tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-148123332024-03-07T13:24:16.909-06:00Antagony & EcstasyBecause, God knows the world needed another left-wing atheist's weblog.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.comBlogger4383125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-70716931039914172602017-01-14T11:04:00.000-06:002017-01-14T11:04:33.579-06:00THE DEATH OF ANTAGONY & ECSTASYThis will be the last new post on Antagony & Ecstasy, almost eleven and a half years after the <a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2005/08/first-post-d.html">first one</a>. It has been a good and steady companion to me, and I cannot fathom what my life would look like without it. I'd never have gone to graduate school, that's for damn sure, and I would, of course, never have had the pleasure of getting to know my many readers who have been regular commenters, and even those of you who've never commented, know that I still thank you for all your support and readership over the year.<br />
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Monday morning, my new collaboration with the very lovely Carrie and Rob Jarosinski, Alternate Ending will be going live at <a href="http://www.alternateending.com/">http://www.alternateending.com/</a>. Hopefully, other than updating your bookmarks and your RSS feeds, there won't be any difference: the same reviews and assorted commentary I've been writing here will be present at the new site, but with a shiny coat of paint that isn't an ancient Blogspot template. It might be a little rocky and incomplete at first, but by the time we're all done on the back-end, I'm sure you're all going to love the new digs.<br />
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The fact is, I've been wanting to move beyond these familiar but dated confines for years, and only my own outrageous laziness has keep me from doing it. So my great thanks to Carrie and Rob for finally pushing me to take this long-overdue step.<br />
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And with that, I bid you all a good day and a good weekend. If all goes well, this post will be lost to the mists of 301 re-directs, but if you're still seeing it after 16 January, 2017, well, just go ahead and skip over to <a href="http://www.alternateending.com/">http://www.alternateending.com/</a>. Otherwise, I look forward to introducing all of you to the new place on Monday, where I hope we'll have many more years together.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-76245443756631463702017-01-14T02:19:00.002-06:002017-01-14T02:19:37.598-06:00SOMEDAY THIS WAR'S GONNA END<i>A second review requested by Patton with thanks for contributing twice to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihxt0Dumc-E6DLi6P4a4f1sINlEVgElQRoKD_SrDXlsDET7BOEPD64EACxYSO_prl_9Fn41rolGGOaFj83FS-zOj1UVa2qSgvGVwaJRh5ZF6M3C86zQT8wT1pcjc2VGfcJf0D9/s1600/apocalypsenow.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihxt0Dumc-E6DLi6P4a4f1sINlEVgElQRoKD_SrDXlsDET7BOEPD64EACxYSO_prl_9Fn41rolGGOaFj83FS-zOj1UVa2qSgvGVwaJRh5ZF6M3C86zQT8wT1pcjc2VGfcJf0D9/s320/apocalypsenow.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div>How in the name of the good Lord does one even go about starting to discuss <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/"><i>Apocalypse Now</i></a>? It's among the small population of films about which I think it's more or less impossible to speak about it qualitatively, i.e. whether it is "good" or "bad", whether it "works" or "fails". It is a movie that simply <i>is</i>, in all its epic lumpiness and horrid beauty and genuine madness. <i>Genuine</i> madness. Director/ringmaster Francis Ford Coppola infamously said of the production, "My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam", and this is more or less what he meant: the creation of the film was an exercise in Americans with too damn much money going into the jungle, losing their minds, and turning out something awfully close to a disaster. And yet good enough to be the only film to ever win the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1979 despite not being finished when it screened there. It's a film that wears the scars of its production on its body: star Martin Sheen's miserable grappling with personal demons and Marlon Brando's rambling, dictatorial refusal to do anything the director asked of him directly map onto the characters they're playing, and the sense of things spinning out of control as the movie starts to shed narrative cohesion and well-defined continuity more or less precisely described the actual process of a shot that engorged itself from six weeks to sixteen months, resulted in multiple heart attacks, and more or less required the filmmakers to actually re-stage a war in the Philippines, while that country was wracked with violent political tensions.<br />
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I'll not go into the production history at too much greater length, in part because <i>Apocalypse Now</i> happens to have been served with one of the all-time best making-of documentaries in cinema history, the 1991 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102015/"><i>Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse</i></a>, which is just as essential viewing as <i>Apocalypse Now</i> itself (I myself first saw the documentary before I had ever seen the feature, for what it's worth), and almost certainly a cleaner, more articulate version of the same basic story: people go into the jungle with straightforward plans, completely lose their minds as a result. It is a sublime coincidence that this is the exact same plot as the <i>other</i> candidate for all-time best making-of documentary, Les Blank's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083702/"><i>Burden of Dreams</i></a>, about Werner Herzog's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083946/"><i>Fitzcarraldo</i></a>. It occurs to me that if you had a full day and wanted to utterly exhausted at the end of it, you could hardly program a better quadruple feature.<br />
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The point being, anyway, if you want to see the story that <i>Apocalypse Now</i> tells, told with utmost clarity and jaw-dropping true stories about people rushing to the brink of insanity, you should watch <i>Hearts of Darkness</i>. If you want to watch the hallucinatory fever dream version of the story, just stick with <i>Apocalypse Now</i> itself. That's not to say that one is better than the other; the fact is, I have never once watched <i>Apocalypse Now</i> and at the end of it thought to myself, "what a wholly satisfying experience about which I have no significant reservations". Quite the contrary, the film is an astounding fucking mess: it took three credited editors - Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch - almost three years to tame Coppola's swirling vortex of footage into a two-and-a-half hour object that could be satisfactorily released as a feature (22 years later, Coppola and Murch returned to rework it and add several sequences as <i>Apocalypse Now Redux</i>, a re-edit that I mostly oppose; to me, the ideal cut of the film is the 1979 70mm version that includes neither opening nor closing credits, with the plantation scene re-instituted in <i>Redux</i> but none of its other changes. Ah well, can't have everything). And what they came up with starts to disintegrate anyway, leading to a film that rivals only <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064276/"><i>Easy Rider</i></a>, its exact counterpart from 1969 (they are to my mind the first and last films of the "pure" New Hollywood Cinema), for encoding in its very form the unhinged derangement of the actions it depicts. And like <i>Easy Rider</i>, I find it supremely off-putting and indulgent and disorienting to the point of nausea. But I suppose I should talk about the beginning of the movie before the ending.<br />
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In its final form, which took most of a decade to write, and passed through the hands of John Milius and George Lucas before Coppola finally took on directorial duties, <i>Apocalypse Now</i> is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1899 <i>Heart of Darkness</i>, though Conrad's work has been so thoroughly reconceived and in some important ways directly inverted that it's probably fair that the novel wasn't credited as a source. The basic throughline is the same, though: in 1969 (never explicitly stated, but easily identified thanks to a news story about the Tate murders) a drunken, spiritually desolate U.S. Army Captain, Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is given orders to travel downriver until he finds the compound where Colonel Walter Kurtz (Brando) has established a cult of some sort or another, ruling over a native tribe as a demi-god. Willard's journey into the Vietnam jungle reveals to him the complete absence of morality or immorality in the nihilistic vacuum of war. By the time Willard and what's left of his PBR crew arrive at Kurtz's compound, the captain barely resembles a functioning member of the U.S. military any more than his messianic quarry.<br />
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The film breaks fairly clearly into four unequal parts sprinkled between three acts: the mission prep, the first half of the journey that mostly involves Willard's encounter with the gung-ho surfing psychopath Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) - amazingly, "Kilgore" is the <i>subtler</i> name for the character, replacing "Carnage" - the second half of the journey, in which we see a USO show that resembles a sequence from <i>The Pilgrim's Progress</i> more than anything, as the PBR crew starts dying horribly, and then last, the surrealistic events at Kurtz's compound. The aesthetic dissimilarities between the acts are so complete that it genuinely feels like we're watching three wholly unique movies, though it is the case that the film generally evolves as it goes along: that is, the middle section, the longest and best part of the movie, gradually moves towards the misty, opaque horror of the final act, after starting off in essentially the same banal everyday style of the opening sequences (and I suppose I should excuse the very first scene from that consideration: it is neither banal nor everyday, but an exemplary mood piece carried off by The Doors' droning, apocalyptic "The End", and some fucking beautiful dissolves and straight cuts that feel like a plunge into the throes of a powerful drunken rager - Sheen's or Willard's, I can't say).<br />
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This strong division into segments is very much in line with the film's express themes and intentions, which are to depict a descent into hell. It does not do this entirely in the "right" order, though surely none of us would shift things around. The idyll with Kilgore, who turns a coastal village into a wasteland of napalm to that he can go surfing, feels like an oddly sudden escalation in all ways. The famous thing about this sequence, of course, is the heaving vocals of the "<i>Walkürenritt</i>" motif from Wagner's <i>Die Walküre</i> (surely better known to English-speakers as "Ride of the Valkyries"), played as diegetic music by Kilgore to... pump himself and his mean up? Put terror into the souls of the Vietnamese? The real answer, of course, is to provide Coppola with a a suitably grandiose aural landscape as he depicts the countryside being torn to hell in amazing aerial vistas that later give way to fire-wreathed long shots that stand Willard, quite dazed, in the remains of what was once a place and has now become Hell on Earth. As with so much of <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, the place where opposition to the arbitrary violence of war ends and the celebration of war as a massive-scale spectacle begins is quite impossible to pinpoint; one gets the strong impression that the filmmakers were too buried in the scale of what they were up to, to stop and think about the morality of it. The film is not about Vietnam. It <i>is</i> Vietnam.<br />
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It's almost certainly the most viscerally-involving extended sequence in the movie, so why not move it later? Simply, because it's a mere primer: it's not actually <i>about</i> anything. Snip it out and the plot is unchanged. It is the exaggerated, over-the-top depiction of war-as-event that prepares us to see much smaller-scale violence and atrocities meted out in a much more intimate setting, the same way that a Broadway musical leads with one of its biggest numbers. And sure enough, the second half of the river sequence is damned powerful, as we see the crew members - "Chef" Hicks (Frederic Forrest), Chief Petty Officer Phillips (Albert Hall), Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), "Mr. Clean" Miller (Laurence Fishburne, young enough to be going under "Larry" still) - caught up in Willard's mythic drive towards death. There are squirrely, vaguely funny scenes; there are horrifying scenes; there are unbearably sad scenes, like the one that trains the camera on one character's face as he stares at another character's dead body, while a sweet, homey letter is read placidly on the soundtrack.<br />
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Capturing all of this is one of the best-shot American films of the '70s, augmented by one of the best sound mixes <i>ever</i>: Murch was responsible for the soundscape as well, and it's fair to say that what he achieved redefined what sound in movies could in fact be (<i>Apocalypse Now</i>, following <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/"><i>Star Wars</i></a>, is one of the defining films in the establishment of 5.1 surround sound as a technical and artistic tool). The all-encompassing sounds of war and the jungle, flailing about space before and behind us, is awe-inspiring, putting <i>Apocalypse Now</i> in the holy trinity of great films about the sound of war, alongside <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020629/"><i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120815/"><i>Saving Private Ryan</i></a>, and it is probably the most impressive achievement of them all, if only for how it also incorporates Carmine Coppola's aggressively toneless, violently synthetic music as a kind of aural wall. It sounds so utterly great that you can overlook how this is one of the greatest-looking films in the career of the genius cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, shifting with brute force from relatively natural settings to shocking fields of practically monochrome war zones: yellow combat, icy blue jungles, orange sunsets that irradiate the landscape in nuclear holocaust. And, then he pulls out an entirely new basket of tricks in the final act, often using just a solitary key light to draw as much emphasis to the deadly blackness that he's interrupting with slices of lighting. It's a flawless visual depiction of the world as a toxic, expressionist fun house, beautiful and ugly.<br />
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Anyway, how about that ending? I will confess that my exhaustion with it is inextricable with my general antipathy towards Brando, who I regard as the single most over-appreciated artist in American cinema. Even if that weren't the case, there's no real argument that <i>Apocalypse Now</i> finds him at his best: showing up on set have having exploded into obesity and totally disinterested in learning his lines or even the plot of the movie, he required the entire project to be re-formed around him - Storaro's amazing nighttime photography is in part an attempt to show the least amount of Brando as can be gotten away with, in the hope of suggesting a hulking muscular brute rather than a fat actor (this does not work). Most of his dialogue consists of meandering philosophical and poetic discursions, chasing stream-of-consciousness rabbits where they'll take him. It's bracing and unexpected, to be sure; but it is, for me at least, even more grotesque and annoying. Whispered, over-dramatic lines of dialogue aren't the film's strong suit - it suffers throughout from Willard's breathy, reflective voice-over, written by Michael Herr, and Brando's musings are like an even more intrusive version of that voice-over.<br />
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It's where the film breaks: <i>Apocalypse Now</i> is in large part a film about how its director could not keep control, and Brando's arrival on set is where Coppola finally lost the movie once and for all. It's fascinating, by all means, but it's also the most sordid, indulgent kind of filmmaking imaginable, emblematic of the dark side of New Hollywood filmmaking, in which filmmakers allow their films to collapse just for the organic beauty of it. <i>Easy Rider</i> had its drug fantasia that's so boldly unattractive and shrill that you kind of have to admire its commitment to anti-narrative savagery. A year after <i>Apocalypse Now</i> opened, Michael Cimino would chase this kind of purposefully formless aesthetic into the mega-bomb <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080855/combined"><i>Heaven's Gate</i></a>, thereby killing the New Hollywood ethos off completely, and I am painfully in love with the film. <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, for its part, is one of the all-time glorious messes: even more than in <i>Easy Rider</i>, it becomes largely impossible to parse, except in general terms, what's happening and how space is laid out, and instead the concluding action plays out asa series of fragments of actions stitched together by Eisensteinian editing techniques and the logic of whatever horrible dreams the filmmakers suffered out their in the jungle. As much as I can't stand the film for staging the brutal slaughter of a water buffalo for a symbolic point (<i>contra</i> Coppola's claims that he simply filmed a ritual already taking place), there's a certain rightness to it: the wantonness, the excessive, the feeling of destruction for the sake of destruction is exactly in line with everything else in the last act, where meaning itself seems to fall apart in favor of striking images and intense actions that follow intuitively rather than logically.<br />
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I invariably feel drained and unsatisfied when this part of the movie ends; I can't really complain, since there seems no reason in the world to assume that <i>Apocalypse Now</i> gives a shit about whether I or anybody is satisfied. It is a film about losing your mind and your self to the savage madness of the world: Vietnam in 1969 is the case study, but the film obviously has something more cosmic in mind than that. Anyway, it is well and right that the film itself should break down into meaninglessness, an all-time supreme example of form and content intimately speaking to each other to create theme. I don't have to like it, and I frankly have never decided if the final 40 minutes aren't so acutely disordered, indulgent, and tediously beholden to all of Brando's very worst habits that they make <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, as a whole, a "bad movie". Who gives a shit. Good or bad, success or failure, this is a magnificent, gonzo piece of cinema, and the art form would be far lesser if it had never existed. <br />
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Act I: 7/10<br />
Act II: 10/10<br />
Act III: 5/10<br />
Cinematography: 10/10<br />
Editing: 8/10<br />
Score: 8/10<br />
Sound Mix: 11/10<br />
Marlon Brando: 🐃/10<br />
The Vietnam War: 2/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-37208075679444657602017-01-13T12:11:00.002-06:002017-01-13T12:12:20.534-06:00BLOODY AWFUL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnHEIsXAJo_p42ThX8XbWOzt7U4zXe8cntKbx7pY6ZPkd3JwyB4RR-U0m3WeppC2bLxHCJt1pXBfpBp9qHWT54GdizZOlXTfChfgn_cDi8LQBOKhMsqp6ni1n17FSSWm0ns0Vs/s1600/underworldbloodwars.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnHEIsXAJo_p42ThX8XbWOzt7U4zXe8cntKbx7pY6ZPkd3JwyB4RR-U0m3WeppC2bLxHCJt1pXBfpBp9qHWT54GdizZOlXTfChfgn_cDi8LQBOKhMsqp6ni1n17FSSWm0ns0Vs/s200/underworldbloodwars.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>There has historically been a one-to-one relationship in the <i>Underworld</i> films between Kate Beckinsale being onscreen and the films being even a little bit palatable to watch. In the fifth and very probably final entry in the series, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3717252/"><i>Underworld: Blood Wars</i></a>, we see less of Beckinsale than in any of the others besides the 2009 prequel <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0834001/"><i>Underworld: Rise of the Lycans</i></a>, in which her character didn't even exist. I assume you can do the math.<br />
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Actually, it's not as dire as all that. Not only is <i>Blood Wars</i> better than <i>Rise of the Lycans</i>, it's also better than the last film, way back in 2012, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1496025/"><i>Underworld: Awakening</i></a>. Note that this does not somehow mean that <i>Blood Wars</i> magically becomes good, merely that it resides smack dab in the middle of a franchise that has ranged from "bad" to "irredeemably awful". But also a franchise that appears to be over now, given how neatly it ties up every outstanding plot thread left hanging by the blithering <i>Awakening</i>, or least how all the ones it didn't prefer to simply ignore. And not a moment too soon, to judge from Beckinsale's hugely detached performance, which is her worst turn yet in the role of leather-clad vampire warrior Selene. And I don't think it's an unkindness to Beckinsale to point out that her work as Selene has never been particularly great, or even more than proficient, asking only that she can look furiously concerned while she mouths the series' characteristically portentous dialogue or pointing a gun, and receiving not one ounce more from her than that.<br />
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The film helpfully starts with a recap of the previous events in the series: Selene is no longer a Death Dealer because both the Lycans and her own Coven are out to hunt her for her pure blood and her hybrid daughter Eve, conceived with Michael Corvin, a human of the pure Corvinus strain. Did I say "helpfully"? Of course I meant "fuck you right in your god-damn face, <i>Underworld</i> mythology". Really, though, it's easier to follow than it tries to be - for it tries to be <i>confounding</i> - as long as you remember that Selene is good and everybody else is at least potentially bad. Well, probably not David (Theo James), her one true ally thanks to having received some of her blood to save his life, which means they're both some kind of super-vampires that can withstand sunlight, a characteristic used near the end of the film in the solitary decent shot that director Anna Foerster and cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub ever whip up. Besides our outsider heroes, there are three factions to keep track of: the Lycans, werewolves who almost always maintain their human form, as Eurotrash clubbers, led by the new "super-Lycan" Marius (Tobias Menzies, apparently cast so that James wouldn't be the most indistinct member of the ensemble); the good vampires led by David's father Thomas (Charles Dance), Elder of a vampire coven in Eastern Europe, the last stronghold against the Lycan warriors; and the bad vampire Semira (Lara Pulver), secretly plotting to overthrow Thomas's reign. There's also a population of pacifist Nordic vampires, but they're basically occupy the same narrative space as the good vampires after Semira kills Thomas.<br />
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A whole lot of gobbledygook involving blood lines and how the absent Eve's blood can be used either as a superweapon or a unifying force clutters up the basic thrust of the thing, which is, as the <i>Underworld</i>s have always been, watching vampires and werewolves shoot guns at each other, in boringly-choreographed scenes so heavily processed towards steel blue that it would be entirely fair to describe the film as monochromatic. Foerster (a protégé of Roland Emmerich's) backs off on the gore, save for a spine-ripping held in reserve till the climax, but that's just about the biggest difference in how the numbing action scenes are presented. Oh, I take that back! This film uses swords more often than most of the others, which offers at least some slightly increased sense of Gothic charm than the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/"><i>Matrix</i></a> rip-offs that were already tired when the first <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320691/"><i>Underworld</i></a> came out in 2003, and have only grown feebler since then. The one interesting piece of fight choreography in the movie is sword-based, in fact, as Selene uses a sword to swing herself around in the middle of a battle on slick ice. Actually, the whole movie has a more Gothic tone than the other Beckinsale-starring films in the series: more time spent in castles, a snow-covered ice palace that's actually slightly creative by this franchise's standard, and more aristocratic plotting by fusty Old World monsters using what I gather that screenwriter Cory Goodman thinks to be 18th Century diction. And this <i>is</i> to its benefit: it's not much, but it's more than the empty, metallic cities of the other movies.<br />
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Still, for a few flickers of visual interest, there's a lot to slog through: endless scenes of vampire politics and war strategy as Beckinsale (who even in her decline, is still the most galvanising on-screen figure in the film by a huge margin) is kept needlessly off to the side for much too long. Pulver, who has self-evidently been given the solitary direction "we wrote this character for Eva Green, but her agent wouldn't take our calls, so just play it like she would have", is kind of almost hammy enough to make a good villain, but she's not much of a successor to Bill Nighy or Michael Sheen in that regard. And the film's constant pauses to sketch out yet another branch of the vampire family tree get in the way of the meager entertainment value offered by the sub-par action sequences.<br />
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All that being said, <i>Blood Wars</i> does make a perfect finale to the story. The summary "oh, and then we stopped fighting, I guess" conclusion in voice-over is exactly as epic as the five-film arc deserves. Besides which, this perfectly sums up the experience that has been central to every <i>Underworld</i> film to date: finding the most perfunctory, boring, and derivative possible way to squander the scenario of an army of vampires fighting an army of werewolves. You'd think, just once in five movies, the filmmakers would have accidentally stumbled in a way to make that can't-miss pitch work, but absolutely no such thing ever happened. Now that's what I call artistic continuity.<br />
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3/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-8580964982739356702017-01-12T18:43:00.003-06:002017-01-12T18:43:46.364-06:00MOVIES I MISSED IN 2016: SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaA2FbOOImc-lzPH-FhHKsvxHYszAYwq_xcTJONKkhMVhiUZBqyy4DzafEl-TaFnYcEcrYq471ZbyMhyhlXYeXScNrIkR_ciEAs-GwKpd_qdjVG7n0KqFtCHmPGIMTeOzgHv1I/s1600/thefits.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaA2FbOOImc-lzPH-FhHKsvxHYszAYwq_xcTJONKkhMVhiUZBqyy4DzafEl-TaFnYcEcrYq471ZbyMhyhlXYeXScNrIkR_ciEAs-GwKpd_qdjVG7n0KqFtCHmPGIMTeOzgHv1I/s200/thefits.jpeg" width="139" /></a></div>It's easy to imagine the same basic stuff of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4238858/"><i>The Fits</i></a> turning into a stock indie coming-of-age drama: 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower), with few friends her own age or gender, finds herself losing interest in boxing at the Cincinnati community center with her brother Jermaine (Da'Sean Minor) and his friends. Instead she starts spying on the dance drill team, the Lionesses, that practices in the in same community center, and begins to fantasize about joining them. Which, in due course, she does, though in so doing she discovers that she doesn't fit in any better with these girls than with the boys.<br />
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It's easy to imagine the stock indie coming-of-age drama version of <i>The Fits</i> even being quite good: Hightower has a naturalistic ease as Toni, who is certainly one of the most sympathetic child characters I saw in any 2016 release, which gives it a leg up right from the start. And then there's the film's sense of discovery: coming-of-age stories about 11-year-old girls are not common, stories about African-American girls are not common, stories about the African-American community in Cincinnati are entirely unknown to me, and the fact that writer-director Anna Rose Holmer is white doesn't meaningfully get in the way of her stepping into that community center and finding it a space teeming with life in unexpected corners and full of strong personalities.<br />
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Ah, but the good news is that <i>The Fits</i> isn't a stock movie at all: in literally every way I can think to name, it's a bold-faced statement of individuality. It's Holmer's first feature, after several years as a cinematographer and camera assistant, and quite a hell of a calling card it is: as promising a directorial debut as anything else the 2010s have produced, if I may be so bold. Toni's story isn't told as a simple slice-of-life realist fable of childhood, but as an impressionistic sweep of conflicting tonal registers and unexpected, dramatic visuals. It is a story told almost entirely without words - very nearly all of the dialogue in the first 20 minutes or so is delivered by offscreen (and often unidentified) speakers, and frequently that dialogue is an empty signifier, mostly just noise that Toni and thus the viewer hears without processing. Even as the script gets (relatively) wordier as it goes along, the dialogue rarely <i>does</i> anything other than briefly get all of the characters on the same page.<br />
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Instead, meaning is generated through space and movement. Holmer and cinematographer Paul Yee go crazy with compositions that crush Toni down into the corner of frames filled with air - it's like a symphony of negative space, a huge and indifferent world that Toni wanders through without having a place in it, almost an incidental component of several compositions, particularly exteriors. As for how she and the rest of the cast move through that space, now that's a special thing unto itself. <i>The Fits</i> is, in some respects, a dance movie, although the filmmakers capture the dance routines in angles and short takes that in no ways ask us to appreciate the dancing as dancing. And the most balletic motions in the film aren't anyways the performances, but the choreography of the rehearsal, and the vividly uncertain - not necessarily uncomfortable - way that Toni inhabits her own flesh (Hightower's dancing is not graceful, and that's very important; it is, however, very deliberate and controlled, and that's important too). The absence of movement matters, too: when Toni, with brand-new pierced ears, stares into the camera like a mirror and gently pokes at one earlobe, the stillness of the shot except for her hand generates an unexpectedly potent sense of awareness of her ears and how she feels about them physically and emotionally.<br />
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The story of <i>The Fits</i> isn't just about a girl trying and failing to make friends and fit into a new social group. It is, in fact, a story about the fits: shortly after Toni joins the team, the other girls, always one at a time, are struck by some kind of inexplicable seizure. As more and more of them have these fits, always coming out perfectly fine and somehow beatific about their experience, a new division rises between the ones who have and have not had the fits; Toni herself does not have them, while her only two friends in the Lionesses, Beezy (Alexis Neblett) and Maia (Lauren Gibson), both do, and thus she is once again cut out from having a social life. This is an obvious and straightforward metaphor for the onset of menstruation, but the metaphor isn't nearly as interesting as what Holmer does with it: she uses it as a means to turn <i>The Fits</i> into a thriller, a mystery, a horror film, without actually doing anything that's suspenseful or horrifying. I genuinely can't think of anything else like it. The thing is, the film actively and constantly insists that we read it in this generic frame: the opening image of the film is Toni doing sit-ups, as her voice whispering on the soundtrack as she counts; but her counting doesn't match her facial expressions or mouth movement. It's ghostly and uncanny, and it's <i>the first thing</i> we encounter in the film. It insists that we find something off-kilter about this. So does the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Juriaans, a modernist dirge that scrapes along on the soundtrack like the Ligeti music in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/"><i>The Shining</i></a>. Listening to the music, you keep waiting for the moment that Toni's eyes roll over black and she starts vomiting blood; nothing vaguely like this happens, of course, and the scenes of the girls having fits are even presented so casually, and with such fascination at the choreographed movement of their bodies (when Maia has her fit, the rest of the girls sweep back in a very beautiful overhead shot that feels like something from Busby Berkeley, if Berkleley made neorealist films), that you cannot possibly call it scary; you cannot even call it disturbing.<br />
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What we've got, I think, is a completely subjective film, in which every shot exists as an extension of Toni's mood, as does the film's own genre. Growing up, of course, is <i>scary</i>. The onset of puberty is <i>scary</i>. Feeling like nobody wants you around is <i>scary</i>. So why shouldn't a film depicting these things from the highly subjective experience of an isolated 11-year-old act like everything is <i>scary</i>, even if nothing actually is? Because that's really what the film is about: what it feels like and looks like to be Toni. Every shot that leaves her isolated and vulnerable in the world is doing that. So does the shot of her rolling a water bottle almost as big as she is down the hall, and the camera crouches over her to block out anything she's not aware of. So does the moment when her brother is talking to her, and is kept so far out of focus that he's barely legible as a human figure. So does the hypnotising close-up of a her tearing a temporary tattoo off her body, slowly enough to focus on the gluey texture distending. And so on and so forth through literally every new shot in the movie. This film gives everything over to Toni's perspective, breaking all kinds of norms of pacing, of camera set-ups, of the appropriate music to use in certain moods and genres, and everything else to make sure that we understand that we're taking up space inside her head. Instead of the objective realism of so many indies, it subscribes to a kind of subjective realism - I called it "impressionistic", and I will happily stand by that, for that's exactly what <i>The Fits</i> is: using visual arts to indicate the interior sensation of one of the year's most fascinating and rewarding characters.<br />
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9/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-69566998779758057972017-01-12T01:58:00.000-06:002017-01-12T01:58:03.775-06:00THREE WOMEN<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPwsxYXDbrZsHKEHuqOsbTiEURKXD8eGHQrPsa2VEUeZlp9Z8HI0Xtd4J4nEcr6QBZfAwx78_FQlNY2_zsHSVuYfVGkqEnAMCD8wHEYFpjs-671MqCf7mgSDmcPYlpRYgJCwML/s1600/certainwomen.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPwsxYXDbrZsHKEHuqOsbTiEURKXD8eGHQrPsa2VEUeZlp9Z8HI0Xtd4J4nEcr6QBZfAwx78_FQlNY2_zsHSVuYfVGkqEnAMCD8wHEYFpjs-671MqCf7mgSDmcPYlpRYgJCwML/s200/certainwomen.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>It's inherently admirable when a filmmaker reaches beyond their established strengths to try something new, as Kelly Reichardt has done with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0716980/"><i>Certain Women</i></a>. The downside is that a director abandoning their strengths runs the risk that their new thing will be, well, not as strong, and this has kind of also happened to Reichardt. Her primary strengths, as I see them, are three: a preposterously strong and definite sense of place, centered on the area around Portland, Oregon; plots that unfold so slowly that you almost cannot detect movement until you get to the end of the feature and realize that you're not where you started anymore; and being far and away Michelle Williams's best director. That last one might sound trivial, but not to anybody who's seen Reichardt's 2008 feature <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152850/"><i>Wendy and Lucy</i></a>, and knows just how life-altering a great Michelle Williams performance can be.<br />
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<i>Certain Women</i> eschews two of those things. Williams is still in the film, thank God, though giving I think the least invigorating of her three performances to date for Reichardt (the second was in 2010's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518812/"><i>Meek's Cutoff</i></a>). Hell, it's not even Williams's best performance in a 2016 film. But it's always a pleasure to see this team-up, so let's not grouse. As for the other two major shifts to Reichardt's regular MO: <i>Certain Women</i> takes place in Montana, which isn't much on the face of it to a popular culture that regards everything south of Canada, north of California, and west of the Dakotas as sort of that big chunk in the northwest of the United States that's all sort of the same place, with Portland and Seattle plugged into it. But Livingston, where <i>Certain Women</i> was shot, is hundreds of miles away from Reichardt's stomping grounds, and it really is a different place altogether. I won't go so far as to say that "hurts" the movie, but there's a gulf between the microscopic precision of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468526/"><i>Old Joy</i></a> (Reichardt's 2006 breakthrough) or the tangible geography of <i>Wendy and Lucy</i> on the one hand, and <i>Certain Women</i>'s "this takes place in the American West" vagueness, and it certainly doesn't benefit the new film (<i>Meek's Cutoff</i>, I should mention, similarly likes the hyper-precision of Reichardt at her best, but there it closely ties into the lost feeling baked into the scenario).<br />
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And as for the glacial development of story, well, the least we can say about <i>Certain Women</i> is that it's in no hurry. I think if I were to sit most average viewers in front of the film and say "my big complaint is that it moves too fast", almost all of them would conclude that I had lost my fucking mind. But it really does move fast. The thing is, <i>Certain Women</i> is, functionally, an anthology film, adapting three short stories by Montana author Maile Meloy (it's the first time since the 1990s that Reichardt is making a feature without screenwriter Jonathan Raymond, which perhaps is part of its general "less-than" feeling), and that leaves an average of about 35 minutes per segment. In practice, the third segment is considerably longer than the others, and it is 100% not a coincidence that the third segment is considerably better, as well. The point being, 35 minutes isn't actually long enough to engage in the immensely sedate pacing that is Reichardt's most consistent trait as a filmmaker, and the movie feels quite a lot less special than her earlier films as a result.<br />
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Which isn't to say that it's <i>bad</i>. If nothing else, it has a tremendously admirable cast: Laura Dern plays the first of our certain women, also named Laura, followed by Williams (as Gina) and the extraordinary newcomer Lily Gladstone (as Jamie), and the most important side characters are played by Jared Harris, James Le Gros, Rene Auberjonois, and Kristen Stewart. There's a lot of talent in there, especially divided between the leads, who are entirely up for the director's characteristic interest in letting reaction shots, things unsaid, and details as subtle as where an actor chooses to look when they're delivering lines, do all the work of establishing character and conflict. The acting leaves little to be desired, with even the side characters getting numerous chances to do the same infinitesimally nuanced character work. Gladstone and Dern are the easy MVPs of the film for me, though it's really not for lack of richness anywhere.<br />
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And the stories... look, anthology films almost aren't <i>supposed</i> to bat 1.000; <i>Certain Women</i> definitely doesn't. The first sequence is strong enough, with Laura, a lawyer, dealing with an intransigent client, Fuller (Harris), who doesn't understand that he'll never win his disability suit thanks to arbitrary but nonetheless real rules of procedure (in this very feminist film's only overt declaration of theme, Laura complains on the phone that her client only needed to be told once by a male lawyer what the situation was). So he takes a security guard hostage, and it falls to Laura to take him down, in an aimless, brazenly under-lit sequence that gloriously typifies what Reichardt's best work can be: nothing but minute after minute of characters talking and half-listening to each other, with Dern's tired face fluctuating indefinitely between annoyance and pity. It's a bit inconclusive - <i>Certain Women</i> thrives on being inconclusive - and feels more like an anecdote than a character sketch, but it's a pretty fine showcase for Dern and Harris to spin out their studies of halfhearted sadness (this sequence also commits the one thing I'd identify as an outright mistake: Reichardt shifts to Fuller's POV, the only time in the film that we identify with anyone besides the three main women).<br />
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The second sequence is even more inconclusive, and <i>not</i> such a fine showcase: Gina and her husband Ryan (Le Gros), who we briefly saw earlier having an affair with Laura (this is not a film that cares very hard about drawing connections between its sequences, however), have dragged their understandably irritated teenage daughter (Sara Rodier) to the deep country, where they attempt to negotiated with an old homesteader, Albert (Auberjonois) to buy the pile of sandstone he has on his property; he is plainly uncomfortable talking to Gina directly, and she spends the whole time clamping down on her tetchy impatience, and the whole thing is very <i>literary</i>, and not in the sense that makes for good cinema. It's all rather inert, and a bit muddled in what it wants us to think about its characters, and neatly demonstrates the difference between slowly inhabiting a scene, like the climax to Laura's story, and simply refusing to cut while a scene goes no place.<br />
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The film picks up immensely as it enters the home stretch, with the story of the isolated rancher Jamie, and her shy infatuation with Beth (Stewart), driving hours into the country to teach a class on school law to a room full of teachers who have a tendency to ask the very worst questions. It's a perfect little slice-of-life sequence, with Gladstone's viscerally engaging performance of the awkwardness of having a crush and not quite being able to tell if it's reciprocated driving a wonderfully humane little romance. The editing, by Reichardt herself, is unusually propulsive, especially in curtly eliding the details of Beth's class, and generally rushing time along to give us a keen subjective sense of how occasionally seeing Beth turns out to be the defining aspect of Jamie's bored, lonely days. It's generous and nice, not in any pejorative way, but because of how fully the film commits to depicting the characters as worthwhile, interesting people, treating this tiny little scenario with seriousness and sincerity. If the first two strands of <i>Certain Women</i> had anything like focus and easygoing pacing of the third, we might be talking about one of the year's great films. As it is, the film has the decency to end well (or not quite: the three-part epilogue is honestly a bit spurious), and that helps to make the vagueness of the first two stories easier to embrace.<br />
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7/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-68585791039496263232017-01-11T18:59:00.001-06:002017-01-11T18:59:19.791-06:00KILLER INSTINCT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZffincyFusNW665bnrC2NM4XipUm6oAwP8WJ9NjXbBWwBVYxwfXOGctjWXxgHmUun698FsBky3DHe3Y31gJMO94s8wAhnLUzl1kiq6ctg_1j9zWlc6mS5y6OLN8xXFREhBgGu/s1600/assassinscreed.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZffincyFusNW665bnrC2NM4XipUm6oAwP8WJ9NjXbBWwBVYxwfXOGctjWXxgHmUun698FsBky3DHe3Y31gJMO94s8wAhnLUzl1kiq6ctg_1j9zWlc6mS5y6OLN8xXFREhBgGu/s200/assassinscreed.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>The good news is that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2094766/"><i>Assassin's Creed</i></a> is probably the most stylish video game adaptation ever, for what that's worth. As you may have heard, movies based on video games sometimes aren't very good. So the bar for <i>Ass. Creed</i> to stand out was in fact quite low. But still, let's not get to pissing on it right away: director Justin Kurzel and his crew have come up with some generally interesting ideas for how to stage the action and how to blur the film's two parallel chronologies.<br />
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The plot hook, you see, is that that the bad guys have a machine called Animus that allows anyone plugged into it to enter the consciousness of a direct ancestor, as long as that ancestor's DNA can be scraped up in some way. To visualize this, Kurzel & company do a few different things: one is the have all of the trips into the Animus start with a monumental CGI-aided plunge from the clouds down to the streets of a city in Granada, Spain in 1492, the camera floating around like a high-speed ghost until it arrives at the ancestor in question. Another is to have the modern-day Animus user vaguely perceive the space around him even while he's in the memory, leading to several shots of Michael Fassbender (for he is our main star, though that seems like an unsporting thing to point out) pantomiming hand-to-hand combat as he's suspended in mid-air, with wraith-like representations of the past foggily appearing and disappearing in the sleek industrial space of the Animus. It is absolutely and undoubtedly cool, and highlights some of the better visual effects of the year.<br />
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Also, it is more or less the only idea that Kurzel ever comes up with. Between Andy Nicholson's production design and Adam Arkapaw's cinematography, the best we can say about <i>Ass. Creed</i> is that it's somewhat banal in its visual associations: smooth lines and blue tinting in the Animus facility, chunks of brown crap shot with blown-out whites in 1492 Spain. The worst we can say is that it's profoundly ugly, coated in a layer of digital grit that gets into everything and leaves the whole movie feeling peculiarly unswept. Only the cross-cutting between past and present in the action sequences adds much of a personality to the film. Which would be fine and all, except it happens every single time, and it's the only real flourish anywhere in Christopher Tellefsen's editing or Kurzel's visual treatment of the fights, so even the thing that the film gets best of all still ends up being boring and repetitive when all is said and done.<br />
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There are undoubtedly worse video game adaptations; but why bother clarifying that point? <i>Ass. Creed</i> is plenty bad in its own right and hardly deserves pity points. The story is a muddled disaster ("this section may be unclear or confusing to readers", says the film's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_(film)#Plot">Wikipedia synopsis</a> as of 11 January, 2017, and for no worse sin than relaying the events of the film in the order they occur), but when you straighten it out, it proves to be almost embarrassingly simple: the evil people - the Knights Templar, though it's really just a generic EvilCo given an equally generic Secret Society origin story - want a magic doohickey, and evil CEO Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) is going to be in hot water if he can't provide it. So he lies to the only man who can acquire it, Callum Lynch (Fassbender), using his daughter Sofia (Marion Cotillard) as his increasingly unwilling cat's paw. Callum eventually figures this out, and rounds up the rest of the human lab rats in EvilCo's clutches to help him fight back. It takes much too much effort to tease this out, not least because there's a whole other secret society, which is either called the Assassins, or the Assassin's Creed, or the Creed, depending on the scene, and the Assassins stand for free will and letting humanity tear itself apart if that's what free will means, while the Templars stand for eradicating free will to attain world peace. And all of this hinges on Callum learning from his long-dead ancestor Aguilar de Nerha's (Fassbender) resurrected memories where the Assassins hid the Apple of Eden, a glowing silver ball that is apparently also <i>the</i> Apple of <i>the</i> Eden.<br />
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None of that's <i>wrong</i> - it's a movie based on a video game, MacGuffins and fetch quests are part of the territory - but it's awfully damn convoluted for what amounts to a sci-fi Indiana Jones film. Even the central gimmick of the movie, the whole consciousness-swapping into a 15th Century Assassin's brain, doesn't end up yielding anything of value: since Callum is an entirely passive spectator to Aguilar's actions, it is basically a movie about watching somebody watching somebody else playing a video game. The evocation of medieval Spain isn't remotely interesting enough to justify the effort required to get us there, and that's in principle the whole reason the movie exists. The video game-style action sequences are given at least some juice by the cross-cutting, but that has the negative effect of making it harder to follow the narrative of the fights, and drawing attention to the generally unlikable "built in a computer" feel to everything that happens.<br />
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Into this messy swamp, Kurzel throws a preposterously over-qualified cast: besides Fassbender and Cotillard in the lead roles, and Irons's substantial supporting part, Charlotte Rampling and Brendan Gleeson get expanded cameos, and there are some solid character actors hiding among Callum's fellow prisoners. I won't say that any of them humiliate themselves, but Rampling is the only human in the whole cast who's in any way <i>good</i>, playing the Queen of the Templars, or some such thing, with peremptory authoritarian cruelty. Fassbender appears to be hunting for some deep character arc involving the ghosts of the past that never materialises, and Cotillard is utterly lost with a total nothing of a role (I think she tries to make sense of it by assuming that Sofia is sexually attracted to Callum, and that's not <i>not</i> in the screenplay). It's all very tedious, and only a little bit exciting when Spanish Fassbender gets to swing his wrist daggers around; good enough to put it over the likes of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/"><i>Super Mario Bros.</i></a> or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146316/"><i>Lara Croft: Tomb Raider</i></a>, but I can't even bring myself to believe that it's the best video game movie of 2016.<br />
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4/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-60455266241393579142017-01-11T10:56:00.000-06:002017-01-11T10:56:17.145-06:00NOTES ON THE IMPENDING DEATH OF ANTAGONY & ECSTASYBig changes are a-coming, as I mentioned <a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/january-is-for-changes.html">last week</a>, and it's probably a good time for me to lay out what you should expect those changes to consist of.<br />
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The very last day that any new content will be posted to this blog will be Friday. The new site, <a href="http://www.alternateending.com/">Alternate Ending</a> (follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/AlternateEndng">Twitter</a>! & on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/alternateendingpod/">Facebook</a>!), will be going live on the morning of Monday, 16 January, with huge swaths of new content, above and beyond the 11+ years of old content we're dragging over from this site. It will not be pretty, at first - the archives are going to be a bit rocky earlier than the start of 2016 until myself and my new collaborators, Carrie and Rob, have a chance to tweak all the extant reviews for the new site format (fun fact: as of this post, there have been 4378 posts on Antagony & Ecstasy since 1 August, 2005. I have to look at each and every single one of them). But I thank you for your patience as we get it to that point.<br />
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An important thing to note: it was of great importance to me to import all of the comments that my beloved readers have made over the years. However, the final version of this site's data was sent to our webmaster this morning. So any comments made on any post since 9:30 AM, CST will <i>not</i> survive to the final version of the site. If you have any thoughts that you want to preserve for all of history, I'd save them for Monday.<br />
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You'll otherwise not notice anything different about the next couple of days here. And come Monday, things will be glorious and shiny and all your old links and bookmarks should automatically re-direct to the new site. Any questions about the new site? Ask me in the comments!Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-17657486797191772982017-01-11T02:35:00.003-06:002017-01-11T02:35:50.228-06:00IF I COULD SING TO THE ANIMALS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHEyKern7CDu-rZ78qNofAbqaSRSseMUi3_sBlCtSDe1D1oMEfT3W_g-gDQDY_b_Dd36GC_Bq4I7yrrePMiq5mghKFXNDDFjpG5CeUddWX72OB2PO0s9Gu9J65Ipbjrh82UhgR/s1600/sing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHEyKern7CDu-rZ78qNofAbqaSRSseMUi3_sBlCtSDe1D1oMEfT3W_g-gDQDY_b_Dd36GC_Bq4I7yrrePMiq5mghKFXNDDFjpG5CeUddWX72OB2PO0s9Gu9J65Ipbjrh82UhgR/s200/sing.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>Buried in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3470600/"><i>Sing</i></a> is the year's most harrowing story of a married family life crushing the life out of the people involved. This children's comedy about singing animals includes a subplot about a pig-woman who only wants to do is have a chance to sing mediocre pop songs and have any other living soul recognise that she has an inner life. But she is so ignored by her husband and 25 children that she's able to replace herself with a tape recorder set up in a Rube Goldbergian device to feed the family, and nobody notices for at least a couple of days, apparently. Meanwhile, she is treated as a prop by the singing partner she's been set up with by a distracted show manager, and continues to have no outlet for her own actual personality, but thank Christ, at least she's getting out of the house. This is, as far as I can discern, meant to be A) funny; B) comprehensible to children. I can't speak to B, but as far as A goes, it'd be like laughing at one of Vittorio De Sica's neorealist films about the brutalisation of women, if they had been made with fuck ugly cartoon pigs.<br />
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So yes, <i>Sing</i>. Illumination Entertainment's seventh feature - and second of 2016, following <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2709768/"><i>The Secret Life of Pets</i></a>, the studio's fastest turnaround between projects yet - which is absolutely not their worst. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1411704/"><i>Hop</i></a> hasn't be retroactively wiped from existence, I'm sorry to say. But it's pretty altogether dreary, putting, count 'em, <i>six</i> massively trite subplots into a blender, half of them totally inappropriate for the audience of small children who make up the only audience that could imaginably find <i>Sing</i> to be in any way fresh or interesting, and mashes them into a uniform past that can be spackled across 108 unreasonably long minutes. Those are, for the record, Rosita the pig (Reese Witherspoon) and her toxic home life; Johnny the cockney gorilla (Taron Egerton), who wants to get out of the life of crime being forced on him by his gang-leader dad (Peter Serafinowicz), in a perverse My First Guy Ritchie Flick situation; Mike the womansing asshole mouse (Seth MacFarlane), who gets in deep to some Russian bear mobsters while trying to make it with a lady mouse; Meena the shy elephant (Tori Kelly) who has a powerhouse of a voice but absolutely no confidence to use it; and Ash the teenage punk porcupine who is definitely a teenage teenager despite having the husky voice of Scarlett Johansson, which puts us into some amazingly horrible new animated version of the ol' "too old to play a high-schooler" bit that's been going on since the '50s; anyway, Ash is one-half of a band with her boyfriend Lance (Beck Bennett), who keeps insulting her down to make sure he can stay the lead singer even though she has more talent.<br />
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Binding these plots together, and providing, I guess, the A-plot, is the saga of Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey), a koala whose dream since childhood has been to be a great theater impresario. Sadly, the Moon Theater is on its last legs, and as a Hail Mary attempt to stave off the creditors and <i>finally</i> put on a show that people will want to see, he concocts the idea of a singing competition, with a cash prize. When his senile lizard secretary, Miss Crawly (Garth Jennings, the writer-director) accidentally prints fliers with the prize listed as $100,000 instead of $1000, the whole town goes crazy, forcing the quick-thinking marsupial into all sorts of crafty schemes to keep himself afloat. The above-mentioned five characters are, of course, the finalists, with the dance-averse Rosita getting paired with the loud German pig Gunter (Nick Kroll), and it should come as little surprise that most of these characters all end up learning a lot about themselves and growing as <strike>people</strike> heavily anthropomorphised animals. I am happy to report that the solitary exception is Mike, who remains a seedy little shit until the very last frame we see of him, which on top of being gifted with the only professional voice actor in the main cast and also one of only two leads who is reasonably accomplished as a singer is enough to make him the solitary enjoyable character in the movie, even if MacFarlane's Sinatra impression is frankly rather thin.<br />
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<i>Sing</i> is all the worst tendencies of contemporary major-studio 3-D animation with none of the merits. As the plot concept almost inherently requires, it is an excuse for a truly heroic number of pop songs to show up: 64, <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/complete-list-every-song-illuminations-sing-147042.html">according to Cartoon Brew</a>, two of them originals (that list includes some classical music as well). Most of them are only snippets, heard in an audition montage that plays as a game of "Name That Tune" for the damned, but a healthy number are given fairly extensive screentime, some in the original recording, others in versions choked out by the cast members as best they can. There's everything from an overblown version of the Beatles' "Golden Slumbers" belted out by Jennifer Hudson to an only slightly autotuned Egerton tromping through "I'm Still Standing" to, oh my God you will never believe it, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sung with too much coloratura by Kelly; presumably, this is the filmmakers' attempt to acknowledge that there is no possibility that <i>Sing</i> would exist without <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/"><i>Shrek</i></a>, and to at least vaguely own that fact. Anything written in the 21st Century and thus at least mostly likely to be familiar to the target audience is contained within the audition montage.<br />
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The soundtrack is a pandering grind, mostly ultra-famous hits presented in comfortingly familiar arrangements, but at least it fits in the world of the movie, which is very distinctly our world but with animals living in it. Pretty boring animals, too. I have limited affection for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2948356/"><i>Zootopia</i></a>, but at least it gave a great deal of thought to mapping personalities and behaviors onto species in a way that foregrounded the cast's bestial nature. It provides a stark contrast to <i>Sing</i>, where the animals are talking animals because talking animals sell. The koala runs a theater and the pig is a housewife. It's kind of a coy, fun visual that the punks are porcupines, and use their own quills as accessories. Only very infrequently is there an actual gag based on the fact that these are actually animals, like when Meena uses her trunk as a prehensile suction cup. Otherwise, it's just <i>there</i>: rabbits twerk, and sheep play video games, and pigs go grocery shopping, and terriers are awful Japanese stereotypes, and they would do these things in much the same way if they were people. I would like to say that the characters are bland, but that's only true from the perspective of the script; visually, they are actively unpleasant, falling into some heretofore-undiscovered dell within the Uncanny Valley, where they have uncomfortably evocative expressions beaming out of faces that have buffed-out, vague textures (Buster is a particularly unsettling example: his eyes and nose feel like smudges taped onto finely-detailed fur, and it's as disorienting as the non-Euclidean geometry of R'lyeh).<br />
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It's dispiritingly poor, not nearly splendid enough in its repulsiveness to get down to, say, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307453/"><i>Shark Tale</i></a> level, but stuck at the level of toxic mediocrity. Mostly, it's just addicted to clichés, given just the smallest amount of zest by the limitless possibilities of animation, by which I mean that there's a physically improbable flood at one point, that immediately leads into the "at their lowest" phase of the six storylines that I think you have probably already correctly predicted. It's colorful, at least, traditionally the one saving grace of Illumination productions. But that's not nearly enough, and I would wish this on no parent, nor even their most undiscerning children.<br />
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4/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-70622024262868718282017-01-10T18:34:00.000-06:002017-01-10T18:34:00.812-06:00WATCH FOR THE WIZARD IN THE ROBE OF GREEN<i>A review requested by Beef Jerky Guy with thanks for contributing to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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Step one: watch this. You won't spend three better minutes all day.<br />
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I have only a vague idea of where Mike Jittlov came from or how he came to make the three-minute short film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796238/"><i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i></a>, which was initially shown as part of the Disney promotional special <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294699/"><i>Major Effects</i></a> in 1979. And I'm honestly not sure that I want a better idea than knowing that Jittlov was making stop-motion effects-driven films for a few years who got some of his footage in front of somebody at Disney at some point. I'd much rather allow <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> to continue to exist in my mind as it has since I first saw it, in the early stages of sleep deprivation, at Northwestern University's <a href="http://www.b-fest.com/">B-Fest</a> back in 2002, as some kind of madcap <i>sui generis</i> piece of found art.<br />
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Emphasis on the "madcap"; and also the "art", for that matter. <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> is a wee little slip of a thing, just 3 minutes long, but those minutes are filled to the brim with virtually constant movement. It is, after all, very little other than a demo reel for Jittlov's in-camera effects work (he also starred as the titular wizard, and I cannot even imagine the degree of difficulty doing both of those things simultaneously), which means that it will damn well have nothing but effects. And those effects are some of the best that have ever been made for no budget and with a crew of two (the second being Deven Chierighino, credited merely as "production crew" alongside Jittlov, AKA "did everything while Jittlov was in front of the camera").<br />
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Hell, I might even waive the qualifier: the level of precision in the last minute and a quarter of <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> is unimpeachable and would be no matter how much money or how professional of a crew you threw at it. The technology Jittlov used was ancient: stop-motion animation had existed for almost 80 years at the point the short came out, and <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> could have been made in the 1910s without the loss of anything but color and its soundtrack. Neither of which is incidental, of course. The soundtrack, in particular, is cannily used to aurally prod us into believing the visuals and stitching over any moments (which are few and far between) in which Jittlov and Chierighino fall short. But everything about the film's actual construction is as primitive as cinema itself, nothing but a camera that has a variable frame rate.<br />
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This is proof, then, that no technology is as good as creativity and artistic vigor, for what <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> achieves in its rickety primitivism is as good as it gets. The number of moving objects that have to be accounted for - one of them a human body, no less - is as impressive as the fluidity with which all of those objects are animated, and the brashness of the effects that find Jittlov running parallel to the ground along a wall, or outracing a train.<br />
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All of this could have been done more elegantly and less laboriously than Jittlov did it, of course, but only at a cost to the film itself. This looks cheap: it was shot on battered 16mm that got even more battered by the time anybody decided to go about digitising it. And that cheapness undoubtedly makes the film more special: in the way that a documentary that looks like hell has more of a "realistic" aura, so does the "I made this in my parents' garage" quality of <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> give it a more humane, tactile, friendly quality, while also making Jittlov's achievement seem that much more pronounced. We've seen enough massive effects-driven films with a sufficiently high standard of quality that none of them really seem like much besides just wallpaper at this point; something as proudly homely as <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> can never cease to be impressive, because it constantly foregrounds the work that went into making it.<br />
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The result is unfettered joy: a shamelessly silly tribute to the most idealistic possible version of what the movies are and how they work (via speed and time, through no coincidence at all). It's there in the cheery "up with Hollywood!" slice-of-life that's the closest the film has to a plot, and in the "movie equipment, like, <i>comes to life</i>, man" musical number that closes it. The message of the film is all about cinema's capacity to provide wonder; how marvelous, then, that it's so unimpeachably good at creating wonder all its own.<br />
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10/10<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">* * * * *</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9-As2H_lZD_qoHX3z6FZhpC2ywszu8qwgGaNKjLPsYwDZFoQfip8Xl3yYKX_lGL0bGo4GJfkEI3ybxRWNcvPzDICL9tBUdfDGiLPUdfViJeO4dfs4orV2oxvJovfblgZOw1xx/s1600/wizardofspeedandtime.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9-As2H_lZD_qoHX3z6FZhpC2ywszu8qwgGaNKjLPsYwDZFoQfip8Xl3yYKX_lGL0bGo4GJfkEI3ybxRWNcvPzDICL9tBUdfDGiLPUdfViJeO4dfs4orV2oxvJovfblgZOw1xx/s320/wizardofspeedandtime.jpeg" width="208" /></a></div>God knows who thought it made sense for a biopic about the making of <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> to find its way out into the world, but they sure went ahead and made one anyway. In 1983, four years after Jittlov's marvelous short came along to make unfortunately no real impact in the world he began shooting his only feature, also titled <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081766/"><i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i></a>, presenting a fluffed up and fictional version of the story behind the best-known of his several ultra-ambitious shorts. It didn't end up coming out until 1988, and also made no real impact, though it was able to strike up the kind of cult fanbase that sometimes accrued to lucky films on VHS in the 1980s. That fanbase was enough to keep Jittlov and his films prominent enough that almost three decades later, I'm able to discuss with you these little ephemeral scraps.<br />
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If the chief appeal of the '79 short is its bottomless delight in the potential of cinema, that's pretty much the appeal of the '88 feature as well. If Jittlov's enthusiasm for his job weren't clear enough from the fact that he made these kinds of gemlike, artisanal movies on the back of his intense labor, the adoration he ladles onto the idea of Hollywood as a dream factory would certainly be enough to do it. What's particularly bizarre about how that plays out in the <i>Wizard</i> feature is that the story itself is one of virtually non-stop, grueling misery, and the way that the film industry devours souls. It takes place in 1977, when Jittlov (playing himself) was shopping around <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064028/"><i>Animato</i></a>, a compilation of the various shorts he'd made over the previous years, while producer Harvey Bookman (Richard Kaye, producer and co-writer of the feature with Jittlov and Chierighino) and director Lucky Straeker (Steve Brodie) of Hollywood Studios, are trying to assemble a TV special about the greatest special effects artists in Los Angeles. They are, sadly, attempting to do this on a shoestring budget, and so none of the greatest special effects artists in Los Angeles want anything to do with them. But Jittlov has a hunger inside him, and so he agrees to make a brand new piece for their show. What he doesn't know is that Bookman and Straeker have a bet for $25,000 as to whether he'll be able to bring in the ambitious project he's promised on-budget and in time, and Bookman is doing everything he can to sabotage the shoot, demanding all sorts of extra-ludicrous add-ons to the film.<br />
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And thus does Jittlov toil at making <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i> with only the promise of money and no clear guidance; his only help coming from cameraman Brian Lucas (Chierighino, playing a variation of himself under the name David Conrad), composer Steve Shostakovich (John Massari, playing himself under his own name), and low-grade actress Cindy Lite (Paige Moore, playing Toni Handcock from the original short despite not resembling her in any way, shape, or form). The whole edifice of Hollywood is stacked against Jittlov and friends: he can't get a straight answer from anyone, and he can't do a thing without getting permits, and he's being attacked at every turn for not being part of the <i>unions</i>, the damnable, horrid <i>unions</i> that make filmmaking impossible for a smart visionary who just wants to do everything himself.<br />
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The movie has a problem with unions. Let us not be unclear on that point. They are dismissed in a flurry of goofball comic asides with all the union reps played by Will Ryan as paper-obsessed caricatures. The whole thing, in fact, is pretty casually libertarian: besides unions, taxes (as the "Infernal Revenue Service", ha ha ha), and the basic concept of federal government (via a droning, flagrantly corrupt TV address delivered by a U.S. president who sound only vaguely like Reagan and not at all like Carter in Ryan's delivery) are all treated with a lighthearted but unforgiving mockery. And that's... a thing. It seems weird for a movie so intoxicated with a free and easy spirit of "ain't the movies <i>great</i>?" innocence to go all-in on political satire, though it makes perfect sense that having done so, that satire would take the form of mild "why do the rules apply to <i>meeeee</i>?" whining. So that's annoying, anyway.<br />
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Much, much, much more annoying: the comedy. Jittlov made the not-unreasonable decision that <i>The Wizard of Speed of Time</i> should take the form of a live-action cartoon, in recognition of the energetic wackiness of the director's movies and special effects work. Sometimes, like in the bouncy editing (by, get this, Mike Jittlov) that turns the whole movie into a playful montage akin a Tex Avery <i>Nouvelle Vague</i> picture, that impulse very much works to the film's benefit. More often, in the dialogue and performances, it does not. Seemingly every character in the film is some kind of caricature or another, and those caricatures bring with them the absolute laziest, broadest jokes you could conceive of: Californians sure do like crazy shit on their pizza! Movie executives sure are Jewish! Blondes sure are dumb! There's very little humor in the film that isn't some flavor of gigantic and dumb, and coupled with the sugar-high enthusiasm with which the cast attacks it, the result is a whole lot of grinding tedium throughout the movie.<br />
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The thing is, what works so very well in three minutes gets swamped in a 95-minute satire using the most up-to-date clichés of Hollywood that 1925 could offer. It's hard, if not impossible, to avoid being cheered by Jittlov's apparent joyfulness at getting to make <i>a fucking movie you guys</i>, going all-in on movie references, gestures of fantasy (movie-Jittlov is, for unclear reasons, able to perceive and manipulate the special effects in the world around him), a huge number of characters for such a small-scale film, cameos from beloved Disney animator Ward Kimball and legendary sci-fi superfan Forrest J. Ackerman, and everything else. It is, befitting its title, an enormously kinetic thing; there's not a slow bit in the 95 minutes, thankfully, and rarely do five consecutive minutes go by without some flourish of visual effects, mostly just to show off what Jittlov and his very tiny crew were able to do on 35mm and with actual money to work with.<br />
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He even remakes his own work, including virtually all of the original <i>Wizard</i>, with a great deal of added footage; it's in no way <i>better</i> than it was before, raising the question of why bother, but at least some of the new effects are pretty fun. Massari's replacement score is somehow thinner than in the short, and matches the footage less perfectly, but I don't suppose that's something I'd have noticed or cared about if I didn't have the short memorised. Still, the point remains that one can watch the short 31 times or the feature once, and the short would, I think not lose nearly enough in 31 consecutive viewings to make that a bad trade-off. It's more special, somehow; the feature still looks like it was made by invigorated actors without money in somebody's garage, but there's just enough crispness and polish, courtesy of the 35mm stock and cinematographer Russell Carpenter (who, like several people involved, would go on to have a decent career after this), for this to lose the warm handmade quality that gives the short all of its personality.<br />
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Still, I shouldn't be too hard on the feature. It is, after all, the reason that Jittlov's name and work remained remembered long enough for me to ever see any incarnation of <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</i>. Besides, it's awfully joyful in its own right, though something about the concentration and brevity of the short is preferable. Jittlov makes candy, is the thing; now imagine eating candy for three versus 95 minutes, and you have approximately the sense of weariness and overstimulation that the feature carries with it. It would, beyond any shadow of a doubt, help matters if the comedy wasn't so grating. But I doubt very much that any feature could capture the pure delight of the three perfect minutes of the short, and this particular feature misses that mark by quite a lot.<br />
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5/10<br />
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This film is also pretty damn easy to find online, but as of 10 January 2017, <a href="https://youtu.be/j5a_00YVVkQ">this version</a> looks especially good.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-6348780279016800682017-01-09T19:18:00.002-06:002017-01-09T19:24:20.654-06:00OUT OF INDIA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr5DxGHne1AOnxpS0URquMznYc44caJB7MXZYF2PpMRwYw_EaElEp9gvWFevUkQ1wqUi4HycFcqZOwP8CHay2bAOMtnSkWpo-5Z_7IBHnNLl50FI2B5KfrhgqZr1ZxJk_6_QDz/s1600/lion.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr5DxGHne1AOnxpS0URquMznYc44caJB7MXZYF2PpMRwYw_EaElEp9gvWFevUkQ1wqUi4HycFcqZOwP8CHay2bAOMtnSkWpo-5Z_7IBHnNLl50FI2B5KfrhgqZr1ZxJk_6_QDz/s200/lion.jpeg" width="135" /></a></div>It's genuinely shocking to me that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3741834/"><i>Lion</i></a> is as good as it is, for as long as it is. It's Harvey Weinstein's duly-anointed champion for the Oscar season, which has only rarely been a good sign in the 21st Century and is frequently the biggest red flag I can think of. And that becomes an even more dire sign in light of the <i>kind</i> of Oscarbait this is: the Inspiring True Story of a person for whom things ended up well, after a long enough stretch of suffering. All the stars were aligned for this to be insufferable in every way, and instead it is merely insufferable <i>sometimes</i>, and in <i>only a few</i> ways. Not half-bad for a movie whose main intellectual takeaway seems to be that the cure to Indian poverty is to be adopted by rich Westerners.<br />
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The inspiring story this time around was that of Saroo Brierley, five years old in 1986, when he lived in the city of Khandwa, in central India. An accident separated him from his elder brother one night, and he ended up traveling in an empty train all the way to Kolkata, all the way on the far side of the country. After several weeks flitting around the city homeless, Saroo was taken in by a government agency that failed entirely to decode his childish understanding of where his hometown was located and what it was named, and so he was officially put up for adoption. This is how he was taken in by the Brierlys of Hobart, Tasmania, who raised him to adulthood. Come 2008, using Google Earth, he devoted a huge amount of time to exhuming his vague childhood memories to begin a hunt to find his home and family. Since they made a movie out of Brierley's memoir, <i>A Long Way Home</i>, I suppose you can guess whether he was successful or not.<br />
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So anyway, <i>Lion</i> is essentially a two-part story of Brierley's life, first depicting the two-year span that took the boy Saroo (Sunny Pawar) from his biological mother Kamla (Priyanka Bose) and brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) into the welcoming arms of John (David Wenham) and Sue Brierley (Nicole Kidman, sporting the worst wig of 2016), with a long stopover lost on the streets of Kolkata that finds the adorable innocent forced to learn how to survive. Then, after a twenty-year time jump, grown-up Saroo (Dev Patel) starts to clench with doubt about himself and his place in the world, alienating his parents, his unstable adopted brother Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), and his girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara), as he wrestles with the question of whether he truly wants to crack open his past and go inside.<br />
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Did you see it? I'll say it again in case you didn't see it, but I'll rephrase it this time: in the first half of <i>Lion</i>, stuff happens. In the second half of <i>Lion</i>, stuff doesn't happen. That's snide and awful of me I'm sure, but the point remains that, a quarter of a century or more into the PC age, filmmakers still haven't figured out how to make "sitting at a computer, looking up information" visually or dramatically interesting in the slightest degree, and that's pretty much what we've got for half of the movie or more. And it really just cannot help but be inert, no matter how much screenwriter Luke Davies attempts to dress up the fringes with touches domestic drama - will Saroo push Lucy away? will he upset his saintly adopted mother? will Mantosh keep spinning down in a self-destructive cycle (this last one is borderline-fatal to the movie: real life doesn't conform to the rules of dramatic narrative, but dramatic narrative had ought to, and the filmmakers haven't found anything resembling a satisfactory way to work the brother's storyline into the rest of the movie)?<br />
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Honestly, it's not the easiest thing in the world to care, though once the movie actually gets back to the matter of <i>doing</i> stuff, and sending Saroo back to India, it mostly works as a good old-fashioned tearjerker. And the pleasure of a movie that ends on just about its single strongest note is not to be denied. Still, there's a lot of second half to get through, and while Patel has a great face for the camera and emotes richly in the fashion of a '40s melodrama star, there's just not much that's organically dynamic, as opposed to forcibly over-dramatised Nor does the cast outside of Patel doesn't give much flavor to their parts (Mara has never been blander, and Kidman can't sell her character's bizarre, quasi-neo-colonialist motivation for scooping up Indian kids and raising them as Aussies, laid out in a boisterously terrible scene). So it just feels padded, an attempt to run the clock while Saroo decides whether or not to keep looking at his computer screen and scrolling the map, an action that director Garth Davis is powerless to render interesting.<br />
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That's the second half, anyway. The <i>first</i> half, however, that's just absolutely great, and I mean that quite sincerely. The whole first chunk of the movie has to rest securely on the shoulders of Pawar, and he repays it ten times over: this is right on par with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125435/"><i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i></a> in recent cinema for providing a performance from a very small child that feels entirely convincing, giving us an emotionally accessible entrance into a film that <i>never</i> breaks the child's-eye viewpoint. Obviously Davis and cinematographer Greig Fraser didn't invent the rulebook for lowering the camera down to give us the young protagonist's POV and dignify his presence onscreen, but they sure as hell do a fantastic job of it. And Fraser's work is exemplary besides: threading the fine needle of making the Indian countryside sufficiently beautiful that we feel Saroo's sense of wide-eyed amazement, while not cheapening the roughness of the Kolkata streets, while <i>also</i> not indulging in overly-gritty poverty porn (Fraser is also just about the only person whose work in the second of the film is above reproach; him, and the composers Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O'Halloran, whose score is astonishingly non-sentimental and has a slightly Indian-ish tone that avoids musical Orienatlism).<br />
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It is, to be clear, another on the not-short list of "woeful child in poverty" movies, and the beats aren't anything new; the value is in the execution, and that's <i>great</i>. Davis leaves all of the cloying crowd-pleasing sentiment to the back half, with the first half as hard and flat a depiction of childhood suffering as any I've seen. It's a damned pity that the film implodes so thoroughly, because there's something awfully good to start with - not groundbreaking, not year's-best, but awfully good, and for a movie that appears to have been created in Weinstein's lab, awfully good is quite an achievement.<br />
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7/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-65929924152808336602017-01-08T14:53:00.000-06:002017-01-08T14:53:05.749-06:00LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiO7tXlzO5QlbtJlDLXahzIsQk_QgFb9HiybqiV6p9o7jcR0XJWZAYCpcpZP9Wr-aU6kxcT0pyB_7NJCoGiCPyrxFWd5bHUyVXh9J28mVbYmnHN_1YZx3yOzTaaxaE7Hcy4OBG/s1600/thingstocome.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiO7tXlzO5QlbtJlDLXahzIsQk_QgFb9HiybqiV6p9o7jcR0XJWZAYCpcpZP9Wr-aU6kxcT0pyB_7NJCoGiCPyrxFWd5bHUyVXh9J28mVbYmnHN_1YZx3yOzTaaxaE7Hcy4OBG/s200/thingstocome.jpeg" width="150" /></a></div><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4120176/"><i>Things to Come</i></a> is about making things that are exceedingly difficult look effortless. That's true of its story, but it's also true of the extraordinary work being done the two women most responsible for the film's considerable impact: writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, winner of the Best Director award at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, and Isabelle Huppert, whose presence in a film's cast has been a pretty reliable proof that the project is going to be damned interesting, if not always necessarily "good", for decades now, but for whom 2016 has proven to be a particularly striking banner year. These two - alongside lots of people, of course, film is a great collaborative art and there is much about that art to love in <i>Things to Come</i>, but really it's mostly those two - are up to some of the subtlest work I saw in any 2016 film, the kind that it's terribly to easy to overlook without fully appreciating how ingenious it is.<br />
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In this particular case, the ingenuity comes in the form of the film's casually elliptical portrayal of time and emotion. <i>Things to Come</i> sketches out several months in the life of Nathalie Chazeaux (Huppert), a philosophy professor in Paris who has a pretty crappy year ahead of her: over the course of 102 trim minutes, Nathalie's husband Heinz (André Marcon) leaves her (awkwardly and inconclusively) for his younger mistress; her mother Yvette (Edith Scob) grows so helpless with dementia that she needs to be moved into a nursing home, leaving the allergic Nathalie to take care of the fat, grumpy cat Pandora; her former student Fabien (Roman Kolinka), now a political activist, tries to adopt her, first as a lover, then as a mentor for his cell of radical academics, despite her active disinterest in either; and the publishers of the textbook she wrote decide that they're not going to put out a new edition. There are other, more minor inconveniences, some of which are much bigger problems than the problems themselves: Heinz leaving proves to be much less of a crisis than Heinz's insistence on nonetheless still buying huge floral arrangements for his soon-to-be-ex-wife, which she is then obliged to dispose of. Turns out that when you're as gifted a screen actor as Huppert, it is possible to make the act of trying to stuff flowers into a trash can that's too small into a performance beat of the most evocative emotional resonance and psychological acuity.<br />
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But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So Nathalie has an extremely busy, unpleasant year, and <i>Things to Come</i> isn't even one and three-quarter hours long. That means plenty of compression takes place, of course, but it's <i>how</i> that compression occurs that makes the movie such a tiny piece of sublimity. The film plays as the "greatest hits" version of the year, almost, but with a significant twist in that it only shows us <i>portions</i> of the events that plague Nathalie. We very rarely stay to watch the big emotional moments that decades of movies train us to expect: the sense of betrayal that her book has been cancelled, the gnawing ambivalence about Fabien's artless flirtation, the weeping realisation that her mother is dying. All of that is cut away, sometimes with some very blunt ends to scenes that skip ahead before we even really had a sense of where they were going. Only a handful of times in the movie is the jump between times smoothed out with any kind of audio bridge or enough continuity of action to clarify how in time these events are related. Mostly, it's instead a series of fragments of time assembled in chronological order and without any other clearer sense that they're linked as part of a causal chain.<br />
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In short, the film has been assembled as a series of ellipses that constantly deny us the expected melodramatic payoff to all of the grand events of the film. Huppert's performance is shaped in almost exactly the same way: we're watching a woman constantly <i>not</i> emoting, or to be more precise, a woman not showing off the emotions she's feeling. It's really quite a beautiful thing: the narrative structure <i>is</i> character, since the refusal to show us any big emotional events but instead focus on limited scenes of Nathalie just grinding through and getting daily life handled is very much in keeping with how she chooses to exist in the world, pragmatic and intelligent and without any indulgence in drama. And, too, the structure subjectively aligns us with Nathalie: since nothing ever really feels like it resolves, but scenes just keep piling up without a neat road map saying "interpret thus", we get a sense of the same "one damn thing after another" exhaustion that she has to keep enduring with no end in sight. It's quite a nifty achievement, putting us securely inside Nathalie's POV while also letting us marvel that she keeps finding the psychological resources to deal with everything, even as Huppert silently allows us to see what a drain on the character everything is.<br />
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All of this results in one of the year's best pure character studies, untainted by melodrama (nothing seems truly <i>bad</i>, just goddamn irritating - even the saddest development in the whole movie is undercut by Huppert's perfect laugh of embarrassed surprise at the fact that life won't slow down even for her to be unhappy in peace), limned with just enough sardonic humor that it's genuinely enjoyable despite being so austere and intellectually French. There are other pleasures beyond Huppert's marvelous performance: Denis Lenoir's cinematography, for example, is just about perfect in its subdued way, using focus and framing to always keep the film anchored on Nathalie while also acknowledging that it's a big world full of lots of other people with lives and problems of their own; it's a visually full film without seeming busy or overstuffed, and one that can acknowledge the beauty of the French countryside and the city of Paris without giving into visual sentiment. It also has some faultlessly-designed interiors, thanks to production designer Anna Falguères, who perfectly sums up the way that an accomplished scholarly genius turns the space around them into a place celebrating their scholarship, rather than their personality. Basically everything in the movie works as part of a complete whole, bending our attention to one very interesting woman overcoming a set of challenges in a way that's far more rewarding for not yielding to drama. It's not remotely flashy or even necessarily "ambitious", but it's pretty close to the ideal version of itself.<br />
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9/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-43728260109228570922017-01-07T20:08:00.001-06:002017-01-07T20:08:40.445-06:00TOP 10 AVANT-GARDE SHORTS<i>A list requested by Marshall Y. Craig, with thanks for contributing to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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So the first question that must be answered, the one that drives everything else: what in the hell do we mean by "avant-garde"? I really cannot think of descriptive term in all the movies that's less distinct than "avant-garde" (or its sibling, "experimental"), even though I think most of us pretty much know it when we see it. Still, while that definition might do for pornography, avant-garde's trashy second cousin, I wanted to have <i>something</i> a bit more concrete to work with. So where do we start: must an avant-garde film be non-narrative? That obviously won't do - it disqualifies <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/"><i>Meshes of the Afternoon</i></a>, one of the building blocks of the American avant-garde, among others? What about animation? Is that automatically disqualified as something subtly separate? I sure as hell hope not, but I took a long time to decide that I was going to include Jan Švankmajer but not the Brothers Quay, for reasons that I still can't quite articulate, other than that it feels right.<br />
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And then there's the decision about where we set the box around "short"(40 minutes or less, in my books).<br />
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Anyway, I eventually came up with at least a somewhat arbitrary list of things I felt confident about or at least comfortable with including under the umbrella of "avant-garde", and a list of things that felt not-quite-there (Guy Maddin's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0260948/"><i>The Heart of the World</i></a> was an especially hard call that ended up on the latter list). And then add in the usual "one film per director(s)" caveat. From that list I have now culled a selection of-<br />
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<b>Antagony & Ecstasy's Top 10 Avant-Garde Shorts</b><br />
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(Many of these can be found without much effort online. Seek them out if you must, but know that in several cases, it will not be at all the best experience, or even much of an enjoyable one at all)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB2GTIpNyPN7b82iZcs9icYCTy9jX5sdheLzaFciDNW1xuIUns7B6HLOt_iThadDYoPXJgfRysin0HbegwLqVhHlIV-vDoksApE8Nhfu3E6BxKRA6uM7bZOkUy9HazCzQjLOeC/s1600/filminwhichthereappear.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB2GTIpNyPN7b82iZcs9icYCTy9jX5sdheLzaFciDNW1xuIUns7B6HLOt_iThadDYoPXJgfRysin0HbegwLqVhHlIV-vDoksApE8Nhfu3E6BxKRA6uM7bZOkUy9HazCzQjLOeC/s400/filminwhichthereappear.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>10. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477965/"><i>Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.</i></a><br />
(Owen Land, 1966, USA)<br />
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More than anything else on this list: for real, don't bother with this one unless you can see a legitimate film print. Because that physicality is very much what matters about this film, which recycles the same short loop of a "China girl" (a woman and color bars used for color reference when the reel is processed in the lab) for six minutes. What's tedious after one minute grows hypnotic by the end, but even more than that, what makes the film such a remarkable experience is the dawning awareness that every one of those loops is marginally different: the dust, scratches, film grain, and so on are all different enough that by the end, it's those physical imperfections that you're watching, rather than the footage. We're also increasingly aware of the film as an object we're sharing space with, and that it's developing more of those same imperfections as we're watching, so that whoever sees that print next time will be, in fact, watching a different piece of art. The ultimate movie about movies.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpl9L-wr6wJht9pG1zr-OAgpa-0G2Vcusy2joltrm7Fhor_DbpvZLf7cWjQ26h9dSxvQQdEDBS12vs2ZBAPOu7z72CjyfYHTP-FFimryT_CE4bAZNEGljRDtXkV-zp6XYNYfuD/s1600/compositioninblue.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpl9L-wr6wJht9pG1zr-OAgpa-0G2Vcusy2joltrm7Fhor_DbpvZLf7cWjQ26h9dSxvQQdEDBS12vs2ZBAPOu7z72CjyfYHTP-FFimryT_CE4bAZNEGljRDtXkV-zp6XYNYfuD/s400/compositioninblue.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>9. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026580/"><i>Composition in Blue</i></a> (AKA <i>Komposition in Blau</i>)<br />
(Oskar Fischinger, 1935, Germany)<br />
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And also a composition in yellow, and orange; the film came out right at the dawn of three-strip color cinematography, and is among the most brazen experiments in playing around with pure color and shape to come out in the 1930s. It's basically the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" sequence from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032455/"><i>Fantasia</i></a>, five years later, only animating blocks instead of cel drawings, and without the institutional support of the world's biggest animation studio. It's sublimely beautiful, simply for the flow and rhythm with which the colors, music, and shapes all interact, but I think we run the risk, more than 80 years later, of not appreciating how extravagantly inventive it was, just three years after <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022899/"><i>Flowers and Trees</i></a>, to make a movie predicated on the idea that color can generate meaning all by itself.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitL0BSqFR5GmsMvjluyekv1zcZ-etKF2McUIAsNb1sAaWM5hsjCKD-OLDKnG_DRXzvxxMLxsVeJvOe6slWchddsuTC37_4zdCIdAB5a_y3ttofA6Wkvk_Ryzf8rBBL_RWgFmnn/s1600/fogline.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitL0BSqFR5GmsMvjluyekv1zcZ-etKF2McUIAsNb1sAaWM5hsjCKD-OLDKnG_DRXzvxxMLxsVeJvOe6slWchddsuTC37_4zdCIdAB5a_y3ttofA6Wkvk_Ryzf8rBBL_RWgFmnn/s400/fogline.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>8. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0350949/"><i>Fog Line</i></a><br />
(Larry Gotheim, 1970, Canada)<br />
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Over the course of ten minutes, fog clears from a field with trees, and a camera pointed through a slightly dirty window captures it. I once had a professor excitedly point out the "plot" - a horse walks across the field - and oh damn, now I've spoiled it. My favorite of the "almost undetectable shifts over time" genre, with distinctive shapes emerging slow gradually that you can only tell what's going on by comparing this particular moment with what happened five minutes ago. That is to say, it's an exercise in slowing down perception, and drawing attention to perception, and asking us to think about how we see what we see, how we draw distinctions between "now" and "then" or "before" and "after" or "first" and "last". It's also one of the most remarkably soothing movies I've ever seen, and one of the few I'd endorse as a good meditation tool.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiptnLuR9PENAXAiosyFA2smJk1QRDzexnbOy6qrykeitZmtzVXUyGU_6qPN0JLBsFIVw4Q2ZbtYMnsVdAY1TWwNU1OTys2a1XV4aF1wCeWWFzEfWHmxjk7eq3jf-k5HT9HrWyb/s1600/meshesoftheafternoon.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiptnLuR9PENAXAiosyFA2smJk1QRDzexnbOy6qrykeitZmtzVXUyGU_6qPN0JLBsFIVw4Q2ZbtYMnsVdAY1TWwNU1OTys2a1XV4aF1wCeWWFzEfWHmxjk7eq3jf-k5HT9HrWyb/s400/meshesoftheafternoon.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>7. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/"><i>Meshes of the Afternoon</i></a><br />
(Maya Deren with Alexander Hammid, 1946, USA)<br />
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My tastes absolutely do not run to psychoanalytic symbolism, and Deren's legendary masterwork - a fundamental work in the history of both avant-garde and feminist filmmaking - is almost nothing else but symbolism. Yet how can one possibly even think about denying this movie it's incredible significance and impact? Every creepy dream sequence or horrifying corruption of suburban homes into illogical nightmare spaces of the last 70 years owes a debt to Deren, whose work is so powerfully uncanny, and so uniquely great depiction the weightless incoherence of dreams, that it remains a staggering experience with or without attempting to decode it as an in-depth portrayal of bored depression.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH4ponPdYmzXXd1x7H-OQMjXv7KFAVuxgIeV0txTPO_LFwf3oQxV8IOFBP6Dn_uhrKUdP6ZM0nCTcfCHAWFevNGc_0RJxYqQdwxUOUFNLMVMLnNd7lD_cZvKzlQSv3RVbnI_mb/s1600/serenevelocity.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH4ponPdYmzXXd1x7H-OQMjXv7KFAVuxgIeV0txTPO_LFwf3oQxV8IOFBP6Dn_uhrKUdP6ZM0nCTcfCHAWFevNGc_0RJxYqQdwxUOUFNLMVMLnNd7lD_cZvKzlQSv3RVbnI_mb/s400/serenevelocity.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>6. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159727/"><i>Serene Velocity</i></a><br />
(Ernie Gehr, 1970, USA)<br />
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The last structural film here, I promise. The mathematical progression used to construct the film (which consists of snippets of just five frames at a time, taken from increasingly distended focal lengths shooting down a hallway) is easy enough to intuit while you're watching, which makes the 23-minute epic something of an anticipation game, since you can guess how long till the next shift, and what the next shift will be. Thus, having that anticipation rewarded is weirdly fulfilling, given that you're just watching a boring industrial hallway for nearly a full half-hour. It's also increasingly tempting to assemble the images like a puzzle: with the camera remaining stable and only the lens lengths changing, the film invites us to consider how the physical space of the hallway fits together, and how different parts of it are or are not visible based on the camera perspective. Astonishingly stimulating for such a basic, static concept.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM6vbxjMHCrbcGubqa0cOrIyWTxfNMyHbOYIrMZdF5BwOvF6iFoEFF6r8eR7O7af1alca6MdyaHYL6phzMaW1bN-0a17GJqL1SYNr-_bqZ6EfAFVR1wAy_lyYc5UK40lCzI_fi/s1600/alonelifewastesandyhardy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM6vbxjMHCrbcGubqa0cOrIyWTxfNMyHbOYIrMZdF5BwOvF6iFoEFF6r8eR7O7af1alca6MdyaHYL6phzMaW1bN-0a17GJqL1SYNr-_bqZ6EfAFVR1wAy_lyYc5UK40lCzI_fi/s400/alonelifewastesandyhardy.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>5. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157304/"><i>Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy</i></a><br />
(Martin Arnold, 1998, Austria)<br />
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I wonder if this isn't, in its own way, the most dated film on this list despite being by 15 years the newest:Arnold's epic work re-editing and re-combining pieces of old Hollywood movies (see also: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107786/"><i>Passage à l'acte</i></a>, from 1993) becomes much less technically audacious and laborious once digital editing goes mainstream, and now you can see the basic stuff here (repurpose old footage ironically, usually to add sex where there wasn't any before) every day on YouTube. But never this good, and never this savage in its breakdown of the rosy-cheeked enforced innocence of the Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, turned into a groaning collection of mother-son incest and protracted orgasms, when Garland isn't being reduced to a siren endlessly bellowing one note into the abyss. The only postmodern commentary on Code Era Hollywood that you really need; and all these words without even bothering to mention how desperately funny it is - <i>by far</i> the funniest movie on this list, but also one of the funniest bits of movie remixing I've ever seen.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimJMYPGtqBhUMttcf4uJlgb3lGeFDwEuJOOGRsvtkmRprZIn4Xfv628m2LedX8i3HWU2R38dI_4_110O3JA4Z_NgGGDBnq8p9913r8f_oq0KSFrmVZGWJbdFrmwk5PURhPzWEV/s1600/tango.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimJMYPGtqBhUMttcf4uJlgb3lGeFDwEuJOOGRsvtkmRprZIn4Xfv628m2LedX8i3HWU2R38dI_4_110O3JA4Z_NgGGDBnq8p9913r8f_oq0KSFrmVZGWJbdFrmwk5PURhPzWEV/s400/tango.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>4. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084764/"><i>Tango</i></a><br />
(Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1981, Poland)<br />
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<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2011/12/personal-favorites-1981-polish-cartoon.html">I've said my piece</a> on this one already, and what was true then for me is still pretty much entirely true: this is a miracle of craftsmanship, the kind of thing that's utterly pleasurable just to watch the smooth motion of dozens of characters, pieced in one at a time, in and around each other in a constant flurry of motion. I'd add now that the political overtones of so many people crowding together in a spartan room trying to live their own private story in a grotesquely overtuffed public space strike me more and more every time I watch. And also, while I've since seen more of Rybczyński's films, and some of them are truly miraculous pieces of choreography of social interactions in their own right, none so reliably thrills me with its artistic bravura and density.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigpYrosdfqp8aocaGSAQWiboxAELdoHMhwg_Vk3gCkiqBcwLeX9wFD8cBhs_bWSClUX-NtRwPDABWmL4cJDlQU25fb0JlzVBmGTIRcQ-XrUOgFGIwno6atUGpcSPvyAgv9uP8V/s1600/mothlight.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigpYrosdfqp8aocaGSAQWiboxAELdoHMhwg_Vk3gCkiqBcwLeX9wFD8cBhs_bWSClUX-NtRwPDABWmL4cJDlQU25fb0JlzVBmGTIRcQ-XrUOgFGIwno6atUGpcSPvyAgv9uP8V/s400/mothlight.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>3. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057324/"><i>Mothlight</i></a><br />
(Stan Brakhage, 1963, USA)<br />
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Hell, I don't even know if this is the best Brakhage film, let alone the third-best avant-garde short ever. It's on here for strictly personal reasons, as one of the earliest genuinely world-expanding experiences I had watching a movie. The fact of its construction, as an attempt to make cinema not just without a camera, but without any fabrication of any sort, remains impressive as hell, as does the film's rousingly successful experiment in making a sublimely beautiful aesthetic object out of the lowest sort of crap imaginable: dead bug parts and fragments of dry leaves. It remains one of the most pleasurable films for me to revisit, as I do at least a few times every year, just to be reminded that there is something absolutely important and beautiful and wonderful about something as apparently simple as a seed pod. The ultimate adventure in close viewing.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeimuXGJwKnAlniSOVphRnw7Pt4jl2sJLLS4bXsM3I8LnyC_ALG8p7I_eIdyKVyvv9IhhlMRK8DeJu_ioVWl_l4Yh54J9YaCXn1_rlIi30vHECYYgnfDKlIe7vCe5CeNPnBAHw/s1600/dimensionsofdialogue.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeimuXGJwKnAlniSOVphRnw7Pt4jl2sJLLS4bXsM3I8LnyC_ALG8p7I_eIdyKVyvv9IhhlMRK8DeJu_ioVWl_l4Yh54J9YaCXn1_rlIi30vHECYYgnfDKlIe7vCe5CeNPnBAHw/s400/dimensionsofdialogue.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>2. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084362/"><i>Dimensions of Dialogue</i></a> (AKA <i>Možnosti dialogu</i>)<br />
(Jan Švankmajer, 1983, Czechoslovakia)<br />
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Maybe, even probably, the best piece of animation made in any of the Soviet Bloc countries under communism, which was maybe, even probably, the best era and place for animation in history. Švankmajer's three-part study of how human communication works and doesn't work is one of the smartest piece of satiric sociology ever filmed, dissecting in drily morbid metaphors how individual personality is squashed, how romantic passions turn sour, and the destructive nature of people failing to communicate on the same level. But it's style, not theme, that makes this one of the all-time greats: unpleasantly fleshy clay mixed in with sharp metal shards and wet foot, chunks of meat, and overall sense of being distressingly physical and organic - it's basically body horror, not a bad feat for something without a single body.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW9JL9yCwNQ9bWARVEUC9oSUMDGqppqa4XQHrJPeQUly9Hme53V5n2pZHkkYQWgId7eY1WAD_cQQdUE7VkbAkVqo73R7C20RVq5bmkRC8sfLN6-_BjSOrjOkfkjQko9CXyLwAN/s1600/begonedullcare.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW9JL9yCwNQ9bWARVEUC9oSUMDGqppqa4XQHrJPeQUly9Hme53V5n2pZHkkYQWgId7eY1WAD_cQQdUE7VkbAkVqo73R7C20RVq5bmkRC8sfLN6-_BjSOrjOkfkjQko9CXyLwAN/s400/begonedullcare.png" width="400" /></a></div>1. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041169/"><i>Begone Dull Care</i></a><br />
(Evelyn Lambert & Norman McLaren, 1949, Canada)<br />
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Do pay attention to the title, which gets it exactly right: this is all about joy. To the bouncy jazz of the Oscar Petersen Trio, Lambert and McLaren provided an imagetrack painted directly on the film strip, providing a jaunty accompaniment in super-saturated color. Or sometimes even just the contrast between light and dark, when it comes down to it. Either way, what we have here is a celebration of music and of color providing each other with ebullient rhythm, a movie about the ecstasy of creating art which exudes the pleasure of its own creation in every pop and burst that both conjures the music into being and responds to it. Its marriage of abstract music and abstract image is not unprecedented in cinema, and in truth already wasn't in 1949; but not one other film doing this kind of thing that I've ever seen is so extraordinarily uplifting and endlessly watchable.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-12625545620033229722017-01-06T22:56:00.001-06:002017-01-06T22:56:22.970-06:00A BOY AND HIS MONSTER<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy_-nrrmOz6u1b03et-a1E4H4ngICchHh0id15UwldKh1iQralnPHjZtHKIxgJghxdBR07UZscKkyfR5kkqPYuBpE8AMjdRN5c8wr-j_4r-FG9TZQHp32WwbqWxpnZLHDTMhOA/s1600/monstercalls.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy_-nrrmOz6u1b03et-a1E4H4ngICchHh0id15UwldKh1iQralnPHjZtHKIxgJghxdBR07UZscKkyfR5kkqPYuBpE8AMjdRN5c8wr-j_4r-FG9TZQHp32WwbqWxpnZLHDTMhOA/s200/monstercalls.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416532/"><i>A Monster Calls</i></a> will make you cry. I suppose I ought to qualify that in some way - it will make <i>some</i> of you cry based on certain life experiences you <i>might</i> have had, etc. etc. - but that barely seems correct. <i>A Monster Calls</i> will make you cry the same that that way that sniffing pepper will make you sneeze. Not <i>everybody</i> will have the response, because not <i>everybody</i> is wired the same way, but it's an instinctive response that takes place more on a physiological level than anything else.<br />
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That's both the strength of <i>A Monster Calls</i> and, frankly, it's biggest problem. This is a greedy tearjerker, greedy and shameless - and effective, to be perfectly fair. The thing is at least in some part aimed at children who need help emotionally coping with the loss of a parent, and even as it moves beyond that niche, it remains dedicated to the idea of children's stories fairy tales as a powerful agent for emotional growth. A certain (rather high) degree of blunt-force anti-subtlety is not merely baked into the scenario, it is, in fact, the very point of the thing. The story is about an English boy right on the cusp of adolescence, Conor O'Malley (Lewis MacDougall), who is unhappy of all of the usual reasons, including being an easy target for bullies and having not a scrap of a relationship with his father, remarried and living in Los Angeles, and has another even worse reason for being so unhappy that he's very nearly not functioning: his mother (Felicity Jones), who's also his only real friend from what we can tell, has cancer. It's never precisely named as such, and the degree to which Conor actually knows what's going on remains unclear, a combination of the adults in his life not going out of their way to be honest with him, and his own insistence on believing the most optimistic possible version of every new development. But let's just say, with all due sensitivity to spoilers, that it's not the kind of cancer that you anticipate will be cured through movie magic and the power of love in the final reel.<br />
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Anyway, that's the film, pretty much: Conor has an awareness that his mother is dying but will not permit that knowledge to penetrate his consciousness, and as a result takes out his intense rage on everyone around him. Most especially his prim grandmother (Sigourney Weaver, strangely laboring under a British accent that she's successfully trotted out in the past), with whom he's only ever had a fairly officious relationship, though when his dad (Toby Kebbell) comes by for a visit, it's pretty clear that Conor has limited patience for him, as well. There is but one outlet for his misery, and one coping mechanism: Conor, prone to imaginative and artistic fancies, dreams one night that the huge yew tree on a hill outside his bedroom window comes to live as a giant tree-monster (voiced and mo-capped by an especially robust and gravelly Liam Neeson - Neeson also cameos, in photographs, as Conor's deceased grandfather, and this is significant, though never commented-upon). Not a friendly monster, either; he is short-tempered and obviously capable of violence, though he only means to tell Conor stories: three of them, which will all in some fashion elucidated Conor's current suffering, and at the end of it all, Conor must tell his own story, about the recurring nightmare he's been having.<br />
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<i>A Monster Calls</i> is thus about the power of stories to give some focus and sense to life, but with a caustic twist: the stories the monster tells are deeply unsatisfying and unresolved, and their lessons are in no way clear in the manner of traditional fairy tales. The whole thing is very much part of the 21st Century vogue for brittle, postmodernist children's fantasies in the post-Neil Gaiman model, but it's a solid enough iteration of this emerging cliché of anti-clichéd bedtime stories. A few things help prop it up, and certainly not least among them is MacDougall, a terrific young actor who plays Conor as all sharp edges, genuinely weird and off-putting in ways that are thoroughly unexpected, and make his alienation feel more real and believable. The key to the character is that Conor actively despises himself, for reasons he spends the whole movie unable to articulate, and MacDougall evokes something of that techy harshness in a performance remarkably unwilling to ask for our love and sympathy.<br />
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The other thing that works, and works powerful well, is that it is an exceedingly beautiful fantasy. J.A. Bayona made his name directing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464141/"><i>The Orphanage</i></a> almost a decade ago, and it would have been enough if <i>A Monster Calls</i> had found its way into the same lavish, spooky atmosphere of that film, but it goes far beyond that. It does this most profoundly in the monster's first two stories, which are animated in an intoxicating hybrid style, combining the color and diffuse shapes of watercolor painting with the full bodies and three-dimensional spaces of computer animation; I think it would not be an unsupportable exaggeration to call these two sequences the most beautiful and stylistically effective animation to have shown up in any 2016 movie, and if not for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4302938/"><i>Kubo and the Two Strings</i></a>, I wouldn't hedge my bets even slightly. Frankly, the animated sequences are worth the price of admission on their own, and the fact that they're so intimately tied in with the rest of the film - they are the mental depiction of how Conor imagines the stories as extensions of his art - just makes them that much better. Even the "real" sequences are touched with a sense of expressionistic gloom and grandeur: the cemetery where the yew tree grows feels a bit too Gothic and grey to possibly be real, and there's plenty of quotidian interior spaces that Bayona and cinematographer Óscar Faura and production designer Eugenio Caballero (who also designed <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457430/"><i>Pan's Labyrinth</i></a>, so we know he's got the goods to do a solid dark fairy tale) invest with a sense of old-fashioned dustiness and gravity that go rather far away from anything like realism.<br />
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The fairy tale style is most of what <i>A Monster Calls</i> has to recommend it: the less fantastic it gets, the more we have to deal with Jones, Weaver, and Kebbell not being particularly interesting in their roles (Jones does the most with the least, though how much is her and how much is the go-for-broke chemo patient make-up she's swathed in by the end is hard to say). And I will honestly say that I never quite <i>trust</i> the movie: there's a fine line between a movie that is sad because it uses art to make us sad, and a movie that shows a boy watching his mother die horribly and cheating its way past artistry, and I haven't quite decided where <i>A Monster Calls</i> falls. But I'll say that it's handsome as hell, and it's definitely an intense emotional experience, however it gets there. You have to be in the mood to watch it - and who the hell is in "the mood" to watch this kind of movie - but as merciless depictions of powerfully bruised feelings go, it doesn't let up.<br />
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8/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-77839876887799612812017-01-06T00:39:00.002-06:002017-01-08T15:25:56.077-06:00WHY WOULD YOU SAY SOMETHING IF IT'S OFF-CAMERA? WHAT POINT IS THERE EXISTING?<i>A review requested by Alison with thanks for contributing to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIt8co7oOtrBZQslKAfbxK6m5BhyphenhyphenRHn50xBxPrwfugRW6EEGgW1bKfrwbOATK5gH7HJty_WTzypkQsEzf_EfwAponLy1xToYoZF5LZUuRV-EdydOe9VFXaqVkYx95yBScC48ab/s1600/madonnatruthordare.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIt8co7oOtrBZQslKAfbxK6m5BhyphenhyphenRHn50xBxPrwfugRW6EEGgW1bKfrwbOATK5gH7HJty_WTzypkQsEzf_EfwAponLy1xToYoZF5LZUuRV-EdydOe9VFXaqVkYx95yBScC48ab/s320/madonnatruthordare.jpeg" width="225" /></a></div>The 1991 document <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102370/"><i>Madonna: Truth or Dare</i></a> is a fascinating artifact, one that I honestly can't quite figure out how to even describe. Despite existing for very nearly no other reason than to carefully manage and sell the image of its titular star, then at the absolute zenith of her pop-culture visibility, I don't get the impression that the film gives the most marginal fraction of a shit as to whether we actually <i>like</i> Madonna, or her music (which is good for me, because I don't). It doesn't really exist to showcase her performances as part of the 1990 "Blonde Ambition" tour, though plenty of those performances are depicted; it exists, rather, as an of extension of the star's own force of personality and will. It feels like it had ought to be important to point out that what we're watching is self-evidently staged reality, designed from the ground up to present an idea of Madonna that she's willing to sign off on, and yet that's no particular insight at all, nor even slightly valuable as a way to enter into a discussion about the film. <i>Of course</i> the movie about Madonna in 1990 would present a modulated, self-conscious depiction of her personality. Self-consciously deciding how one self-presents is the whole point of Madonna.<br />
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What this means, of course, is that the thing we're watching when we watch <i>Truth or Dare</i> isn't quite a documentary and definitely isn't narrative fiction, but is some kind of of narrative written out of the material of the real world. In this respect, the only thing I can immediately think to compare it to is a Werner Herzog documentary (not one of his modern-day "the world adventures of a cartoon German" films, but his old "the truth is more important than facts" films, like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098669/"><i>Herdsmen of the Sun</i></a> or especially <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145046/"><i>Little Dieter Needs to Fly</i></a>), though it would be claiming too much to say that <i>Truth or Dare</i> is on the hunt for "ecstatic truth". And it would also, I suspect, be claiming too much to suggest that 26-year-old director Alek Keshishian had Herzog or any other art filmmakers in mind, or even that he's the film's true <i>auteur</i>: it seems clear enough that he's nought but Madonna's proxy in deciding how the material is to be shaped and what message is to be drawn out of it.<br />
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One thing Keshishian might have been in charge of, I suppose, was selecting the film's aesthetic, which in fairness is quite a hell of a thing. The film has two kinds of scenes, generally speaking: the wired, fraught backstage of a major concert tour, and the onstage performances themselves. These are presented in two hugely different aesthetic registers. Backstage, the footage captured by Keshishian's small army of camera operators (chief among them Robert Leacock, son of the great direct cinema pioneer Richard Leacock) is all in high-contrast, grainy black-and-white, while the performance footage is in bright color; extra-lurid bright color, I'd almost be tempted to say, but it's at least possible that's only a function of the shocking juxtaposition of the two color schemes making the color footage seem that much more colorful. Meanwhile, the backstage footage is all handheld and generally in longish takes, while the performances have been shot with crisp, stable footage that's cut with the machine-gun speed typical of that era of music videos (at one point, the concert footage switches over to slow-motion, completely crushing the last vestige of documentary realism there). In fact, it would be pretty easy to sum up the basic stylistic strategy of the film as low-budget documentary versus MTV, though the high-contrast footage is itself so intensely stylish that it's already taken at least one step away from "documentary" and towards "fashion photography".<br />
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But that's of little matter. The basic division within the film holds, and the enormous contrast as it shifts from one phase to the other is one of the primary moving force of the film. Not just visually, either: the basic thematic stuff of the film is encoded within those two stylistic strategies. The bright colors and overcranked editing of the performance sequences adds to the impression of "just hanging around trying to capture the madness as it happens" realism of the backstage footage, while the casual, ragged, artless backstage imagery exaggerates the degree to which the onstage footage feels like larger-than-life spectacle. And spectacle it very much it is - the "Blonde Ambition" tour set new standards for theatricality in pop music concerts, and while we see surprisingly little of it <i>Truth or Dare</i>'s two hours, what we get promises a fairly amazing pantomime of sex and religion and how they are, for Madonna, incarnations of the same impulses. Keshishian's presentation of these performances invests them with such movement and color, as well as such remarkable shifts between intimacy and performativity, that it's damn near impossible to avoid being swept up in their pageantry, and I say that as a viewer whose affection for Madonna starts and ends with "Like a Prayer". While there are a handful of concert films that are unequivocal masterworks of cinema - <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077838/"><i>The Last Waltz</i></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088178/"><i>Stop Making Sense</i></a> foremost among them - it's precious rare for concert footage to actually work as a <i>movie</i>, and I, for one, would never have assumed that some untried kid making what amounts to a brand extension exercise would have come within spitting distance of that standard. But it surely does, and not just because the stage show presents such kinetic design and spirited choreography to capture.<br />
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The backstage footage is less interesting to look at, though it is undoubtedly more interesting to discuss and thinkpiece about, as is dramatically attested to by the glut of thinkpieces that greeted the film's 25th anniversary. I frankly don't know what to make of this part of the movie. It captures the sense of tension and craziness that we can all assume is part and parcel of a major tour, but it's also obviously been designed to a certain extent, even if that extent is only that Madonna herself possesses an absolute awareness that she's in front of a camera, and willingly performs "herself" for it. This isn't hidden. There are, I think, three minutes where something happens that was more or less accidental: one is when Kevin Costner (wearing the god-damnedest mullet) appears backstage to stiffly call the show "neat"; one is when Madonna's childhood friend shows up during her hometown concert, to enact a nightmarishly creepy "obsessed non-fan" routine in which she asks Madonna to be the godmother to her unborn child, a request that Madonna deflects with admirable grace, considering how stalkery the whole thing feels; one (the one I really wanted to get to) is when Madonna's then-boyfriend, noted lothario Warren Beatty, just up and demands if <i>anybody</i> involved in the tour is as disturbed as he is by the cameras, and Madonna's habit of playing "everyday life" as a media event. Note that Madonna herself approved of this footage showing up in the final cut (note also that she and Beatty had split up by the time <i>Truth or Dare</i> opened); it's clearly not a charge she's upset about, or is worried will spoil her persona.<br />
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Because that <i>is</i> Madonna's persona: decide who you want to be, then be that person, and that then becomes reality. Post-Lady Gaga, post-Katy Perry, post-Ke$ha, post-God knows who, this is no longer a shocking thing; in 1990 and 1991, it was outlandishly radical. Or, at least, <i>owning</i> it like that was (I don't know when the micromanagement of music stars' images began, but it was at least in place by the time Elvis Presley's gyrating pelvis was kept offscreen during his third appearance on Ed Sullivan). This is the heart and soul of Madonna's genius: informing us that her apparent personality is essentially performance art, and in doing so demand that we think about what celebrity personality even <i>means</i>: what it means in terms of commodification of the body, in terms of what we as society "expect" of famous people, and of women, and of famous women above all (and, of course, Madonna's other stroke of genius, alluded to throughout <i>Truth or Dare</i> but never exactly clarified, was to explicitly and without male oversight express her own sexuality as an act of radical feminism, and then successfully commercialise it). None of this seems particularly groundbreaking now, I don't think, and that's of course because of how thoroughly Madonna won: we are more or less definitively living in a post-Madonna celebrity culture. The precisely-massaged version of herself that she displays in <i>Truth or Dare</i> - outspoken, swears a lot, has fun talking about sex, cares deeply about the people around her and wants to be a mom figure for the outcasts and disadvantaged (her backup dancers are mostly gay men of color, also a much bigger statement in 1990 than it seems now) - was a major part of the moment that caused that cultural shift. <i>Truth or Dare</i> was, at the time, the highest-grossing documentary in history (a record it lost after eleven years to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310793/"><i>Bowling for Columbine</i></a>), which was only enough to make it the 78th-highest-grossing film of 1991; but still, a cultural milestone is a cultural milestone.<br />
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It would be unfair to accuse the movie of being synthetic: much of what happens around Madonna is clearly authentic and spontaneous. Particularly concerning her backup dancers, a cluster of men who were clearly excited and overstimulated and thus subject to a number of tensions that end up feeling far more consequential than the "official" sources of drama, like whether Toronto will arrest Madonna for simulating masturbation onstage (spoiler alert: <i>of course</i> they didn't). It's worth mentioning that three of the most prominently-featured dancers later sued for misrepresentation, violation of privacy, and emotional manipulation in the course of producing the documentary, so maybe that too should be taken with a grain of salt. But then that gets us back to the Herzog thing: if it feels true, that's as important as if it <i>is</i> true. And while <i>Truth or Dare</i> presents an editorialised vision of life on the road with Madonna, there's still a reality being depicted: people sniped at each other, therapeutic shopping trips were made, and Madonna's microphone really did flicker out onstage, without her even slowing down in the energy of her performance. Those things <i>happened</i>, and so what if they're worked up into a somewhat legendary depiction of the figure at the center? The stated argument of <i>Truth or Dare</i> is that we're getting the warts-and-all reality of Madonna, but the true argument is that the constructed Madonna is far more interesting and consequential than "reality", and the pseudo-documentary <i>Truth or Dare</i> is a better fit for its subject than a severely detached, bitterly journalistic <i>Truth or Dare</i> could possibly have been.<br />
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8/10? Rating this one seems uniquely pointlessTimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-85093206245085993222017-01-04T16:47:00.002-06:002017-01-04T16:47:29.611-06:00I AM A CAMERA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnNiwI0VSqTDuiY8TL7VHJxI50zr6Oh7QWcOHP2uDOPZalyS3G-nQw3Fk_8cleYRTjteb9JYHoyb9ld19Wd8cZPbpd78kQ9hcI79ecoQJOkoqBs0zlXZCBhyphenhyphenT7qW9sDnq7H7D1/s1600/cameraperson.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnNiwI0VSqTDuiY8TL7VHJxI50zr6Oh7QWcOHP2uDOPZalyS3G-nQw3Fk_8cleYRTjteb9JYHoyb9ld19Wd8cZPbpd78kQ9hcI79ecoQJOkoqBs0zlXZCBhyphenhyphenT7qW9sDnq7H7D1/s200/cameraperson.jpeg" width="131" /></a></div>Ironically, given that it is a movie expressly and entirely about the communicative power of the moving image, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5375040/"><i>Cameraperson</i></a> gives us the answer key to understanding everything about it in the form of a title card that precedes any other footage: "For the past 25 years I've worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot the following footage for other films, but here I ask you to see it as my memoir."<br />
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The "I" in that sentence is Kirsten Johnson, best known for shooting 2014's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4044364/"><i>Citizenfour</i></a>, though if there is any shred of justice in this world, she will going forward be best known for this very movie instead. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, <i>Cameraperson</i> is the most important work of art of 2016.<br />
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Now then, let's walk back from that (because <i>obviously</i>, it's not that, and even if it were, we'd need at least a few more years to be sure), but not too very far. Whatever else it is, <i>Cameraperson</i> is an extraordinarily exciting and stimulating challenge to documentary form, like nothing else seen this year, or last year, or maybe ever (the last film I saw that was even in the same wheelhouse was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129435/"><i>The Beaches of Agnès</i></a>, from 2008). It is, as Johnson tells us, a memoir; it is also an act of metacriticism of the boldest sort. Johnson's work throughout her career has touched on multiple genres of documentary, but generally speaking all of her best-known work - in films like <i>Citizenfour</i>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120152/"><i>The Invisible War</i></a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1202203/"><i>Pray the Devil Back to Hell</i></a>, her projects with Michael Moore - has been in the realm of what we might call political awareness documentaries, journalistic films attempting to cast light on something horrible and important in the world, either with an eye towards ginning up activism, or simply to bring out the truth where it's been missing. Certainly, that's where she gets most of her footage in <i>Cameraperson</i>; more than any other single source, she's primarily drawing on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2063551/"><i>I Came to Testify</i></a>, an episode of the 2011 PBS documentary series <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1854225/"><i>Women, War & Peace</i></a>, about the women of the Bosnia town of Foča, sharing their stories of being raped <i>en masse</i> by Serbian soldiers. And there's a lot to be said about that footage, which forms one of the two sustained through-lines in the movie, but for right now, let's stick with the fact that, generally, what Johnson does is journalism, and what we generally think of journalism is that it strives for objectivity. At the very least, that the persons (camera persons, even) who do journalism have found a way to remove themselves from it.<br />
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What <i>Cameraperson</i> does is to point out how much tendentious bullshit that all is. In its best moments (no, that's not a fair way to phrase it; the whole thing is best moments), the film rips the veil of objectivity off to remind us that Kirsten Johnson is a human being who had feelings and thoughts in her head while she was filming. In the first clip we see after that title card, a flock of sheep mill around, and in come's Johnson's voice, anthropomorphising and interpreting the animals' feelings of dismayed confusion at the camera crew. In the second clip, a road stretches off at a diagonal line, with stormclouds gathering, as the occasional car drives past: it is a strong graphic composition, beautifully colored, and a perfectly painterly backdrop for the film's opening credits. And then come the moment that made me realise that <i>Cameraperson</i> was going to be one of my favorite films of the year: a bolt of lightning strikes on the left side of the frame, and Johnson audibly gasps in joy. A few seconds later - maybe it was longer, I wasn't keeping track of time by this point - she sneezes and jostles the camera.<br />
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And <i>that</i>, that is everything. We know two things about Kirsten Johnson: the prickly, ionised air that precedes a storm makes her sneeze, and she's delighted by beautiful lightning strikes. The movie doesn't always draw her in quite so directly a fashion, though it does so frequently enough: hearing her complain about too much haze, confer with the director about where to position a shot, quibble with the U.S. government about how much of the Guantanamo Bay prison she's allowed to show in any one shot. What matters is not that the whole movie is made up of unusable outtakes of a cinematographer chattering and moving her camera; what matters is that <i>enough</i> of it is that we always remember thereafter that all of this footage is being filtered through one person who has opinions about what she's doing, and who lets those opinions inform what she assembles.<br />
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And that, then, becomes part of the great triumph of <i>Cameraperson</i>, which is a new incarnation of one of those selfsame advocacy docs, depicting the bureaucratic claustrophobia of Gitmo in one passage and stonily giving us a tour of how the entire physical place of Foča was repurposed as a prison camp and veritable factory for rape. Here, though, the focus is entirely on subjectivity, not objectivity, asking us not merely to be upset and outraged by the various crimes we see, but to think about how we come to know about those crimes: how they are chosen and shaped by directors, by editors - even by cinematographers! - and to confront the core reality that no documentary nor any act of journalism is genuinely free from individual perspective.<br />
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Doubling down on that reality, much of <i>Cameraperson</i> isn't even slightly engaged in this political messaging. Much of the footage comes from what appear to be Johnson's home movies, of her children, her father, and her mother, suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These are presented by the director and her editor, Nels Bangerter, with no distinction from any other footage; there's not a frame of the movie identified by anything other than location where it was shot, which sets everything, be it a sobering interview with a rape survivor, a furious boxer moments after losing a match, or a grandfather helping his grandchildren bury a dead bird they found in the backyard, in a single continuum. It's the only shortcoming of any real note within <i>Cameraperson</i> that this continuum is sometimes pieced together without any clear logic behind it, and while the juxtapositions of disparate moments sometimes reveal startling affinities, sometimes, they just seem to communicate "this is the footage I thought looked pretty". Which is often enough - the footage <i>does</i> look pretty, and even the footage that doesn't tends to become pretty by virtue of context: <i>Cameraperson</i> is a movie about what it means to look at people and the places in which they are found, and it demands that we think closely about what images do, how they are designed. At times, Johnson even designs them right before our eyes, cleaning windows or repositioning elements in the shot to get the most impact from a composition.<br />
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At any rate, the flow of images is powerfully evocative even when it's not clear what they're evoking, always suggesting how Johnson associates image with meaning, and implying her feelings about her footage without necessarily requiring that we feel the same way. The moments with her family, of a certainty, mean more to her than they could possibly mean to us, but it's nonetheless moving to understand what she feels towards her sick mother, especially when they show up on camera together (the only time in the film we see Johnson's face, 95 minutes into a 102-minute film), and understand that for her, this is as much a part of the world to be recorded and preserved as the stories of the women from Foča, or the revelations of Edward Snowden. This is, after all, an autobiography, however strange a form it takes: it is the story of what Kirsten Johnson knows and thinks, and how she engages with the world. At one point, she abashedly tells a gathering of the Foča women, five years after filming them the first time, that she'd enjoyed their company and personalities so much that she'd forgotten all about their tragic stories. That's <i>Cameraperson</i> writ small: a tribute to what happens in front of the camera, how it is captured, and the eternal present of cinema.<br />
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9/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-26336669949578625842017-01-03T23:24:00.005-06:002017-01-03T23:24:52.182-06:00YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO HATE YOU<i>A review requested by Steve T, with thanks for contributing to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIYem_8surTtR0f2KWaGEpLVBTSAA_UX4N-MDafAm-piq9nXi7U7xQyeHYGcOX1coECtyu3RPZU_t1tQrOOI-p3DBWt-0b2U0NlcpEpanNr1hZoxKt7BYI5VH1bKjVpkBYQjcH/s1600/whenharrymetsally.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIYem_8surTtR0f2KWaGEpLVBTSAA_UX4N-MDafAm-piq9nXi7U7xQyeHYGcOX1coECtyu3RPZU_t1tQrOOI-p3DBWt-0b2U0NlcpEpanNr1hZoxKt7BYI5VH1bKjVpkBYQjcH/s320/whenharrymetsally.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div>There are, in the broadest possible sense, two epochs of the English-language romantic comedy. One was the age of the great screwball comedies, which ended during World War II. The second was the era of of the cosmopolitan (i.e. New York-based, or occasionally Los Angeles) romcom about neurotics, which started in 1977 with Woody Allen's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/"><i>Annie Hall</i></a>, and ended sometime in the first decade of the 21st Century, recently enough that I cannot swear <i>when</i> it ended, though I imagine few people would disagree with me that the days of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108160/"><i>Sleepless in Seattle</i></a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251127/"><i> How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386588/"><i>Hitch</i></a> are over now.<br />
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There's one important difference between these two traditions of the romcom: the ones from the 1930s were almost always extremely good, and were frequently masterpieces. The ones from the '80s, '90s, and early '00s were almost always mediocre. "Almost", but not "always". At least four times, the contemporary romcom form produced a film that could stand head-and-shoulders with any of the genre's leading lights from the golden age. One of these was <i>Annie Hall</i> itself, which cheated its way there by virtue of being a florid structural experiment about the nature of memory, edited from the ruins of a failed murder mystery. The second and third, 1984's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088011/"><i>Romancing the Stone</i></a> and another Allen film, 1985's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089853/"><i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i></a>, are genre hybrids with action-adventure and fantasy, respectively. That leaves only one altogether "pure" romantic comedy from the last 40 years that is an outright masterpiece of romance, comedy, and cinema itself: the great New Year's Eve movie from the legendary summer of 1989, Rob Reiner's film of a Nora Ephron screenplay, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/"><i>When Harry Met Sally...</i></a> It is, according to every angle I can scrounge up, a perfect movie, save for one somewhat minor annoyance: the black-on-white opening credits, set to a light-jazz version of "Our Love Is Here to Stay", are the most banal way possible to play at being Allen Lite, and the film refuses thereafter to ever bring in any piece of music that doesn't similarly evoke a department store playlist designed to appeal to conservative grandparents.<br />
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But outside of that? The film gets pretty much every solitary thing right all the way down to the finest possible details, like that suggestive little ellipsis. For that's the whole movie, right there: in 1977, when they were both recent graduates from the University of Chicago, Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) met Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), and... then the movie and everything else spins off from it. They drive from Chicago to New York (ooh, that's something else the film gets wrong: the shot down Lake Shore Drive from the north side that movies set in Chicago love is incompatible with a starting point at UChicago; I believe, but do not know, that it similarly fudges New York), and Harry is a rude sexist asshole while Sally high-strung to the point of dysfunction. They don't see each other again until 1982, when they bump into each other in an airport, and while he is marginally less obnoxious, they still barely manage to tolerate each other. And then it's another five years until 1987, when they're both in their early 30s and halfway stable people for once, if you don't count the awful breakups they've both just suffered, and this is the point where those meet-anti-cutes start to pay off: having already shared with each other, perhaps uncomfortably, their respective views on sex and relationships, the two attempt to disprove Harry's youthfully arrogant prescription that men and women can't ever be platonic friends, because the man's desire for sex will always get in the way.<br />
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Spoiler alert for a 28-year-old generational touchstone: it turns out they can't, and if there's one thing about <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i> that personally offends me, it's that message. On the other hand, the original drafts of Ephron's screenplay ended up leaving the pair romantically uninvolved friends at the end, and I will certainly admit that would have been <i>completely</i> unacceptable. Fuck real life: <i>obviously</i> we want Harry and Sally to end up together, because that is what romantic comedies <i>do</i>. They slam two people together in heteronormative pair-bonded bliss, regardless of whether it would be good for them or not, because it is enormously pleasurable and wish-fulfilling to watch. In the case of this particular movie, it's all the more satisfying, because unlike so many other romcoms, there's no idiotic 11th-hour threat to their happiness, nor a cartoonishly awful Other Man/Woman; there's just two people with a lot of defense mechanisms who need to learn how to get the hell out of their own way, and that is the thing we watch them do over the course of 96 minutes.<br />
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That's another thing it does right, by the way. Comedies that weren't too long were more common in the 1980s than now, but even granting that, <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i> is a tightly-plotted and beautifully waste-free motion picture. This, I think, is one of the two great things it learned from the 1930s romantic comedies: take the time you need and then <i>stop</i>. The other thing was to make the film about <i>both</i> members of the couple, not just one or the other; even <i>Annie Hall</i>, which I treasure like few other movies, is clearly told exclusively from Alvy's perspective. <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i> starts out favoring Sally, both in the way that Reiner and cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld position her within the frame (the end of the 1982 sequence, which leaves Ryan in medium-close shot while letting Crystal fall into the back of the frame and out of focus, is the clearest tell; so are the extremely tight close-ups on her face as Sally recognises Harry before he recognises her), and in how unapologetically unlikable that Ephron, Reiner, and Crystal allow Harry to be in the first two segments.<br />
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But when it arrives in 1987 and the story really kicks in, the film scrupulously gives both leads plenty of space to be the lead, together and in their own isolated scenes. The result is a marvel and a wonder, the most egalitarian of romantic comedies, or even romantic movies, period, in the last half-century: the result is the best character Ryan ever played and accordingly her best performance as one of the great female leads in any comedy from any era (Crystal, who's playing a distinct variant on the Woody Allen Character - New Yorker, Jewish, morbid sense of humor - is probably equally as great, but feels less fresh). The same "it's about <i>both</i> of them" approach pops up in Ryan's two other major romantic comedies of the following decade, <i>Sleepless in Seattle</i> and 1998's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128853/"><i>You've Got Mail</i></a> (both of them directed by Ephron from her own scripts) neither of which has the precision of character writing of <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i>, both of which are much more comfortable with cozy sitcom-level concepts, and therefore neither of which emerges as nearly so great an achievement.<br />
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There's hardly anything that could be called "sitcom-level" about this movie (really, only the one "punchline"-type gag is the famed "I'll have what she's having", which is such a perfect capper to a marvelous scene that it's worth forgiving). On the contrary, this is a remarkably smart, adult movie, with two very self-aware characters discussing themselves and their worldviews in conversations that feel uniformly honest to their personalities. Ephron's script is outstanding, and a deserved Oscar nominee (the film's only one, though it easily should have gotten nods for Ryan and Carrie Fisher, brilliant as the acerbic best friend, and there are another four at least it could have earned in a world with less institutional bias against comedies). Not just for the lines, which are often golden - also for the impressive parallel structures silently threaded in, like the stark contrast between Christmas in 1987 and 1988 (one about good friends pulling for each other, one about the misery of singlehood in your 30s in New York), or the way that the two different scenes where the female sex drives is discussed in a restaurant showcase the dramatic difference between how a man and a woman physically perceive sex. But <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i> isn't only about its writing, however whip-smart that might be. It's an astonishingly well-made film, with Reiner and co. treating it like, get this, a piece of visual storytelling and not just a machine for dispensing jokes. Sometimes, they even augment and strengthen those jokes through careful manipulation of film language. What a remarkable concept!<br />
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But for real, it is an impressively made film, all right. It was edited by a certain Robert Leighton, who was also responsible just before for cutting <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094812/"><i>Bull Durham</i></a> and Reiner's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/"><i>The Princess Bride</i></a>, which should between the three of them be enough to argue that he was maybe the best comedy editor of the 1980s. In the case of <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i>, most of that great cutting shows up in small ways that have nothing to do with the big showy gestures, like the split-screen bedtime conversation about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/"><i>Casablanca</i></a> (which is a great gesture, certainly: connecting the characters in their isolation, and quietly insisting that we think of them in bed together), but in the small things like how Harry and Sally share a bemused shot-reverse shot reaction as their best friends Marie (Fisher) and Jess (Bruno Kirby) fall in love with each other and talk loudly while we watch the leads instead. Or sometimes, it's just about selling a joke by putting in a little tiny pause for the punchline and then quickly moving on to make the moment feel harder-hitting. And it's not just well-edited: Sonnefeld, just a year away from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100150/"><i>Miller's Crossing</i></a>, shot one of the most beautiful comedies in a whole generation (in fact, he shot two: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093822/"><i>Raising Arizona</i></a> was just a couple of years in his past. And for that matter, there's a lot to find dubious about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094142/"><i>Throw Momma from the Train</i></a>, one of the films he shot in between the two, but it's well-shot). New York in autumn has a feverish, golden glow, but not one that feels fake or over-the-top; it's simply a beautiful way of looking at a city that usually gets more of a grimy, grainy treatment, and providing a striking backdrop of pure visual romance for the two characters who need to be goaded that way - literally, in a heart-to-heart that positions Harry and Sally as mostly black silhouettes in front of a window with Central Park flaming in red and orange behind them.<br />
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So it is, all told, an outstanding film, correct in all the ways that matter, utterly precise in how it depicts at least its four biggest roles (Jess takes longer to crystalise than Marie - who is already perfectly formed in her first scene, when she folds, rather than tears up, a card for a married man in her rolodex of prospective romantic partners - but by the end he's as sharply etched as she is), full of great laugh lines that are also piercing character moments: "I'm gonna be <i>forty</i>!" "When?" "...<i>someday</i>!" In two paired scenes, it's maybe the all-time best screen depiction of the hope and promise, as well as the boundless possibility for frustration, of the countdown to midnight at New Year's Eve. It's just... <i>so good</i>. If there's been a better American movie about the specifically gendered way romance works in all the years since, I can't name it, nor if there's been a funnier movie about intellectual neurotics in the same time. It's smart and beautiful and mechanically flawless, and it single-handedly redeems all of the subsequent history of movies trying and failing to capture a portion of its genius.<br />
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10/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-55048201201223950022017-01-03T16:03:00.001-06:002017-01-03T23:30:41.344-06:00JANUARY IS FOR CHANGESThe start of the new year is a good time for stock-taking and doing new things in the world, and I've been getting up to both. You've already all seen the recent count of the ACS fundraiser & my terribly ambitious plan to wrap it up (coming tonight: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/"><i>When Harry Met Sally...</i></a>, courtesy of Steve T), and today I have a handful of announcements.<br />
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One of these is that I have finally, only several years late, started to dig into the whole social media thing. So now, if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm <a href="https://twitter.com/timbrayton">@timbrayton</a>, and as of today, I will never tweet another sentence from <i>Moby Dick</i> ever again. I've also been on Letterboxd for a few months now, also as <a href="https://letterboxd.com/timbrayton/">timbrayton</a>, if you want instead to get the short version of the epic-length reviews that crop up here. And as long as I'm going on about social media, for seven years I've been also been on iCheckMovies as <a href="https://www.icheckmovies.com/profiles/tbrayton/">tbrayton</a>, and I'm not entirely sure why I never mentioned it, but there you have it.<br />
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The other big announcement is that Antagony & Ecstasy's life as a Blogspot site is ending in less than two weeks. On 16 January, I and a couple of my friends will be launching a brand new website, Alternate Ending, that will be much the same as this, only a lot prettier, and also with a podcast attached. It will, when the time comes, be located at <a href="http://www.alternateending.com/">www.alternateending.com</a>.<br />
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Have no fear! Almost everything will be the same - the reviews will be just as long-winded, and they'll come at about the same pace. The comments will be the same, only now they'll be through Word Press instead of the nightmare-awful native Blogger commenting system. Heck, even the initials of the website will be the same, a random coincidence (the name Alternate Ending was picked before I came onboard) that will be a psychological comfort to myself, at least. If we've done everything right, even the links should be the same, thanks to the magic of some internet wizardry called 301 re-directs.<br />
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We'll worry about this again in a couple of weeks. For right now, I just wanted to make everyone aware that change is a-coming - good changes! Changes that excite us! Changes that get us all very happy about leaving the rotten Blogger infrastructure after just 11 years! But changes that will undoubtedly be a bit annoying for some of you, as they have been behind-the-scenes stressful for me.<br />
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For right now, though, it's back to business as usual. Spoiler alert for tonight's review: <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i> is, like, pretty good, y'all.<br />
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<b>Oh, and P.S. - any regular commenters who are on twitter, let me know your user name and I'll start following</b>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-20895230554878339362017-01-02T23:51:00.004-06:002017-01-02T23:51:46.528-06:00JANUARY 2017 MOVIE PREVIEWA new year waits, like a blank page, like fresh snow fully of unspoiled promise of a whole new cycle of movies ready to come and surprise us, delight us, move us- hang on, the first wide release of 2017 is an <i>Underworld</i>. Well, fuck all that shit.<br />
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<b>6.1.2017</b><br />
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Aye indeed, the first wide release of 2017 is an <i>Underworld</i>: specifically <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3717252/"><i>Underworld: Blood Wars</i></a>, which purports to be the finale of a series that has lain quite happily dormant for five whole years at this point, and that despite never once missing out its every-three-years release pattern. My relationship to this franchise is special: every time one comes out, I manage to suppose that I have liked all of the previous ones, and will thus like this one. In fact, I have <i>never</i> liked an <i>Underworld</i>, and I have fully hated at least the last two. But this one has an added enticement, in the form of Kate Beckinsale coming off of her career-best performance in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3068194/"><i>Love & Friendship</i></a>. Do you know what this means? It means I am <i>extra</i>-excited for <i>Underworld: Blood Wars</i>. Somebody please shoot me in the damn face.<br />
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We have as well a brace of limited-release films making their wider bows: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416532/"><i>A Monsters Calls</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/"><i>Hidden Figures</i></a>, though as neither one involves werewolves firing guns at vampires, I am not sure why anybody would care.<br />
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<b>13.1.2017</b><br />
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There's something that's just uniquely adorable about the two-years-delayed <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3095734/"><i>Monster Trucks</i></a>, a movie about a <i>truck</i>, with a <i>monster</i> in it. They've confirmed that the concept was dreamed up by some executive's small child; I presume an epic-sized sugar rush was driving it. The trailer looks <i>so happy</i> in the most dimwitted, hapless way, and I swear you can just feel Lucas Till's flop sweat, coming right off the screen. Unless this one is an enormous surprise, I think we'll have Worst Film of 2017 sewn up real early.<br />
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The rest of the new stuff looks bad, but too colorless to reach the panoramic heights of "alien hides in the engine block of a pick-up, fights oil drillers". We have the expected wintertime garbage horror in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4030600/"><i>The Bye Bye Man</i></a>, which looks for all the world like a re-skinned <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1922777/"><i>Sinister</i></a>, and with a title that will be more humiliating to speak in front of a ticket seller than the world's most vulgar porno. And also <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2072233/"><i>Sleepless</i></a>, with Jamie Foxx versus corrupt cops, the kind of thing that you forgot you saw in the middle of watching it.<br />
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More platform releases going wide: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2361317/"><i>Live by Night</i></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4572514/"><i>Patriots Day</i></a>, so you can program an all-Boston double feature of Ben Affleck and Mark Wahlberg; and also Martin Scorsese's Catholics-in-Japan epic <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490215/"><i>Silence</i></a>, which is the first movie whose named I've typed that I'm meaningfully excited to see. Also, on a solely personal note, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3716530/"><i>Elle</i></a> will at long last hit Madison, Wisconsin, and I will accordingly be able to button up my best of 2016 list.<br />
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<b>20.1.2017</b><br />
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So M. Night Shyamalan finally pulled of his tailspin with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3567288/"><i>The Visit</i></a> back in 2015, and so I would ordinarily be ready to look forward to his next thing with, well not <i>enthusiasm</i>, but at least some measure of hope. But along comes <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4972582/"><i>Split</i></a>, and it is really just powerful hard to keep an open mind about a movie whose big shock scare appears to be "isn't it TERRIFYING when bald men wear dresses?"<br />
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And yet, what else are we supposed to do? The alternatives are the long-awaited-by-nobody <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1293847/"><i>xXx: Return of Xander Cage</i></a>, with Vin Diesel returning to the forgotten spy franchise 12 years after it was feebly put to pasture. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013752/"><i>Fast & Furious</i></a> this ain't. Hell, it ain't even <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1411250/"><i>Riddick</i></a>. I am confident that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295701/"><i>xXx</i></a> fans must in some capacity exist, but I have never met one in all my days.<br />
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Lastly, there's one of those Religious Right message pictures, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4902904/"><i>The Resurrection of Gavin Stone</i></a>, and it breaks my heart to imagine that this has a chance at being the film's best new release.<br />
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A couple of more things making their wide expansion: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4276820/"><i>The Founder</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4385888/"><i>20th Century Women</i></a>, and I do believe this marks the end of the platforming Oscarbait. Leaving us with nothing else to talk about but <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3666024/"><i>The Red Turtle</i></a>, which is <i>not</i> going wide, not now nor ever, but as the (for right now) final film with animation by Studio Ghibli - but not a Studio Ghibli film - it's surely worth the effort to find it.<br />
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<b>27.1.2016</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2592614/"><i>Resident Evil: The Final Chapter</i></a> marks the second horror franchise that has been dormant for five years to get a series finale in one month; but this series, at least, has been capable of generating some trashy pleasure along the way. I'm kind of excited. I'm <i>definitely</i> doing a series re-watch, and might even write about it, if I'm feeling feisty.<br />
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The rest of what we've got: the bluntly-named <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1966359/"><i>Bastards</i></a>, which does not appear to be a remake of the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2821088/">Claire Denis film</a>, but is instead a dumb comedy with Owen Wilson and Ed Helms. There's also an action-adventure thing called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800302/"><i>Gold</i></a>, which is also, technically, a 2016 limited release, but not as far as I can tell, one that actually opened in 2016. Last, and I am pretty certain least, Lasse Hallström directs <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1753383/"><i>A Dog's Purpose</i></a>, which is neither a decade-later return to the characters of his international breakthrough <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089606/"><i>My Life as a Dog</i></a>, nor even a sequel to his weirdly-ensconced-on-the-IMDb-Top-250 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1028532/"><i>Hachi: A Dog's Tale</i></a>. Rather, it is a tale of dog reincarnation, whose concept pretty unambiguously promises that we're going to watch dogs die onscreen nonstop for two hours. Oh what fun.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-70287027097060809562017-01-02T19:39:00.000-06:002017-01-14T02:20:50.211-06:00A VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THE SECOND QUINQUENNIAL ANTAGONY & ECSTASY ACS FUNDRAISER<b>Update 1/2/17:</b> Here is where we stand at the dawn of 2017: 33 reviews left, and me with no obligations for a couple of weeks. This officially becomes my highest priority as of now: my intent is to write one review every day until they're done, which is probably too ambitious; one review until the school year starts back up on January 17th is, however, certainly feasible. So we'll check back in again, and my thanks and apologies to the thirty individuals still waiting on at least one review. The end is in sight!<br />
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<span style="font-size: 90%;"><i>Previously: Drumroll - the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">2015 Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy Cancer Fundraiser</a> has ended, with a total of 172 donations reaching the AMAZING total of $5360 raised for the American Cancer Society and other cancer research foundations. That's almost four and a half times the total we raised in 2010! So a huge round of applause to everybody who gave.<br />
<br />
It's especially gratifying for me to announce this at this point in time: quite by coincidence, on 18 June 2015, shortly before the fundraiser ended, I was given the all-clear by my oncologist. After 10 years without a trace of cancer in my body, I'm completely out of the woods and don't ever have to go back for a check-up. So this day isn't just exciting to me for the sheer fact of the fundraiser; it's personal celebration too.<br />
<br />
Thank you again to everyone who donated, for making this such a roaring success.</i></span><br />
<br />
<b>List of Donors</b><br />
<a name='more'></a>Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/into-woods-and-out-of-woods.html">Requested <i>The Day of the Crows</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/kenya-believe-it.html">Requested <i>2016: Obama's America</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/havana-good-time.html">Requested <i>Cuba</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2016/02/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html">Requested <i>Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Movie Trilogy</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/jackie-oh.html">Requested <i>Jackie's in Trouble</I></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/rocky-mountain-high.html">Requested <i>Jeremiah Johnson</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/09/life-during-wartime.html">Requested <i>Ugetsu</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/11/opera-buff.html">Requested <i>Diva</i></a><br />
Anonymous<br />
Alex, Greece<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/05/this-is-story-of-girl.html">Requested <i>Attenberg</i></a><br />
Alison, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/why-would-you-say-something-if-its-off.html">Requested <i>Madonna: Truth or Dare</i></a><br />
Hunter Allen, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/the-perfect-murderers.html">Requested <i>Rope</I></a><br />
Jordyn Auvil, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/it-is-very-plum-plum.html">Requested <i>The English Patient</i></a><br />
Jenny B, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/hitler-i-hardly-know-er.html">Requested <i>To Be or Not to Be</i></a><br />
Kaitlyn B, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/lord-save-little-children.html">Requested <i>The Night of the Hunter</i></a><br />
Rich B, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/hopeless-but-not-serious.html">Requested <i>One, Two, Three</i></a><br />
Vianney B, California, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/childhood-dreams.html">Requested <i>The City of Lost Children</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/les-temps-difficiiles.html">Also requested <i>Delicatessen</i></a><br />
Arlo Banta, New York, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/miles-to-go-before-we-sleep.html">Requested <i>Over the Garden Wall</i></a><br />
Will Beckley, New York, NY, United States<br />
Beef Jerky Guy<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/watch-for-wizard-in-robe-of-green.html">Requested <i>The Wizard of Speed and Time</I></a><br />
Matthew Blackwell, Edmonton, AB, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/that-dizzy-feeling.html">Requested <i>Vertigo</i></a><br />
Branden, Tri-Cities<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/ripley-and-me.html">Requested <i>The American Friend</i></a><br />
Tim Brayton, Trieste-Zürich-Madison<br />
Teo Bugbee, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/but-ah-paris.html">Requested <i>Quartet</i> (1981)</a><br />
Zev Burrows, Owings Mills, MD, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-old-ballgame.html">Requested <i>The Natural</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/do-you-wanna-know-secret.html">Also requested <i>The Last of Sheila</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/alexandre-great.html">Also requested <i>Stavisky...</I></a><br />
Bryan C, Columbus, OH, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/i-cant-see-me-loving-nobody-but-you.html">Requested <i>Happy Together</i></a><br />
Grace C, Auckland, New Zealand<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2016/02/dont-touch-my-mustache.html">Requested <i>Mortdecai</i></a><br />
CJ, San Francisco, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/in-this-damn-country-which-we-hate-and.html">Requested <i>My Beautiful Laundrette</I></a><br />
Cammy, Melbourne, Australia<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/hes-making-list-and-checking-it-twice.html">Requested <i>High Fidelity</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/12/the-superhuman-condition.html">Also requested <i>Gattaca</i></a><br />
Coco, New York, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/living-with-past.html">Requested <i>The Milk of Sorrow</i></a><br />
Marshall Y. Craig, Pennsylvania, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/top-10-avant-garde-shorts.html">Requested a list of the ten best avant-garde films</a><br />
James Cronan, Glasgow, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/family-reunions.html">Requested <i>Tokyo Story</i></a><br />
Alex D, Sydney, Australia<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/i-am-jacks-movie-review.html">Requested <i>Fight Club</i></a><br />
Anna D, New Zealand<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/11/notes-on-vamp.html">Requested <i>What We Do in the Shadows</i></a><br />
Chris D, Victoria, Australia<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/you-can-not-redo.html">Requested <i>The End of Evangelion</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/10/suffer-children.html">Also requested <i>Battle Royale</i></a><br />
Julian D, St. Louis, MO, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-man-without-past.html">Requested <i>The Passenger</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/09/positively-same-dame.html">Also requested <i>The Lady Eve</i></a><br />
Scott D, Florida, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/something-wild.html">Requested <i>The Wild Bunch</i></a><br />
Mat Daniel, New Zealand<br />
Nick Davis, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/i-want-to-see-you-be-desperate.html">Did not request <i>Frances</I>, but got it anyway</a><br />
Deeper Understanding<br />
<div style="padding-left: 20px; text-indent: -20px;">-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/the-things-you-do-for-your-kids.html">Requested <i>The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom</i></a></div>Trevor Downs<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2016/01/dont-tell-me-truth-hurts-little-girl.html">Requested <i>Labyrinth</i></a><br />
Nik Evans, Seattle, WA<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/11/the-portrait-of-lady.html">Requested <i>Laura</I></a><br />
Brian F, United States<br />
Dave F, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/terror-tactics.html">Requested <i>Four Lions</I></a><br />
Tristan F, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/when-future-has-past-without-even-last.html">Requested <i>The Last Unicorn</i></a><br />
Mark Falconer, New York, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/thats-what-star-quality-is-that-little.html">Requestd <i>A Star Is Born</I> [1954]</a><br />
Jakob G, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/12/its-small-world-after-all.html">Requested <i>Baraka</i></a><br />
Salim "STinG" Garami, Miami, FL, United States<br />
Mike Gibson, Fall Church, VA<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-world-is-fine-place-and-worth.html">Requested <i>Se7en</i></a><br />
Rob Graham, Ewing, NJ<br />
David Greenwood, Alice Springs, Australia<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/unspeakable-filth.html">Requested <i>L'âge d'or</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/abuses-of-power.html">Also requested <i>Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom</i></a><br />
John Grimes, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/dont-play-with-your-food.html">Requested <i>Foodfight!</i></a><br />
Ben Gruchow, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/thou-art-mortal.html">Requested <i>Mortal Kombat: Annihilation</i></a><br />
Kent H, San Francisco, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-hell-of-town.html">Requested <i>Escape from New York</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/little-cats-feet.html">Also requested <i>The Fog</I></a><br />
Shoumik H, Dhaka, Bangladesh<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/yunnan-mountain-high.html">Requested <i>Romancing in Thin Air</i></a><br />
Tim H, Washington, DC, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/02/going-home-is-murder.html">Requested <i>Grosse Pointe Blank</i></a><br />
Robert Hamer, Norfolk, VA, United States<br />
Thomas Hartwell, Phoenix, AZ, United States<br />
Fedor Ilitchev<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/please-share-my-umbrella.html">Requested <i>Umbrella</i></a><br />
Robert J, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/09/sexual-behavior-in-human-male.html">Requested <i>Roger Dodger</i></a><br />
Ryan J, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/to-become-immortal-and-then-die.html">Requested <i>Breathless</i></a><br />
Jackie Theballcat<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/toy-story.html">Requested <i>Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/10/i-got-results-of-test-back-i-definitely.html">Also requested <i>The Room</I></a><br />
John, Lake Orion, MI, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/im-with-band.html">Requested <i>Almost Famous</i></a><br />
Andrew Johnson, San Diego, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/santa-on-beach.html">Requested <i>Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/truck-off-and-die.html">Also requested <i>Duel</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/its-about-time.html">Also requested <i>The Time Machine</i> (1960)</a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/train-of-thought.html">Also requested <i>Runaway Train</i></a><br />
Kari Johnson, Utah, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-curious-little-monkey.html">Requested <i>Curious George</i></a><br />
Josep<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/among-thieves.html">Requested <i>Big Deal on Madonna Street</i></a><br />
Mark K, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/a-mission-from-god.html">Requested <i>The Blues Brothers</I></a><br />
Robert K, California, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/take-biiiiiiite.html">Requested <i>The Apple</i></a><br />
KayMartha12, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/clash-of-titan.html">Requested <i>Titan A.E.</I></a><br />
Pat King, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-film-that-will-live-in-infamy.html">Requested <i>Pearl Harbor</i></a><br />
Bryan L, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-love-of-god.html">Requested <i>Amadeus</i></a><br />
Sara L, Tennessee, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/misapplied-science.html">Requested <i>Memories</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/09/the-princess-is-in-another-castle.html">Also requested <i>Princess Arete</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/10/there-was-little-girl.html">Also requested <i>The Ring</i></a><br />
David Lewellyng, Dyersburg, TN, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/youre-dethpicable.html">Requested <i>Space Jam</i></a><br />
Liz, Virginia, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/old-soldiers-never-die.html">Requested <i>The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp</i></a><br />
Aaron Loehrlein, Vancouver, BC, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/who-needs-reasons-when-youve-got-heroin.html">Requested <i>Trainspotting</i></a><br />
Robert Lovejoy, Florida, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-art-of-lying.html">Requested <i>F for Fake</i></a><br />
Marc Lummis, New York, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-impression-of-normalcy.html">Requested <i>The Conformist</i></a><br />
John M, Denver, CO, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/10/clown-in-dumps.html">Requested <i>Shakes the Clown</i></a><br />
Mark M, Cincinnati, OH, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/09/the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of.html">Requested <i>The Maltese Falcon</I> (1941)</a><br />
Maciej, Brooklyn, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/09/everyday-miracles.html">Requested <i>Miracle in Milan</i></a><br />
Brian Malbon, Alberta, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-behavior.html">Requested <i>Meet the Feebles</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-rules-of-gamine.html">Also requested <i>Amélie</i></a><br />
manwithpetgull<br />
Eric "Sssonic" Mason, Massachusetts, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/gangsters-vs-zombies.html">Requested <i>Versus</i></a><br />
M.C., Chicago, IL<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/teach-controversy.html">Requested <i>Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed</i></a><br />
Max, New York, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/and-they-call-it-puppy-love.html">Requested <i>Little Manhattan</i></a><br />
McAlister, Florida, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/new-slang.html">Requested <i>Ball of Fire</i></a><br />
James Miller, Manteo, NC, United States<br />
Andrew Milne, Edinburgh, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/bittersweet-symphony.html">Requested <i>A Bittersweet Life</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/dy-no-mite.html">Also requested <i>Black Dynamite</i></a><br />
Nathan Morrow, Nashville, TN, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/point-of-view.html">Requested <i>Mind Game</i></a><br />
Geoffrey Moses, Casablanca, Morocco<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/im-vilifying-you-for-gods-sake-pay.html">Requested <i>The Lion in Winter</i></a><br />
David N, Berkeley, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/the-man-from-gorky.html">Requested <i>Days of Eclipse</I></a><br />
Travis Neeley, Austin, TX, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-devils-music.html">Requested <i>Phantom of the Paradise</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/10/hes-off-and-flying-as-he-guns-car.html">Also requested <i>Speed Racer</i></a><br />
David Nemes, Louisville, KY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-left-handed-form-of-human-endeavor.html">Requested <i>The Asphalt Jungle</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/04/my-mother-thanks-you-my-father-thanks.html">Also requested <i>Yankee Doodle Dandy</i></a><br />
Andy P, Arlington, VA, United States<br />
Gabe P, San Francisco, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/no-hay-banda.html">Requested <i>Mulholland Dr.</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/minnesota-nasty.html">Also requested <i>Drop Dead Gorgeous</i></a><br />
James P, Minneapolis, MN, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/fancy-starting-war-on-such-beautiful-day.html">Requested <i>Hope and Glory</i></a><br />
Rachel P, Cleveland, OH, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tale-of-two-sisters.html">Requested <i>Sense and Sensibility</i></a><br />
Patton, Birmingham, AL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/thats-what-8000-pound-mako-thinks-about.html">Requested <i>Deep Blue Sea</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/someday-this-wars-gonna-end.html">Also requested <I>Apocalypse Now</i></a><br />
Pip, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/to-reluctantly-go-where-others-have.html">Requested <i>Galaxy Quest</i></a><br />
Christopher Pufall, Los Angeles, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/into-west.html">Requested <i>Dances with Wolves</I></a><br />
David Q, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/11/where-angels-fear-to-tread.html">Requested <i>The Exterminating Angel</i></a><br />
Nathaniel R, New York, NY, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/strangers-and-other-lovers.html">Requested <i>Love with the Proper Stranger</i></a><br />
Michael R, Massachusetts, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/who-can-take-sunrise-and-sprinkle-it.html">Requested <i>Candyman</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/androids-do-dream-of-electric-sheep.html">Also requested <i>Electric Dreams</i></a><br />
Ryan R, Washington, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/05/triumph-of-pills.html">Requested <i>Valley of the Dolls</i></a><br />
Monica Reida, Milwaukee, WI, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/08/s-awful-nice.html">Requested <i>An American in Paris</I></a><br />
K. Rice, South Carolina, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/where-love-ghost.html">Requested <i>Paheli</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-weed-with-roots-in-hell.html">Also requested <i>Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/10/its-in-your-soul-that-true-distortion.html">Also requested <i>The Phantom of the Opera</i> (1989)</a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/the-peter-principle.html">Also requested <i>The Life and Death of Peter Sellers</i></a><br />
T. Rice, Lexington, KY, United States<br />
André Robichaud, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/icons-of-cinema.html">Requested <i>Andrei Rublev</i></a><br />
Thor Rudebeck, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2016/01/keep-calm-and-carry-on.html">Requested <i>When the Wind Blows</i></a><br />
Daniel S, San Francisco, CA, United States<br />
Mia S, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/death-and-decay.html">Requested <i>A Zed & Two Noughts</i></a><br />
Rebecca S, Los Angeles, CA, United States<br />
Scott, New Jersey, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-frozen-north.html">Requested <i>Horus, Prince of the Sun</i></a><br />
Frankie Shoup, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-future-of-animation.html">Requested <i>Akira</i></a><br />
Carter Smith, Atlanta, GA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/whatever-i-feel-like-i-wanna-do-gosh.html">Requested <i>Napoleon Dynamite</I></a><br />
John Smith, Ontario, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/an-unmarried-woman.html">Requested <i>Our Miss Brooks</i></a><br />
Jonathan Storey, London, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/when-it-rains-rain-falls-down.html">Requested <i>Dog Day Afternoon</i></a><br />
Andy Stout, Pasadena, CA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/07/the-agony-and-ecstasy.html">Requested <i>Martyrs</I></a><br />
Steve T, Edinburgh, United Kingdom<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2017/01/you-make-it-impossible-for-me-to-hate.html">Requested <i>When Harry Met Sally...</i></a><br />
Will T, Georgia, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/06/bee-afraid.html">Requested <i>The Swarm</i></a><br />
John Taylor, Toronto, ON, Canada<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/people-come-people-go-nothing-ever.html">Requested <i>Grand Hotel</i></a><br />
Andrew Testerman, Bozeman, MT, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/09/im-on-boat.html">Requested <i>Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World</i></a><br />
theizz, United States<br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/05/you-know-you-can-follow-my-voice.html">Requested <i>Hedwig and the Angry Inch</i></a><br />
Tyler Thibodeaux, Spring, TX, United States<br />
Allison Tooey, California, United States<br />
Matt U, Sydney, Australia<br />
Zev Valancy, Chicago, IL, United States<br />
Tim Van Autreve, Gent, Belgium<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/08/cool-clear-water.html">Requested <i>Manon of the Spring</i></a><br />
Ben Verschoor, New York, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/just-remember-uncanny-valley.html">Requested <i>Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within</i></a><br />
Chris W, Georgia, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/whats-past-is-prologue.html">Requested <i>Out of the Past</i></a><br />
Lisa W, Canberra, Australia<br />
Phil Wiese, San Francisco, CA, United States<br />
K. Wild, California, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/she-didnt-say-much-but-she-said-it-loud.html">Requested <i>Evita</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/04/down-once-more-to-dungeon-of-my-black.html">Also requested <i>The Phantom of the Opera</i> (2004)</a><br />
Bryce Wilson, Austin, TX, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/06/robot-jocks.html">Requested <i>Rebuild of Evangelion</i></a><br />
Caleb Wimble, Philadelpha, PA, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/05/metalhead.html">Requested <i>The Iron Giant</i></a><br />
Nathaniel Winer, Bethesda, MD, United States<br />
Kin Wing Yan, Hong Kong<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/09/simple-pleasures.html">Requested <i>A Simple Life</i></a><br />
Andrew Yankes, Pennsylvania, United States<br />
-<a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/03/you-never-open-your-mouth-until-you.html">Requested <i>Glengarry Glen Ross</i></a><br />
-<a href="http://reviews.antagonyecstasy.com/2016/10/the-wolf-at-door.html">Also requested <i>Tale of Tales</i></a>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-35536466589111821812017-01-02T19:33:00.000-06:002017-01-02T19:33:00.969-06:00THAT'S WHAT AN 8000-POUND MAKO THINKS ABOUT. ABOUT FREEDOM. ABOUT THE DEEP BLUE SEA.<i>A review requested by Patton, with thanks for contributing to the <a href="http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-decade-later.html">Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser</a>.</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBOe0zcAM0P-w9M7g8qxkDQRZKaAgfZCMnNIT6CUJupob09n1ZCyzD8AqUrQRzVVHjtTTWJfUg7Dmqz1Nts0Te8nFi8UfkbShN6VW4je8uPFBdjsTtW6agdGuFSgZtZct9D3m9/s1600/deepbluesea.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBOe0zcAM0P-w9M7g8qxkDQRZKaAgfZCMnNIT6CUJupob09n1ZCyzD8AqUrQRzVVHjtTTWJfUg7Dmqz1Nts0Te8nFi8UfkbShN6VW4je8uPFBdjsTtW6agdGuFSgZtZct9D3m9/s320/deepbluesea.jpeg" width="216" /></a></div>Pop culture knows <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/"><i>Deep Blue Sea</i></a>, from 1999, as the movie in which Samuel L. Jackson delivers a big, operatic summer action movie monologue, and then right when he gets the soaring inspirational part, a giant super-intelligent mako shark jumps out of the water behind him and eats him. This is a worthy thing to be known for, undoubtedly. It is easily the film's cheekiest, most self-aware moment. But to suppose that this is the be-all and end-all of <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> is to do a grave disservice to one of the most delightfully shitty movies of the 1990s; and that was, alongside the 1950s, one of the all-time greatest eras for so-bad-it's-good genre films.<br />
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What we have here, in other words, is an awfully special movie. It is a very bad film, with some of the most wanton attempts to test the limits of the audience's willing suspension of disbelief that I've ever had the privilege to witness. We have here a script that makes a very big deal about having sharks so big that they defy the laws of God and man - the <i>little</i> sharks are 26 feet long - and then puts those sharks in rooms that have flooded with about three and a half feet of water, where they are then able to smoothly glide along with their dorsal fins poking above the surface. Better still, there's a moment in which one of these sharks, in one of these rooms, in just exactly that much water, is able to jump straight up from the surface to mount an attack. And we have also watched these same sharks darting around the corners of hallways (which are, of course, also full of waist-high water), skillfully turning their 26-foot masses through one tight corner after another. There was apparently confusion between "sharks have flexible cartilage for skeletons" and "sharks are non-Newtonian fluids" at some point in the screenwriting stage.<br />
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These are film-breaking problems. This is a giant killer shark movie, after all, and its solitary purpose out in the world is to make us jump in terror at the giant killer sharks. If we are instead distracted by the knowledge that the shark has to be crawling along on its belly and also folded into a U-shape, terror is hardly apt to be the result. Do please note, I have only so far talked about <i>one small thing</i>: the scale of the film's killer sharks. That's one detail out of one and three-quarter hours' worth of details, and absolutely <i>everything</i> in <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> is wholeheartedly misconceived at more or less that same level. It is a movie with a script almost entirely fashioned out of plot holes and inaccuracies, with actual narrative content barely able to peek in around the edges at points. It would be a long and pleasant activity to sit with the screenplay by Duncan Kennedy and Donna & Wayne Powers and annotate every last bit of it to explain just how far off the rails it's going in everything from its biology to its physics to its treatment of character behavior to its motor vehicles to... But we do not have that kind of time nor space available to us.<br />
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Like any killer shark movie, <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> exists entirely within the shadow of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/"><i>Jaws</i></a>, though it owns that debt more pridefully than not. There is, for one thing, absolutely no chance that it was an accident that the three main sharks in <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> die the same way, in the same order, as the three main sharks from <i>Jaws</i>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077766/"><i>Jaws 2</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085750/"><i>Jaws 3-D</i></a> (explosion, electrocution, explosion). There are particular shots that are taken very nearly without alteration from <i>Jaws</i>: a below-the-water shot of a swimmer's legs, a close up of the hero following the shark with a rifle. And the very same Louisiana license plate that came out of one tiger shark in <i>Jaws</i> comes out of a different tiger shark in <i>Deep Blue Sea</i>. But outside of that, the film as a whole goes almost as far as it is possible to do from the well-established and often-copied <i>Jaws</i> formula. In fact, <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> proves to be a Tampering In God's Domain film, not a Nature Run Amok film at all.<br />
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The film's opening scene is certainly its most surprising violation of the clichés of its genres (it will also prove to be the final surprise until the very end, when the "wrong" character dies): a party of drunk young folks on a boat are attacked by a very damn huge shark, and they do <i>not</i> get eaten. Rather, the animal is harpooned by the taciturn ex-con shark security expert, Carter Blake (Thomas Jane, at near-peak levels of Thomas Janiness), who drags it back to the floating WWII surplus submarine dock in the middle of the ocean where a pharmaceutical corporation has been breeding extra-large mako sharks in an effort to increase their brain size. This is the best movie of the 1990s. Now, the incident with the boat, having proven that the mega-makos are able to escape from their enclosure, has cast doubt on this entire enterprise, and so corporate executive Russell Franklin (Jackson) is flying his way to the facility to check in on everything. He arrives on an auspicious day: Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows), the obsessed scientific genius in charge of the research, is ready to prove that injecting giant mako-brain juice into human brain tissue can reverse the progress of Alzheimer's disease. It's an auspicious day for the sharks, as well: today is they day they've been planning, with their illegally genetically-modified genius brains, to hatch their escape into the open ocean, by tricking the humans into systematically flooding the facility while being eaten one by one.<br />
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It's hard to think of a story that's simultaneously more beholden to every predictable, hoary cliché on the books, while also assembling those clichés in a more giddy assemblage of outright madness. Part of the whole point of giant killer animal movie is that there's a basic formula that keeps filmmakers from getting themselves in too much trouble - they are boring, they are often bad, but they are certainly safe. <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> feels like it's constantly daring us to take it seriously, relentelssly increasing the monumental stupidity of the characters and the absurd convolutions of the sharks' behavior. So it's not too much that the sharks will pull a man being airlifted out by a medevac helicopter to drag the copter into the water? What about if then then throw that same man into a huge glass wall to break it and flood the research center control room? <i>And what if he's still, somehow, not dead when this happens?</i> That is the kind of overclocked, sugar-addled enthusiasm with which <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> piles on incidents.<br />
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It's stupid as hell, and also energetic as hell, and in these respects it is perhaps the perfect example director Renny Harlin's overall output: for what is that man's <i>modus operandi</i> if not to compensate for idiotic scripts by making them almost impossible to follow by over-editing and throwing in explosions every place they'll plausibly fit (in <i>Deep Blue Sea</i>, there are even "outrun the fireball" setpieces with the fireball made out of water)? This isn't his best film, which I'd say is probably <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106582/"><i>Cliffhanger</i></a> (a very shitty film to have as your best), but I have absolutely no doubt that it's the most fun; it is the perfect combination of being <i>so</i> stupid that it's funny rather than obnoxious, while also being sufficiently over-the-top in its aesthetic for enough of the time that it never gets boring (the critical failure of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112760/"><i>Cutthroat Island</i></a>). There is a point near the end where the film cuts from a shot looking up the barrel of a gun at LL Cool J to another shot looking up the barrel of a gun at LL Cool J. And then it cuts to <i>a third consecutive shot looking up the barrel of a gun at LL Cool J</i>. It takes unapologetic fearlessness to be <i>that</i> awful at constructing a film.<br />
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Why, then, does <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> round the corner from being acutely terrible to be so acutely terrible that it feels like a joyful celebration of life and cinema? Mostly, I think, how unnecessarily good the movie is in a couple of key ways. One is the staggering, film-bending presence of Stellan Skarsgård as the first person to get eaten by a shark (he is, indeed, the one who is used to pull down the medavac, and thence to break the glass), who brings a feeling of causal European naturalism that the rest of the movie <i>is not</i> ready to deal with. He and Jackson - the other obvious MVP in a cast that includes a bunch of people who are just about perfect to play shark fodder in an overpriced B-movie, though LL Cool J is undeniably a lot of fun - get a lot of dialogue together, including magnificently bad zingers like "What in God's creation...?" / "Oh, not his. Ours", and the way Skarsgård delivers the second line is the strangest thing. Same with "No, sir, for 6.560 seconds, you saw what it was like <i>not</i> to be damned", also delivered to Jackson. These are slurred, casually dismissive, and create such a weird imbalance that the whole movie seems to bend around the performance like a black hole.<br />
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Another big thing is the sharks themselves: played sometimes by crummy 1999 CGI, and played more often by incredibly good animatronics, developed by Walt Conti, who was kind of an animatronics expert for a while there - he's made several sharks in the intervening years, but he got the <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> job because of his work on the titluar snake in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118615/"><i>Anaconda</i></a>. Which has the distinction of being my other favorite creature movie from the 1990s, and not least because of Conti's work. These sharks are <i>too good</i>. They are interesting, they feel plausibly dangerous, they resemble makos barely at all, and they seem <i>thoughtful</i>. They are, despite everything, outstanding movie monsters, and they earn <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> enough goodwill that even when it's fucking terrible, one can't help but root for the movie to haul itself over the finish line.<br />
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I mean, for certain: its completely fucking terrible. I cannot fathom how to make the film any dumber: I can't say "by staging the sharks as slasher movie serial killers" or "by turning the film into a parable about the power of faith", because both of those things already happen. And Harlin's aesthetic is so feverish and blurry that you almost can't call it "bad", since that implies that it's coherent enough to be evaluated. But rare is the terrible film that's this upbeat and delightful and entertaining - it's both one of the worst thrillers of its decade, and honestly, one of my favorite. An ironic favorite through and through, but it counts.<br />
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3/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-10207901569808545502017-01-01T19:22:00.001-06:002017-01-01T19:26:58.633-06:00MOVIES I MISSED IN 2016: A TALKING CAT!?!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGRg4_-wvIvDz6rh3FzytHfIoMs_9dDDejF3ZMG90RfaAtbqghkHGttiCi1A84Y9GnxJNr_BNoWS9vlhhARX9QKq5FllKYAkdVkhCCGSaAZolxhv38gAJhr87s5eHdhnewDwTl/s1600/ninelives.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGRg4_-wvIvDz6rh3FzytHfIoMs_9dDDejF3ZMG90RfaAtbqghkHGttiCi1A84Y9GnxJNr_BNoWS9vlhhARX9QKq5FllKYAkdVkhCCGSaAZolxhv38gAJhr87s5eHdhnewDwTl/s200/ninelives.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>The question is not the obvious one, "why would Kevin Spacey get involved in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4383594/"><i>Nine Lives</i></a>, a movie where his character falls into a coma, only to have his soul transfer into a Norwegian Forest cat named Mr. Fuzzypants, voiced by Spacey in a <i>Garfield</i>-esque inner monologue?" <i>That</i> part isn't hard to figure out at all: Spacey makes awful movies all the time, and at least in this case he could do it sitting in a sound booth. It's just a question of what producer has the incriminating photos on any given week.<br />
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No, the question is, "why <i>everything else</i> about <i>Nine Lives</i>?" It is astonishingly misguided - not <i>bad</i>, not only that. A lot of movies are bad, and a lot of children's movies in particular are <i>very</i> bad. <i>Nine Lives</i> is something else - it is <i>wrong</i>. It is not the kind of bad when untalented people fail to make something good, and not the kind of bad when the people making a film absolutely do not give a shit if it's good or not as long as it's a commercial play - it is the kind of bad that suggests that the creators were actively making choices that would ruin the film both as art and as a desirable object for consumption. Possibly this is what happens when you hand a magical cat movie off to a director who openly brags in the media about how much he hates cats.<br />
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That director being Barry Sonnenfeld, who hasn't ever gotten out of director jail in all the years since <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120891/"><i>Wild Wild West</i></a> emerged as one of the worst summer tentpole movies in history, but still hadn't until now quite sunk down to the indignity of a kids' movie with a hook so shaggy that Disney has already <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111146/">remade</a> it <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0393735/">twice</a> (and let's be fair to <i>Nine Lives</i>: it is utter garbage, but it's better utter garbage than <i>Wild Wild West</i>). He's the leader of a cast and crew making an awe-inspiring number of bad choices, not least of which, of course, was "sign a contract to work on <i>Nine Lives</i>", but I get it, everybody has to eat. Everybody does not, however, have to make something as uniquely off-putting as this fairy tale about a shitty dad who's just a Queens accent away from being Donald Trump, and who learns how to be a better family man by virtue of being thrown off the top of his under-construction skyscraper and then transformed into a hideous CGI abomination.<br />
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Specifically, Spacey plays Tom Brand (and in case you are able to close your eyes and grit your teeth and pretend that the "Tom cat" pun isn't there, the end credits make sure that you notice it), an incomprehensibly rich jackass with a notably younger wife, Lara(Jennifer Garner), an adult son from his previous marriage, David (Robbie Amell), and a daughter just one day shy of her eleventh birthday, Rebecca (Malina Weissman), and absolutely undisguised loathing for all of them. He's also building, in downtown Manhattan, what will become "the tallest skyscraper in the northern hemisphere", a phrase used often enough to be stripped of all meaning, and it is this unusually overt ego trip that has put him into some conflict with all the board members of Firebrand, his company, but mostly the ambitious executive Ian Cox (Mark Consuelos). It's Ian who's responsible for knocking Tom from the top of the building during a rainstorm, and who then starts to work double-time to keep David from coming into his own as the manager of Tom's controlling interest in the company while his father lies in intensive care. But Tom the cat is cunning, and David quickly learns to navigate his way through the corridors of power in Firebrand, and together (though without David realising that his dad is a cat now), they are able to stop Ian and concoct a plan to beat the Chicago developers who are <i>also</i> chasing the "tallest skyscraper in the northern hemisphere" record, and have potentially come up with a dirty trick to beat Firebrand by 60 feet.<br />
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Why, yes, this children's fantasy film <i>does</i> have fucked-up priorities.<br />
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But the story is, truly, a bunch of whatever. Both "man learns to be a better dad through magic bullshit" and "children's movie that accidentally spends all of its energy on corporate politicking" are sufficiently well-established that <i>Nine Lives</i> really doesn't stand out from the pack (it's not even the first movie to cast Christopher Walken as the strange old man who triggers the magic; <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389860/"><i>Click</i></a> got there back in 2006). It's in the execution that this becomes truly objectionable. There is the matter of CGI Mr. Fuzzypants, to begin with; and let me not give you the wrong impression that the CGI is substandard, for it is quite the opposite. When the cat is animated (around half of its overall screen time, I'd guess), it looks almost entirely indistinguishable from the real animals playing the part. That is, indeed, the source of the film's problems. For the things the CGI cat is called upon to do are things that actual cats cannot do: throw a ball around a room, manipulate a pen, open a bottle of scotch, or merely react to events with a knowing, profound look. It is <i>deeply</i> repulsive to watch him do these things: Mr. Fuzzypants's variety of facial expressions alone would be enough to give me waking nightmares for weeks to come, and those aren't even nearly as unsettling as the scene where he's trying to write a note to his wife, flipping around weightlessly despite having perfectly photorealistic texturing. Despite this, the non-stop foleyed-in meows we hear all sound like drunk people in a bar were asked "do cat noises", and then panicked. I think that is not just that Sonnenfeld hated cats, but that he wanted to make every human being who ever came into <i>Nine Lives</i> also hate cats.<br />
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And if the eldritch, obscene horror of Mr. Fuzzypants leaning drunkenly on a garbage can or maliciously grinning as he prepares to piss in his ex-wife's (Cheryl Hines, accidentally giving a performance that invests her character with inner life) handbag wasn't enough to torpedo <i>Nine Lives</i>, then there's every other fucking thing about it. Not the score, by Evgueni & Sacha Galperine. I actually pretty much liked that. It has a sort of indie rock/funk thing going on. But every <i>other</i> fucking thing, including a script by five credited writers that proudly requires Christopher Walken to say say "poopy boxes" instead of "litter pans", and a scene where the Leiber/Stoller R&B standard "Three Cool Cats" is trotted out to score a scene where Mr. Fuzzypants and Rebecca play with each other, completely ignoring the way that the lyrics which are clearly presented with no expurgation offer the unavoidable implication that Tom wishes to seduce his 11-year-old daughter. I beg your pardon, I misspoke. That scene happens <i>twice</i>.<br />
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The film can't even get basic visual representation right: the film is perilously color-corrected to make everything look cheery and completely artificial, so bright and tacky that red dresses appear to glow with nuclear fury, and human flesh itself appears to have transmuted into latex, or vinyl, or something equally far removed from organic chemistry - Spacey is almost neon bronze in his handful of scenes as a person, and I will not willingly speak of the vaseline terrors that make of the expressions of the board members. Outside of a few unexpectedly sharp line deliveries by Spacey right at the start, there's not a solitary moment that isn't both visually grotesque and narratively inept, and only the beautiful live-action cats playing Mr. Fuzzypants when he isn't some kind of fucking mutant ninja make <i>Nine Lives</i> anything resembling a pleasurable moviegoing experience.<br />
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2/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-31210070183672424432016-12-31T22:31:00.000-06:002016-12-31T22:31:07.705-06:00THE LIFE OF PABLO<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwg8R67GCPFOufE7xW8iPBaXwAQb_6I6i7rk-cqJ4NZIPe1f1ORkSRuVKwAaJzEWZzDJmmnIUxOiDxC5hrAe7y_HVeJkWGf-JRbGWCykxKm1-C_Y7h2tiXtCxJoQ34I0za5yq/s1600/neruda.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwg8R67GCPFOufE7xW8iPBaXwAQb_6I6i7rk-cqJ4NZIPe1f1ORkSRuVKwAaJzEWZzDJmmnIUxOiDxC5hrAe7y_HVeJkWGf-JRbGWCykxKm1-C_Y7h2tiXtCxJoQ34I0za5yq/s200/neruda.jpeg" width="139" /></a></div>It's rare enough for a filmmaker in these fallen days to release two major films in one calendar year. It is virtually unprecedented in modern times for both of them to be outright masterpieces, like Pablo Larraín has gifted unto the world in 2016. And both of them coming from the almost invariably shitty genre of the biopic, no less! His mood-piece exploration of the mourning Jacqueline Kennedy, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1619029/"><i>Jackie</i></a>, was the first to hit U.S. theaters by two whole weeks, but the first of the films to premiere was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4698584/"><i>Neruda</i></a>, which first say the light of day at the 2016 Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and it's this earlier film that we'll be turning to now. It's a story involving the great Chilean poet and Communist senator (maybe not in that order) Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco), which is a distinctly different thing than being a story <i>about</i> Neruda, let alone being a biography of Neruda. I don't know that we quite have a word for what it is, exactly.<br />
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Here's the history: Neruda, already a literary icon and leader of the Chilean Left, got himself in trouble in January, 1948, denouncing President González Videla (Alfredo Castro) on the floor of Chilean senate after a major crackdown on striking miners and the outlawing of Communism. Neruda became a hunted man as a result. For most of the year, Neruda and his partner, Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán) were protected by the left-wing underground, as he composed and distributed portions of <i>Canto general</i>, his epic poem on impoverished, politically oppressed life in the Americas that was finally completed in Mexico in 1952. By the end of '48, Neruda was able to escape over the Andes into Argentina, spending the next several years as a political refugee.<br />
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The movie mostly relates the story of Neruda's very bad 1948, or as much of it as can be reasonably packed into 107 minutes. Already, it's as effective and smart as a traditional biopic is going to be: screenwriter Guillermo Calderón does wonderful work carving out one particular slice of Neruda's life and turning it into a single dramatic arc, while also including the usual "people love him in montage" gestures that insist upon the subject's considerable historical importance (I confess that as an English speaker, I've never actually read any of Neruda's poetry, and the film prefers to focus on his personality and politics rather than his writing). It's kind of the best of both worlds, focused enough to have a real honest-to-God plot and generic enough to legitimately celebrate its subject. But anyway, <i>Neruda</i> is <i>not</i> a traditional biopic. It is, in fact, one of the least traditional biopics that I have ever seen, though it hides that fact beneath apparently straightforward scene construction.<br />
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The thing is, Neruda isn't even necessarily the main character in <i>Neruda</i>: that honor, one could readily argue, instead goes to dogged policeman Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), the merciless & mirthless authoritarian who chases the poet from one end of Chile to the other. Here's an interesting fact about Peluchonneau: he didn't exist and has no specific historical analogue: Here's an even more interesting fact: he seems to be aware of his non-existence, and so are the other characters (there's even a line near the end which states this explicitly; the character expressing it might not mean it literally, but we're certainly welcome to take it that way). And <i>now</i> we start to get at why <i>Neruda</i> isn't just very good "for a biopic", but one of the very best biopics of the modern age, and among 2016's greatest contributions to cinema. It's isn't just the story of Neruda's escape from Chile - it is, in a very definite sense, the story about the story of Neruda's escape. Who the author of the story is, is up for debate: Calderón, placing history into a generic framework, decades later? Neruda himself, allowing his formidable literary mind to craft a narrative scenario around his own life as a means of mythologising himself, or perhaps just finding a familiar narrative framework to understand what's happening to him?<br />
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For one of the things we learn about the poet, or at least one of the things that the movie had decided to invent about him, is that he was a great fan of pulp detective fiction. And Peluchonneau isn't just an implacable cop: he's a proper hard-boiled detective, narrating the whole movie in crisp, choppy lines of tough-guy dialogue, with a bitter edge of unfunny irony that he surrounds himelf with. García Bernal (whose last great performance was in another of Larraīn's many films about Chilean political history, the wonderful <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059255/"><i>No</i></a> from 2012) is terrific, insofar as one can be "terrific" in a part with such tightly constrained requirements: all but completely unrecognisable behind a pencil mustache, the actor is a block of ice, barely flexing his facial muscles away from their hyper-serious poses, coming across like a Fascist action figure more than a man. At any rate, he is self-evidently a crime novel archetype in a film made out of real-life figures, which is perhaps Larraín's commentary on Chilean authoritarianism as much as a metnarrative flourish.<br />
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Peluchonneau is the keystone to the whole movie: his narration covers the real-life matter with the snarling attitude of <i>film noir</i>, and that shift alone dictates most of what makes <i>Neruda</i> so utterly fascinating. It is the literary biopic as crime thriller, <i>and</i> it manages to carry off that baffling and beautiful generic hybridisation without giving up on the unblinking political analysis that has always been Larraín's calling card, reliably circling back to the oppressed and indigent as the natural company for the literary genius, and his poetry as a radical act of democracy (near the end, it even manages to nod, prophet-like, to the specter of Pinochet, the director's great phantom antagonist). Not that it's not perfectly satisfactory as a straight biopic! Gnecco is impeccably-cast as a Neruda doppelgänger, and gives a great performance on its own terms besides: there is a passionate liveliness to the way he moves through spaces and declaims lines, and it's more than easy to understand this man as a politically-minded artist who'd devote his life to protecting and praising the immiserated, the disenfranchised, and the besieged. There's a bit of Falstaff in Gnecco's performance, without any of the moral turpitude. If the only thing one wanted out of the film was an evocation of a larger-than-life artist, <i>Neruda</i> would ably provide it.<br />
<br />
It provides so much more, though. The genre-mixing, obviously, which makes the film rather a great deal more pleasurable than it feels like it should have any right to be, while also justifying Sergio Armstrong's dazzling cinematography, which is <i>noir-</i>like in its dramatic shadows and shafts of light peering through windows, but also dusts the Chilean countryside and brothels and homes where the action takes place in a sepia-touched haze of time, memory, and populist nostalgia. The blurred line between genres, like the air of metanarrative, also deepens our sense of Neruda-the-character, if not necessarily the historical Neruda, showing him active and complicit in the construction of his own story by virtue of narrativising himself, and, in some sense, constructing his own alter ego and dark mirror in the form of Peluchonneau, with whom he is so neatly connected by editor Hervè Schneid (there is some real nervy cutting in the film, not just between the two parallel plotlines, but even within Neruda's on thread, smearing the line between private and public behavior, between inner and outer life). The film emerges as not just the story of one man's politics and poetry, but of the mindset that it takes to be that poet-politician in the first place, and the willingness to understand the world in literary terms. That, on top of being a rollicking thriller that's enjoyable simply as brainy entertainment. There's a level of self-satisfaction about all this that not everybody is going to love, and I kind of wish that the film was being a bit less direct in how it mounts its arguments (it's highly literate, but rather more prosy than poetic, if you follow what I mean). But whatever, it's a great piece of cinema and a great attempt to engage with history and pro-people politics that remain no less important in 2016 than in 1948.<br />
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9/10 Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-64142289771733117992016-12-30T20:32:00.003-06:002016-12-30T20:32:39.709-06:00REVIEWS IN BRIEF: MEDIOCRE FILMS GAINING AWARDS TRACTION<a name="captain"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTEXh8sxB7ZgJwtcQBed0okJGMeSDFCJ-eoiUV_1T_ARPcxO6uOYYzCpkBkydWwRuE3sc5xVGdsQPf2rC7yRMpiSL3tplOPg3js-VJv-dTdhHWWWADtAa83xnCk6cLHW8yoJNK/s1600/captainfantastic.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTEXh8sxB7ZgJwtcQBed0okJGMeSDFCJ-eoiUV_1T_ARPcxO6uOYYzCpkBkydWwRuE3sc5xVGdsQPf2rC7yRMpiSL3tplOPg3js-VJv-dTdhHWWWADtAa83xnCk6cLHW8yoJNK/s200/captainfantastic.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>If <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/"><i>Captain Fantastic</i></a> had come out nine years earlier, you'd suppose it was a minimally inspired <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449059/"><i>Little Miss Sunshine</i> </a>knock-off: a colorfully eccentric family travels across These United States in a vehicle unapologetically nostalgic for the 1960s (a refurbished school bus named "Steve", decked out in hippie decor, in this case), with a misfit teenager (George MacKay even looks like an ersatz Paul Dano) and cute little moppets behaving a bit too much like adults without having a clue what they're actually saying. Instead, it premiered at Sundance a whole ten years and three days later than <i>Little Miss Sunshine</i>, and thus rather than feeling like a halfway-adequate trend-hopper, it more resembles some kind of misplaced archaism, a Quirky Indie Crowdpleaser™ that's years too late for the party.<br />
<br />
The quirk about this particular family is that the dad, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen), and the mom, Leslie (a barely-seen Trin Miller), were so invested in the anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist words of the great left-wing philosophers that they decided to raise their brood of six children in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, living off the land and eschewing every last trapping of modern American culture, like television or prepared food. But Leslie suffered from bipolar disorder, not helped out by her isolation from the world, and she had to leave the family behind for a time. While out in the world, she committed suicide. Now, Ben and the kids, ranging from 18-year-old Bo (MacKay) down to little Nai (Charlie Shotwell), are off on a road trip to attend Leslie's funeral, where they shall enforce her last wishes (to be cremated in a no-big-deal ceremony) against the wishes of her normie Christian parents (Frank Langella and Ann Dowd).<br />
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The script, by second-time writer-director Matt Ross, plays around with a lot of big words and famous leftist names, but it's strictly an affectation ("Trotskyist" qualifies as a deep cut), mostly so for the ostensible pleasure of watching little children mouth boilerplate anti-capitalist sentiment. But the film isn't terribly interesting in exploring the ramifications of its ideas at all, nor digging into politics in more than the most superficial way: the ultra-famous (by the standards of academic philosophers) Noam Chomsky is the only living writer to be so much as named-dropped. And it's <i>certainly</i> not interested in hosting a debate, propping up Traditional Values in the form of Langella, or Ben's dopey suburban brother and sister-in-law (played by Steve Zahn and Kathryn Hahn), only long enough for them to be smugly shown-up, or outright ignored.<br />
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No, the name of the game here is strictly "watch as the free-spirited dad defends his kids, then realises he's possibly fucking his kids up, then decides that nope, everything is aces", with the usual artificial and quickly-resolved roadblocks that provide the least-possible obstacle to the audience's ability to enjoy the characters being their adorable selves. It's all slightly intolerable, salvaged minimally by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's beautiful shots of the Washington woods, and given a far-too-committed performance by Mortensen, who has decided to treat his role with respect and gravity that make the whole movie feel much more serious and consequential (the same is even more true of Langella, who is so earnest in his portrayal of a concerned grandfather that almost threatens to make this a genuine discussion of the moral dimension of child-rearing), though I'm honestly not sure if the film is better off because of it or not. Otherwise, this is all forced whimsy that did something I wasn't aware could happen: it made me want to slap people upside the head for how much they like Chomsky.<br />
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5/10<br />
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<a name="hidden"></a><div style="text-align: center;">* * * * *</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNrsO9cCYaO7V8XMKFY9bF4IcboUR4F60x0UTM357GTLVfYtwtXooTMcymgrnPfJhwMXseQyUytK_TPZksxps6WVTBVVWouR37Wrd5pOndwG9RUFVdFYoT626QVLrciKvQBvVQ/s1600/hiddenfigures.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNrsO9cCYaO7V8XMKFY9bF4IcboUR4F60x0UTM357GTLVfYtwtXooTMcymgrnPfJhwMXseQyUytK_TPZksxps6WVTBVVWouR37Wrd5pOndwG9RUFVdFYoT626QVLrciKvQBvVQ/s200/hiddenfigures.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>The trailer for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/"><i>Hidden Figures</i></a> included a line of dialogue so utterly wretched in its flat-footed expository gracelessness that I maintained some hope it was one of those things that was only ever shot to give maximum possible clarity to the ads. Silly me. In fact, the version of the line that shows up in the first seven minutes of the film is <i>even worse</i>: "Three Negro women are chasing a white police office down the highway in Hampton, Virginia, 1961. Ladies, that there is a God-ordained miracle." I would dearly love to report that this is as bad as gets, but no, that's pretty much the level at which the entire screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi (the latter also directs) operates. Anything that can be explained to the audience in tin-eared, hyper-literal dialogue will be, usually twice.<br />
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In other words, it's the end of December and we're getting a painfully earnest paint-by-numbers biopic about people who were almost beyond a shadow of a doubt more interesting than the film ever suggests. Same as it ever was, with the not-incidental detail that in this case, the film's subjects were three African-American women, which was a double strike against their prospects for showing their exemplary skills with math and engineering the halls of white male enclave NASA, in the early days of the space race. If we're going to be subjected to the milquetoast-to-shitty likes of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/"><i>A Beautiful Mind</i></a> (which the film strongly evokes in its opening scene, earning my immediate ire) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/"><i>The Imitation Game</i></a> every autumn, we might as well ask that they represent a fully diverse cross-section of humanity, but equality in mediocrity is hardly the stuff of inspirational cinema.<br />
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The real-life story <i>is</i> pretty damn great, at least. The chief among our hidden figures was Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), one of the critical math geniuses who was instrumental in calculating flight trajectories for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and was considered to be the best of the best to such a degree that John Glenn, at least, refused to launch until he'd been assured that she had personally okayed the figures for his flights. The others were Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), who was primarily responsible for integrating digital computers into the NASA workflow, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who became the first African-American to complete the training required for high-level engineering work at the agency. The trio of actors are generally very good at inhabiting these people, with Henson especially standing out at combining the vaguely distracted look that connotes "knows math" in movies with a barely-visible but omnipresent anger at the unfair, bigoted world she has to inhabit; as the comic relief in a generally comic film, Monáe is even better here than in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4975722/"><i>Moonlight</i></a> (with a substantially easier part, to be fair), and between the two films has officially established herself as an interesting movie actor. Spencer is, basically, just playing the Octavia Spencer Character, but she does so well. <br />
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The issue is not the characters, then, but the fact that the characters don't really <i>do</i> anything. Their historical achievements are more about who they were than the specific actions they performed, which is a common enough problem with biopics; the bigger problem still is that their achievements were all math-related, and I think we've more or less proven by this point that math is boring in movies (the opening scene of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249241/"><i>Werckmeister Harmonies</i></a> notwithstanding). <i>Hidden Figures</i> has enough of a sense of humor, and a strong enough bench of supporting players - Mahershala Ali, Kirsten Dunst, Kevin Costner as the increasingly stock "Kevin Costner is the Good White Guy" boss - that at least it's more entertaining than <i>The Imitation Game</i>, which really had no damn excuse to be as tepid and tedious as it was. The core problem is the same, though: people working figures <i>isn't visually interesting</i>, and there's nothing in Melfi's dreary, center-punched compositions to compensate for that. Every year needs its suffocating middlebrow Oscarbait, and <i>Hidden Figures</i> is 2016's; I hope the internet is right that this will be of some social benefit, because it sure as hell hasn't got any artistic merit.<br />
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6/10<br />
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<a name="nocturnal"></a><div style="text-align: center;">* * * * *</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wzKZb95d779A9aMvQR1HALCMLPLJnD6PtEE1TGr3lWG6IjTs7RQzQVvb7KjDD8Ff8c4zkEFOFdZE4lznG8WJJmnp-kbAKxqdkSDmVKjazFOf2rYd2rKXMGrD-ycFZTDDgliJ/s1600/nocturnalanimals.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wzKZb95d779A9aMvQR1HALCMLPLJnD6PtEE1TGr3lWG6IjTs7RQzQVvb7KjDD8Ff8c4zkEFOFdZE4lznG8WJJmnp-kbAKxqdkSDmVKjazFOf2rYd2rKXMGrD-ycFZTDDgliJ/s200/nocturnalanimals.jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>The opening credits of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4550098/"><i>Nocturnal Animals</i></a> feature several obese women, naked but for drum majorette hats, dancing in slow motion. Nothing that resembles this ever happens anywhere else in the whole movie. I can think of a few different explanations for why director Tom Ford would have seen fit to include this, none of which reflect well on him, most of which involve the assumption that slow-motion naked fat women are <i>ipso facto</i> repulsive beyond the means of language to describe it.<br />
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That's probably right, then; <i>Nocturnal Animals</i> is animated by a largely morbid revulsion at human beings that has disguised itself in a thick lacquer of outlandishly beautiful Seamus McGarvey cinematography. And it <i>is</i> a beautiful movie, with a lengthy nighttime sequence about a quarter of the way through that keeps providing one powerhouse frame after another. There is, mind you, absolutely no connection between the beauty of these images and <i>anything</i> else in the movie; they are pretty for the sake of being pretty. Compared to this, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1974419/"><i>The Neon Demon</i></a> is a model for thematically tight, narratively-motivated imagery.<br />
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We are, in short, right back in the territory of The Fashion Designer Who Wanted to Direct, seven years after Ford demonstrated a virtually complete lack of any understanding of how human beings think or feel in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1315981/"><i>A Single Man</i></a>. <i>Nocturnal Animals</i> does the job of erasing that "virtually"; <i>A Single Man</i> at least had convincing homoeroticism, while this film about a sexless straight woman has nothing at all. The layers-upon-layers plot finds book editor Susan Morrow (Amy Adams, choking to death), bored with the high-class New York art scene and barely on speaking terms with her asshole husband Hutton (Armie Hammer, fully a decade too young for the demands of the part), receiving the manuscript to her ex-husband's novel, <i>Nocturnal Animals</i>. Reading it, she discovers that he's based the material on their relationship, or maybe that's just how she interprets it: we see in great detail the imagery she conjures up as she reads the grotty tale of Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose wife Laura (Isla Fisher, looking enormously like Adams) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber) are raped and killed by a redneck drifter, Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing Yosemite Sam). This drives him to revenge, with the aid of the increasingly lawless lawman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon). While growing increasingly entangled with the narrative, Susan starts to flash back to her happier days with Edward, her ex, who is <i>also</i> played by Gyllenhaal.<br />
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There's something in this, though less than Ford (who also adapted the screenplay from Austin Wright's novel <i>Tony and Susan</i>) thinks there is - the "character reads themselves into a work of art" thing isn't exactly new (for a more sustained <i>and</i> prettier incarnation of mostly the same idea, I'd point you all to the wonderful and criminally underrated <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/"><i>The Fall</i></a>) It's been decades since "ennui of the idle rich" movies have had any real meat on their bones, and <i>Nocturnal Animals</i> is additionally hobbled by the generally inert performances - an Antonioni film this ain't, though it's crying out for that kind of icy control. Shannon is the solitary bright spot in the cast, and to be clear, he's <i>really</i> great, playing his Western-ish sheriff with a kind of helpless morbid curiosity about the sordid affair he's gotten involved with, driven less by a sense of justice than a sense of repulsed fascination. Which is exactly the correct attitude to adopt to the narrative within the book, which feels less like literary fiction and more like a particularly tawdry attempt to ape Cormac McCarthy.<br />
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Still, credit where it's due: Ford turns out to be kind of an outstanding thriller director, and the parts of the movie where it is the most focused on boilerplate genre theatrics are easily the most entertaining, exciting, and all-around well-made. If only the film wasn't so way the hell up its own ass with metanarrative shenanigans that are only fitfully interesting and never emotionally resonant, and just committed to celebrating the tacky viciousness of the story-within-the-story, this might even be a fun, stylish, disreputable thriller. Ford sure as hell knows how to assemble a striking frame, after all. Damn pity he can't pace a story or dissect a character worth a damn.<br />
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3/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-2498970470599863472016-12-29T23:58:00.002-06:002016-12-29T23:58:48.876-06:00FATHER KNOWS BEST<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjahvoZby9VbtU4FT2n88bMmOs1yR0g2zWC4wBQUCE464yQVhQcyVBwBSe55rQefQDKvS2Kyp75nnRuNvfSG8QU4HLNNUeLM3G1wpuQQzPkQdZW_9Y-UCDg1ipmucviqnrbavVO/s1600/fences.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjahvoZby9VbtU4FT2n88bMmOs1yR0g2zWC4wBQUCE464yQVhQcyVBwBSe55rQefQDKvS2Kyp75nnRuNvfSG8QU4HLNNUeLM3G1wpuQQzPkQdZW_9Y-UCDg1ipmucviqnrbavVO/s200/fences.jpeg" width="127" /></a></div>"It's stagey" say so many of the critics, in regard to the long-awaited film adaptation of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2671706/"><i>Fences</i></a>, August Wilson's magnificent 1983 play about a former Negro Leagues player emotionally terrorising everyone around him. "It feels like you're just watching Denzel Washington and Viola Davis doing the play, just as they for 114 performances back in 2010". Oh, if <i>only</i>. A film that did absolutely nothing but let us sit in rapt awe as Washington and Davis swung through Wilson's grand dialogue and embittered characters in long wide shots would be, maybe not <i>the best</i>, but it would certainly be better than the <i>Fences</i> that was actually made with Washington as director (his third film in that capacity, the first in nine years).<br />
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It is, by and large, exactly the movie any reasonable person could possibly want it to be, with the dream cast of all dream casts, but it tries just a little too hard in the worst possible way to be "cinematic". In practice, this means that the editing, credited to Hughes Winborne but certainly encouraged by the way Washington and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen set up their shots, carves the movie into a frenzy of barely-connected shots that merrily hop around the actors with no care towards the rhythm of the dialogue or the 180° line. The word "choppy" gets thrown around to describe editing a lot, usually without being defined terribly well, but <i>this</i>, this is what choppy editing looks like. Intense, high-impact moments are broken into three or four pieces, with the camera jabbing at poor Viola Davis like a horde of knife-wielding maniacs. It's astonishingly disruptive to a movie that, thanks to its theatrical inheritance, should really be focused as much as humanly possible on the continuity of moments, both for the real-time effect of the narrative, and for the pleasure of seeing great actors tear through minutes and minutes of great material without a safety net.<br />
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That aside, <i>Fences</i> is a completely solid, and in no way aesthetically inspired, translation of incredibly strong source material into movie form. The adapted script is credited to Wilson, who prepared a draft prior to his 2005 death, and it's an open secret that Tony Kushner took a swipe at it. But I'm damned if I can tell what of substance changed other than re-positioning some scenes inside of a house rather than in its backyard, or in the most dramatic shift of all, <i>moving the action to the front porch</i>. What remains is one of the great American plays of the last 50 years, my own personal favorite entry in Wilson's ten-part cycle exploring the African-American experience of the 20th Century with once-every-decade dramas set in Pittsburgh. <i>Fences</i> is the one set in the 1950s, which means that the Civil Rights Movement is just starting to make its presence felt on a national level, and it is just possible to start to see some sliver of hope that a more equal society is coming. That's not terribly exciting to 53-year-old garbageman Troy Maxson (Washington), who was one of the greats during his time playing baseball, but who peaked years too early to take advantage when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. His general attitude since then seems to be that if he couldn't succeed, than nobody else had damn well better succeed either, and from this bitterness stems his antagonistic relationship to his 17-year-old son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), a high school football player being scouted by colleges. He has even less patience for his much older son from a previous relationship, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), who he insultingly regards as a shiftless freeloader. This general hatred of himself and his family life extends, perhaps most bleakly of all, to his wife Rose (Davis), who remains mostly silent in the face of Troy's non-stop pontificating, but it is clear that her silence is the result of many long years of joylessness and regret.<br />
<br />
This is American Naturalist Theater 101 in a lot of ways, just scooping up a collection of characters at right angles to one another - the remainder of the cast consists of Troy's co-worker and best friend Jim Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who also acts somewhat as his conscience, and Troy's brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), badly out of touch with reality after receiving a head wound in the war, with his government payout serving as the seed money for Troy's house - and watching them collide when placed into a tight physical space with all of their mutual acrimony wound up. The key thing about <i>Fences</i> is that it's a very near perfect incarnation of that aesthetic, marred only by an epilogue that weirdly ends up leaving the film less whole & resolved than it would have been without it. The way that social change keeps dancing around the edges of the drama without ever asserting itself as the main point of the drama ends up feeling vastly more true to life <i>and</i> more politically astute than more naked social commentary ever could have.<br />
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And of course the characters are superb: Wilson's gift for sketching out years of shared backstory from just the words people use to address each other is the foundation for a multi-part character study of the highest order. Troy is a magnificent theatrical figure, prone to launching into endless monologues driven by passion rather than a sense of what point he's trying to make or where he'll end up, full of nastiness and rage that make him impossible to like, but so completely fleshed out in his motivations and the damage that has been done to him that we can't simply write him off. Washington is beyond-great in the role, which I'd be pretty willing to call his best-ever screen performance - he obviously knows the material inside and out, yet his acting is full of a constant sense of discovery, like even he doesn't quite know what mad depths Troy is going to plunge into next, with every line delivery feeling like a combination of improv and divinely-inspired prophecy. He makes us believe in Troy without playing for our sympathy or even, necessarily, our understanding. It's a piece of theatrical acting toned down <i>just</i> right for the movie screen, and worthy of every accolade that's apt to come his way. There's not a single wrong turn in the cast at all, of course - for the obvious reasons, including the second-largest part and the second-biggest movie career, Davis stands out, in a role that is mostly bottled-up reaction after bottled up reaction, letting nothing but her increasingly stormy expressions clue us in to what's going on, right up until she finally starts to lash out with her own vibrant reams of prose, but after Washington, I don't know that I'd even have it in me to rank the performances. Henderson, a stage actor for the most part, exudes friendly warmth but you can see in the set of his jaw and his eyes where the hard steel lies beneath that warmth, and Adepo is a proper triumph in his first major film role, taking the stock material of the script's most clichéd role (sullen teen who silently hates his dad and chafes at parental authority) and turns it into the most raw expression of bare emotion in a film where baring emotion is the whole damn point.<br />
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Of course, we can always long for a <i>better</i> film version of <i>Fences</i>; one that has any visual aesthetic to speak of that actually pulls out the material rather than simply recording it, for starters. But capturing this set of performances is absolutely enough to justify the fact that this is the version we've got. The material lacks the emotional presence of live theater, of course, and it's a play calculated to take full advantage of that presence, but if <i>Fences</i> was doomed to be made into an awards-season prestige picture, I really can't imagine how it could have turned out more satisfying than this.<br />
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8/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-23244682211907051062016-12-29T16:09:00.001-06:002016-12-30T00:03:11.479-06:00POETRY IN MOTION<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3IzVL1eEAvgpRN6Pk5fyM6mtJq2_ihLp27I_6JVmRr6hkyDSCM5ejU6GYRX1uGCZu2qy79ecRYz_WV2euZk6ZXo5UxQ0v12CzX6cJL833fdLJng8GfaTP4VRmnnD7cuCnjyg/s1600/paterson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3IzVL1eEAvgpRN6Pk5fyM6mtJq2_ihLp27I_6JVmRr6hkyDSCM5ejU6GYRX1uGCZu2qy79ecRYz_WV2euZk6ZXo5UxQ0v12CzX6cJL833fdLJng8GfaTP4VRmnnD7cuCnjyg/s200/paterson.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>Only a director as reliably extraordinary as Jim Jarmusch could make a movie as sensitive and heartbreaking as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5247022/"><i>Paterson</i></a> and have it feel vaguely disappointing. I cannot speak for any other fans of the director's work, but what I like most about his now twelve narrative features is how the best of them seriously interrogate and challenge the basic assumptions and formulas of narrative storytelling, even in the apparent guise of building a straightforward genre exercise. He happens to be coming off of two films that have done this particularly aggressively: 2009's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135092/"><i>The Limits of Control</i></a> (inarguably his "hardest" movie), and 2013's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714915/"><i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i></a> (which I greatly underestimated when it was new, and I harbor some hope I'm doing the same thing with <i>Paterson</i>), which makes it all the more upsetting that <i>Paterson</i> isn't just more conventional than that pair of uniquely unconventional experiments; it seems possible to me that this is the most conventional feature Jarmusch has ever made.<br />
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That's absolutely not to say that he's "sold out" or some damn thing, and by any reasonably objective standard, <i>Paterson</i> is a glory: a striking character study written with intelligence, performed with uniquely subtle sensitivity, and making outstanding use of a particular location by drawing upon both its geography and cultural makeup. That location being Paterson, New Jersey, a city of some significance not just historically, but artistically: long before Jarmusch set his sights on it, poet William Carlos Williams wrote his own <i>Paterson</i>, teasing out the city as a representation of all America. Jarmusch's <i>Paterson</i> doesn't have nearly such airy intentions: instead, it's a deep dive into the life of one man over one week. His name is also Paterson, and he's a bus driver played by Adam Driver, which is a nimble bit of doubling that was almost certainly a coincidence, but ties in nicely with everything else that the movie is doing.<br />
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For as it turns out, Jarmusch's <i>Paterson</i> is a descendant of Williams's <i>Paterson</i> in more than just setting. As has been done a few times, but not recently that I can think of and not in such a thoroughgoing way, the film is structured according to the principles of poetry, not narrative. Which is to say, it's long on imagery and longer on what we might call rhetorical devices, including repetition and parallelism - the basic unit of <i>Paterson</i>-the-movie is the single day, always beginning with the same shot of Paterson-the-man and his girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) lying in bed, and generally proceeding through the same order of events, though the specific details are always a touch different. The exact cadence of his conversations with his supervisor Donny (Rizwan Manji) shifts, he eavesdrops on a different conversation between passengers on his bus, he encounters different sets of twins, or doppelgängers, or whatever we want to make of the film's extensive population of individuals who precisely resemble each other. Perhaps we're not even supposed to assume that these people and conversations and encounters all literally exist, but that they're simply extensions of Paterson's brain, visual representations of how he thinks about the world. Because he's also a poet, our Paterson, and <i>Paterson</i> is mostly a film about how he thinks about the things he encounters before transforming them into writing.<br />
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It would be extremely easy for the film to belabor this, as a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048356/"><i>Marty</i></a>-style "the working class has a <i>soul</i>, man" affair. Thank God Almighty that it doesn't. In fact, Jarmusch barely registers that this could be regarded as any kind of surprise at all; it's simply who Paterson is. Driver plays the role with an extremely satisfying lack of fuss or gilded soulfulness, which proves to be a godsend for the movie; with no special pleading that we should regard Paterson as any kind of prophet or philosopher, the film doesn't get tangled up in grandiose statements about what art is or does, how it's made, how it's consumed. Instead, we're invited to regard poetry as an act, rather than a belief system - a miraculously unromantic notion that treats poem-writing with far more dignity than all the movies that have, swooning, sketched it out as a thunderbolt of inspiration. We see Paterson tinker and labor, attempting to reformat his emotional experiences into words, as an act of communication and of self-analysis. Driver's thoughtful, slightly perturbed facial expressions are perfectly attenuated to increase this sense, allowing him the yearning soul of a poet without losing sight of the concrete facts of the town of Paterson, the house and the bed and the amazingly expressive, contemplative bulldog Marvin (posthumous Palme Dog winner Nellie) who lives with Paterson and Laura, and is by any reasonable yardstick the film's third most interesting and well-realised character.<br />
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<i>Paterson</i> is, in short, a feature-length exploration of the linkages between routine, unexceptional daily life and the creation of art, and the kind of personality it takes to transform one into the other. It does this incredibly well, not just through its regimented structure but also its equally repetitive and formulaic visuals, which have adopted the status of punctuation marks - never periods, but always semicolons and commas and the like - by the time the film ends. The few dramatically unexceptional events depicted in the film are, in this scheme, like the unexpected bursts of imagery that give a poem its emotional force - the sensual "they were delicions / so sweet / and cold" that forcefully pays off the quotidian "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox", to use the example of the one William Carlos Williams poem that shows up prominently in the film's script.<br />
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The extraordinarily persuasive everyday-ness is so strong, in fact, that it's a crushing disappointment when Jarmusch abandons it on the last two days of his week; without giving away what happens, <i>Paterson</i> very swiftly becomes exactly the story you would predict, with exactly the clichéd crisis that you'd expect this movie was leading up to if it was some hokey, sentimental bullshit about the striving power of the poet's heart in the face of setbacks. I'm not going to go all the way around to "the ending ruins <i>Paterson</i>", especially because <i>the ending</i> is quite good, with a Japanese tourist (Nagase Masatoshi) on hand to return this to the realm of Jarmusch's more characteristically wry absurdism (among other things, the character is an apparent nod back to the director's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097940/"><i>Mystery Train</i></a>). It is <i>the climax</i> that almost ruins <i>Paterson</i>, turning it into something trite and obvious and overdone, and along with the handful of dangling concepts and inexplicable moments, it's enough to make a by-all-means very great film feel like it got something small but critical wrong.<br />
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9/10Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com0