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jimstinson
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Ida (2013)
Film School Hipsters
The lonely minority of negative Ida reviews have already voiced my overall opinion, but two matters are worth further comment.
Even the dismissive notices praise the cinematography, one critic intoning, "...Pawlikowski has a photographer's eye for composition, and every crisp, monochrome frame could be a postcard from Poland's tragic, turbulent past." If you want crisp monochrome, look at Some Like it Hot or Dr. Strangelove. The quality in Ida is no more than adequate. As for composition, setups that place the center of interest on the lower frame line and often squeezed into one corner reveal not a photographer's eye but a hipster's pretensions.
Another review credits the film with, "...exploring the silence and the empty spaces within the frames to underline the elusive emptiness present in the lives of these two women." This is a very old trick. If you hold on closeups of faces that reveal nothing, the audience will believe the subjects are thinking. Keep holding and holding and holding... and viewers will try to supply those thoughts themselves. Since they won't have much success, many will conclude that they're just not up to this industrial-strength philosophizing. As W. S. Gilbert rhymes in the comic opera Patience,
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!
The rave reviews for this inflated student film take me back to my youth when we solemnly studied Wild Strawberries and Hiroshima Mon Amour, straining to find the profundities that The Very Best Critics assured us were there. Decades later, these Very Best Critics are still hard at it.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
A snooze but harmless for kiddies
Unless watching with children, don't waste your time.
The story: reduced to 20 minutes and given an edgy attitude, perhaps it would be at least a a candidate for South Park. At 90 G-rated minutes, it's a wearisome barrage of clichés. The nerdy teen who triumphs after all is beyond shopworn. The hopeful but incompetent young lady might not be sexist if she weren't also such an embarrassing cliché.
Animation: positive proof that full-scale computer animation doesn't add value by itself. Not an original image in the lot. The town cop is the only character drawing with wit. Hey: even Ice Age had the squirrel!
Performances: routine Saturday morning level. For contrast, listen to The Incredibles or Up! for a few minutes with the sound off.
Overall: Harmless time-passer at the Barbie/hello kitty/smiley face level.
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
An Under-appreciated Classic -- not for everyone.
George S. Kaufman said, "'Satire' is what closes on Saturday night," and the vicious one-star reviews of this film seem to prove he's still right. Viewers who hated this wonderful movie probably thought Dr Strangelove was just a comedy that wasn't too funny and Catch 22 was an overlong bore. This film turns the Make Love Not War pablum bowl upside down and dumps it all over war itself. It matches new age drivel with teapot machismo and anyone who finds both extremes tiresome and dangerous can only laugh with recognition and delight. George Clooney delivers the best straight-faced comic acting since Cary Grant at his absolute peak (say, North by Northwest). Watch this movie with all this in mind and remember: don't trust comedy reviews by critics who don't get the joke.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
Champagne and fine vodka don't mix
From the opening music on, this seems on the surface to be a "Jeeves and Wooster" type romp, and the script, performances, and production design confirm it. But without the Wodehouse/Laurie/Frye genius, it fails to fizz. The biggest problem is that the film is undercut by the best actress and performance in it. Frances McDormand can't help but bring a realism and complexity to any role she plays that can work wonderfully in a "comedy" like "Fargo" but operates in a different universe from the "anyone for tennis?" farce genre that the Brits can do better than anyone else -- when they get it all together. In short, she's been turned loose in the wrong movie and gives a subtle, nuanced performance that contrasts painfully with that of almost everyone else. Not a stinker, but a pleasant time-passer at best.
The Game (1997)
A must for Hitchcock students
The Game is a non-stop homage to Hitchcock, from the never-quite-modern San Francisco milieu to the symbolic doors, windows, mirrors, stairs, glass shards, blood, to the clueless man on the run from inexplicable evil, to fake falls off very high places to lifeless mannequins propped up in chairs.
Check the suggestive sign that lights up behind Michael Douglas as he moves to look down a subway staircase (which is really stairs from a bridge to the street) with a phone (and weird derelict) at the bottom; then a split edit with phone ring audio leading that cuts to Douglas answering a quite different phone. Consider the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane/Grace Slick "White Rabbit," which appears in the film and is reprised in its entirety over the end credits.
Like every Hitchcock movie, The Game is, itself, a game: thoroughly engrossing when you're playing it, but obviously preposterous when you think about it five minutes later. If playing the game of The Game(and spotting all the Hitchcock tropes) is for you, you'll have a blast. If you're irritated by the wildly implausible (and even downright impossible), go watch a documentary.
If you fall in between, as I did, give in to the chase (BTW, the R rating must be solely for some F-- words: there's no explicit sex or violence) and enjoy the show. A great film it ain't; but for high class Hollywood production, it wins in every category.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)
A Failed Amadeus
Fur is a slow, intense, poetic meditation on a woman whose inherent weirdness is brought out and intensified by her fascination with her reclusive neighbor, who suffers from a genetic disorder that grows hair on his face and body as long and thick as a woolly mammoth's. (Unfortunately, Robert Downey, Jr.'s prosthetic pelt is unintentionally funny: he looks exactly like Chewbacca.) Carefully labeled a fiction inspired by the real-life Diane Arbus, the film exploits her photography the way Amadeus uses Mozart's music: to validate the genius of an artist who, without it, would be just your basic weirdo. But where Amadeus overflows with Mozart's glorious music, Fur never shows any of the intense, disturbing images that earned Diane Arbus her well-deserved fame. Since we must take Arbus' redeeming genius on faith, then, we must also believe that radiant Nicole Kidman is as disturbed as Vincent VanGogh, while pretending to be a stable, upper-class New York wife and mother of 1958. As always, Ms. Kidman's performance is intense, nuanced, and deeply affecting; but in closeups, the relentless camera exposes an interior life that, however complex, is essentially whole and together. (Like VanGogh, the real Diane Arbus later killed herself.) That hidden, ticking-bomb danger we sense in say Joaquin Phoenix, is not there. Without it, and without the evidence of the real Arbus photographs, Fur is not a tragedy about the penalties of genius but a small, sad film about an unhappy woman. For some stories, that might be enough; but since the subtext of Fur is the mystery of creativity, this treatment is most kindly labeled a sensitive, intelligent attempt.
The Stunt Man (1980)
A near-masterpiece
Like all great films, The Stunt Man is hard to classify: comedy, action film, mystery, satire, meditation on reality. Well worth watching and re-watching. (Suitable for older kids, despite infrequent strong language and brief partial nudity.) Look for a visual version of the metaphor "smoke and mirrors" at the opening. Do NOT look for views behind the scenes of actual film-making: they are purposely distorted to serve the needs of the film. Ironically, the film misses true masterpiece status only because, despite the director's fierce protection of it's uncut length, it's too long -- not the action sequences but the romantic, rhetorical, and other poky, talky scenes. Rush should indeed have reduced the film to 120 minutes, by making many cuts, 5 to 30 seconds at a time.
Tous les matins du monde (1991)
Music is the vehicle, not the subject
Other reviews have focused on the music, but this film is not really about guys in funny clothes with ribbons speaking French and playing cellos with 7 strings instead of 4. It is a meditation on two opposite forms of male egotism: the older genius who is too good for the world and everyone in it and the younger opportunist who will use anyone and anything including his own talent to get ahead. They meet, mesh, clash, and part over music for the viol (viola da gamba), not incidentally leaving the older man's daughter pregnant, ill, and ultimately a suicide. The story is narrated by the opportunist now old himself as a confession, to a room full of his sycophantic music students at the court of Louis XIV (the character, Marin Marais was an actual composer of the time, as was the older man, M. de Sainte Colombe). No other film since Bergman's best seduces you into such hypnotized concentration or breaks your heart with such economy of action.