashes, the movie gets its top rating from
young adult males, and, despite the importance of women and
romance, it gets its lowest ratings from women over 30. They both
know what they want and know when they get it. A guy film --
sensitive, nuanced, realistic, conflicted, and uplifting.
Out of Africa (1985)
You could write a book from the movie
The movie has enough reality, complexity, and dimensionality that it would make a good book without much being added. When I read Out of Africa years ago, I found it taut and suggestive, while the movie is rich. By the way, comparing it to the tissue-thin The English Patient is like comparing add-water-and-microwave soup to gumbo.
One admirable trait is that what happens depends on the personalities, their histories, the social setting, and the physical locale, plus an accident or too. It is mesmerizingly true to life, though perhaps not to the life of a 2003 couch potato.
Is there a class cleavage here -- those with a touch of class admiring the movie and those without bored by it?
"Out of Africa" weaves together a number of concerns -- colonialism, feminism, nationalism, and naturalism, for starters. These concerns are raised in part before the core of the movie starts, the love story, perhaps to set the context in which our heroine both ennobles her love story and is ennobled by it. The love occurs within a life -- I had a farm in Africa -- rather than being a substitute for life.
The characters are both alienated and committed, again realistically. Our hero's long-time, close partner doesn't reveal to him that the partner is dying of fever and has a native mistress because he doesn't know him that well! In love, our heroine wants more committment while our hero treasures his independence, but in work our heroine treasures her independence. Ring true?
Hable con ella (2002)
Not as I say
A movie in which actions tell the story while the words are how characters try to cope. Why is the bullfighter gored when she has just won back her lover? No one explains, though her past and curent lover each blame themselves. However, we have already seen the bullfighter executing death-inviting moves after her breakup. The get-together is very recent. We see her executing another dangerous move. This time the camera moves close and we see her nervousness, a contrast to her earlier nonchalance. No one tells us that the desire to live has caused her death, but that is what is shown.
A pregnancy following a statutory rape brings the dancer back from her long-time coma. No one comments, no one moralizes -- indeed, the facts are deliberately hidden from the man who cares most, leading to his suicide. Again, no comment is offered.
The talk is featured but we are not asked to identify it as truth. What is shown as true about the reporter is the departure from objective reporting it is involvement, passion, and emotion that is celebrated. Talking is an act, a symbol. The comatose women need to be talked to in order to demonstrate love and care. One dies without it; the other revives when talk is replaced by action.
This is a more significant picture for men than for women.
Far from Heaven (2002)
Pretty as a picture and as two-dimensional
Right after viewing "Far From Heaven," I saw "Real Women Have Curves,"which has all the nuances, social differentiation and lack of stereotyping that this movie lacks. Even in the fifties, gossip didn't travel equally in all social directions at the speed of light, but the movie wants to take the shortcut to a message and a portrayal of the precariousness of social position. Hartford didn't have a rural, outdoor platform for its train station but, again, the director prefered a prettier, simply picture to the truth. A black-tie coorporate party for a hundred middle management people? Get real. All the rich white folks didn't work for a single company, and all the Philco employees didn't own dinner jackets. Nor would anyone on the street in Hartford in the late fifties have told a black man holding a woman's elbow to "take your hands off" of her. While the movie does not make the usual comic book of the fifties, race, or homosexuality, neither does it offer the stuff of life.
Adaptation. (2002)
sort of boring
Adaptation employs a host of gimmicks to keep the viewer awake -- multiple narratives, time interweaving, self-reference, twins played by the same actor. getting lost in a swamp, esoteric drug use, masturbation, an alligator attack,several car crashes, and attempted murder. One gimmick is to predict the gimmicks that will be used. The gimmicks remain effete, primarily because the basics are boring.
Like its protagonists, the movie is bright but emotionally backward. The characters are not likeable and of little interest. The situation -- trying to adapt a novel to the screen -- doesn't engage the heart. Nicolas Cage is a fine actor but his hangdog look -- which he wears most of the time in this movie -- has to be one of the most repulsive in film history. Meryl Streep is an even better actor and does her best to develop and bring life to her character, but she is caught in a humorless Woody Allen film
Changing Lanes (2002)
three films
This is three films presented simultaneously.
First is the morality tale of the good, black, female, working class family-oriented New Yorkers trying to do the right thing pitted against the greedy and selfish, white, male, upper class, alliance-of-convenience elite New Yorkers, not incidentally lawyers. The film's quick alternation of scenes presents a contrast between two group worlds: the well-appointed, spacious court of the elite, run for the participants' convenience, versus the crowded shirtsleeves hearings for the rest of us; the office of rows of computers and phones that is the work world for good folks versus the suite of over-appointed offices holding incriminating files where the lawyers work; the small car that dies at the first sign of trouble vs. the luxury import whose air bag saves a life in a high speed accident. You get the idea: who gets pinned to the ground by school safety patrolmen and who gets away with perjury? The black mother is unremittingly sympathetic, albeit a tad hasty at the custody hearing; the childless rich white wife intentionally chooses and justifies a life built on wronging others. The characters near the margins of this divide are allowed to be veer somewhat from good to evil. Black, working stiff but male -- mostly very sympathetic, but prone to outbursts. White male but recovering alcoholic -- friendly, some good advice, but one act of superior moral condescension which AA would frown on. The good people are victims, victimization is good but should be compensated.Since there really are two stark worlds in NYC, though one isn't good and the other evil, this film is visually entertaining if bankrupt morally and intellectually.
The second film is a vendetta of escalating violence between two men. This is entertaining if full of holes. The single most extreme act is unbelievable, out-of-character and, as a premeditated attempted murder, completely off the plot line. This is the action film -- car crashes, wrestling, fights, arrests, terrorized bystanders. The natural symmetry of a vendetta film wars with the PC moralism of the first film.
The third film focuses on the redemption offered by conscious ethical control and responsibility from the ravages of impulse, anger, and short-sighted self-concern. Before, beside, and after their vendetta, the protagonists must fight with themselves to avoid the nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short life derived from following their natures and instead take control in order to pursuit the well-being of others. What gives the vendetta a complexity is its embedding in this ethos, but the complexity in turn vitiates the vendetta, and the ending -- bringing in the first film -- makes an unbelievable hash of the redemptive message.
So the "complexity" is purchased at the price of coherence and sense.
Acting does count. Jackson makes his character sympathetic -- but not too sympathetic, since you believe he is capable of outrageous behavior. Affleck is neither charming nor weighty, so we don't care about his character and don't believe his redemptive solution. Hurt as a friend is both caring and removed.
There is something to be said for relying on writers to create a satisfying script.