Rent
(Chris Columbus, 2005)
I stand so far outside of understanding what the hell is going on here. This is not made for me and certainly doesn't bring me into the fold.
Memoirs of a Geisha
(Rob Marshall, 2005)
Maybe I would care about this if the people spoke Japanese, but as it stands it feels like the actors don't know what they're saying. Things fall apart from there.
Walk The Line
(James Mangold, 2005)
People like to hear songs that they know. Reese Witherspoon does her best work since Freeway. It sucks less than Ray (which sucks so much), but it's still a mess.
Derailed
(Mikael Håfström, 2005)
Satisfying like a set of Legos and just as nourishing. Don't eat Legos.
I'm not even going to try to keep this organized. Some thoughts on Peter Jackson's King Kong:
- King Kong (1933) is, I hear, Peter Jackson's favorite movie. The concept of wanting to remake your favorite movie (or even a movie you moderately enjoy on any level) is beyond comprehension. There is no way my brain can understand the reasons that this movie was made. It reminds me of Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake. But Gus Van Sant is nutty, and his film was doomed both artistically and financially from its inception, so in a lot of ways it makes MORE sense.
- I kind of feel like this is a $200,000,000 piece of fan fiction.
- Digital lens flair makes me feel like the john that asked the hooker to wear his wife's pajamas.
- Peter Jackson likes a good wall. He's into walls. Big walls, ancient walls, and preferably walls that are, at one point or another, ablaze.
- My favorite movie is Seven Samurai. I think it's damn near perfect. And there's no way I would ever want to remake it. And if I were to remake it, I wouldn't set it in Japan. I would do something crazy with it and make it my own. I'd have the samurai be superheroes, and make sure it was an all baby cast. It would be called The Adorables. Don't steal that. That's my sweet sweet brain sugar flowing.
- Naomi Watts makes me want to cease MY chest-thumping, dinosaur ravaging ways as well.
- If 1933 Kong fought 2005 Kong in a cage match battle royale, 1933 Kong would win (even though he was only an 18 inch model) because he existed. 2005 Kong doesn't exist and never did.
- Man, this story would actually make an awesome 100 minute B-movie. Maybe we could remake this King Kong as a... let's see... how about they remake it as if it were actually from 1933, and even digitally correct the film so that it looks like it's from the thirties? They could even digitally animate Kong as if were a model, and CGI in some old time actors like Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot. Man, wouldn't that just be the ultimate? That would be such an improvement on the original remake. Has anybody pitched it to Peter Jackson?
- CGI has jumped the shark. Jack Black's Carl Denham is a filmmaker so passionate about shooting on location and capturing reality that he risks not only his career, but his life and the lives of his crew. "No one's going to think they're fake," he says of dinosaurs as he hand cranks his camera, fever in his eyes. And yet... aah. Does no one see the sadness of this whole affair?
I was so pleased about the very notion of this movie that it took me a few days to figure out what I'd actually seen. I mean... c'mon. Big gay cowboys in love! What better "fuck you" to the these-colors-don't-run-except-from-two-dudes-kissing America? And that's all well and good, but I also knew that this movie needed to be a lot more than just "that gay cowboy movie". If it was going to be anything but novelty, it needed to be a real live movie. We can worry about changing hearts and minds later (although the very fact that any hearts and minds need changing is fucking AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHAAAHHHAAHHHHHHHH I want to die and kill and die). But first, let's make a damn movie.
The fact is, the nature of the film's central archetypes is what's so exciting about it. Gay cowboys! Ha! Let's go see that gay cowboy movie! That's what puts butts in seats. But, as I say, what about the movie?
Heath Ledger is perfectly cast, Jake Gyllenhaal less so. But both give good performances. It seems at first that the cinematography, with its vistas and Ameri-scapes (!), is going to smother everything like an underpaid nursing home janitor, but it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is that we get to live with Ennis and Jack.
The film doesn't have many easy "forbidden love" scenes. We don't get a scene where Randy Quaid, as a hateful redneck, follows them out of the bar with a gun in his hand and hate in his eyes. In fact, there's very little "homophobia" in the film. Randy Quaid's character sure doesn't approve, and wants nothing to do with it, but that's almost the extent of it. These characters can barely define what it is they hate. They simply know what they've always known. These are not people who are currently engaged in a national dialogue about marriage rights or civil unions. We don't get any easy villains, which would be so easy for your standard gay cowboy movie. That's the most courageous thing about Brokeback Mountain, and it crystalizes with the fact that Ennis' greatest opponent is himself.
I don't want to say that they're courageous performances, because that's a cliché and at the end of the day the dudes are actors. They act. Fuck 'em. But they're good performances, especially everything on Brokeback itself. Unfortunately, there are a few distracting missteps (a heartbreaking reveal in the second act garnered belly laughs from the audience, and Anne Hathaway's hair and makeup is like a visit from a different movie).
It's after we leave Brokeback that the film starts to suffer from a certain biopicness; we live 20-plus years with these characters, and we only have time for the greatest hits of self-loathing cowboy love. Any movie that seriously follows characters over decades is already fighting an uphill battle, but Brokeback fights valiantly, and in the end it's at least a moral victory, if not a complete blowout.
The love that lies at the film's center is well drawn, and through Ennis we almost get to see love again for the first time. I guess that's the point of romance movies. What the hell do I know? I think that the film's greatest accomplishment is that the novelty wears off quickly, and you stop watching "gay cowboys in love" and start watching Ennis and Jack, who share something new and exciting and dangerous. Like all love...
Haha see what I did there?
There's something I'm told that you have to know about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Apparently, keep it under your hat, but the book's author, C.S. Lewis, intended the novel to be an allegorical companion to the New Testament. Perhaps you've heard that Disney is marketing their first Narnia film to the church crowd that made The Passion so successful. Perhaps you've heard that Aslan the lion is our Jesus figure, making a similar sacrifice in the film. But calm down, calm down, don't worry. It's all marketing. Narnia is certainly less zealous than The Matrix, though I guess it's not as chilled-out-let's-smoke-weed-with-this-gray-haired-old-wizard-and-go-smote-a-Balrog as Middle-Earth. But who cares? Forgiveness and sacrifice are not exclusive to the Bible, and Lewis's novel is powerful in its simplicity and engaging in its fantasy. It's more pleasant and palatable than Lord of the Rings, and often a lot more fun.
And then there is this movie. It follows the novel's plot point-by-point, but director Andrew Adamson (and, I'm sure, the Disney suits) have dictated a thoroughly modern cinematic language for the film, very little of which adheres to the lazy, comforting feel of the novel's narrative. No, instead, cinematic Narnia is just as intense as Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, complete with rip-roaring final battle for the good of the world.
I don't mean to fault the film for its departure from source material. Does it work as a film? The answer is no, and the primary reason is CGI. Aslan the lion is, save for very few close-ups, a completely digital creation, and thus he's completely castrated. Can you imagine the effect Aslan would have if the filmmakers had used a real lion (at least for some shots)? I realize that this would've been difficult, but what we end up with here is a cinematic IOU. "This is pretty much what a lion would look like..."
CGI beavers? CGI leaves blowing? Are you kidding me? CGI wolves are the White Queen's secret police, but in a few dazzling shots, they're real wolves indeed. And it's beautiful and relieving, but only for a flickering moment of reality. I don't know. It just becomes so tiresome when you realize that Adamson is working without limits, and so he doesn't have to direct the scenes with any semblance of balls.
The best scene in the film comes early, as Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus the fawn for the first time, and they return to his home for tea. Almost everything in the scene works, clicks, and for a brief moment the film is on its legs. But alas, it's quite brief. And it's not all digital mess. It's also editing mess, performance mess, pacing mess. The kids are good, especially little Georgie whatever-her-name-is as Lucy, and Tilda Swinton is fine I guess. Kind of "Blah".
By walking this uncomfortable-PG-Disney-gore line, the final battle does nothing but accentuate the disparity between the source material and the film. We also solidify the odd patchwork of disparate mythologies that Lewis was working with. That's not the film's fault, obviously, but to see it brought to life on such a grand scale and without humility is almost laughable. Cheetahs, rhinos, Centaurs, a Phoenix...? Why not a pirate, a WWI veteran, and an Indian chief as well? It's a complaint that could be levied against the Harry Potter movies too, though they've never pretended to be anything more than loose quilts of everything magic. I think that there needs to be a little more Narnia in their Narnia, and the film doesn't quite capture it.
Perhaps I'm too close to the source material (it holds a special little children's corner in my big big man heart), but I still think that this movie sucks a lot. But it's not Jesus that ruins everything.
Note: It occurs to me that I prefer Narnia in the winter and always have. Maybe it just means that I have no soul, but I wish Narnia had stayed frozen.
You can't start talking about Syriana without first talking about last year's Crash, by Paul Haggis. Crash sucks so much. Oh man, does it suck. It is melodramatic, self-important, and didactic in the worst way. It weaves men and women of disparate social, racial, and economic backgrounds together to "SAY SOMETHING ABOUT RACISM IN 2004"... in big letters. But its characters often make leaps beyond psychosis so as to fit the film's square pegs of characterization into its round holes of plot machination. Some of the acting is super, but it's all in the service of some of the most transparent audience manipulation since Ron Howard left a baby in the bathtub in A Beautiful Mind. So Crash sucks. So now we can move on.
Syriana weaves men and women of disparate nationalities and social backgrounds together to "SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL MACHINE OF OIL DEPENDENCE IN 2005"... in big letters. It is, for the most part, procedural. The audience is sometimes scrambling to keep up with the double talk and political maneuvering of the film's players, including Jeffrey Wright as an corporate lawyer, George Clooney as a CIA operative in the Middle East, Matt Damon as a hotshot oil broker, and Alexander Siddig as a Gulf prince.
One could argue that the complexity of Syriana's plot is simply a cover for some of the most melodramatic writing since 21 Grams. That's not the case. There's a child's death early on in the film, but it does not serve to teach us anything about oil or about the nature of the global political machine or anything like that. It only informs the decisions of Matt Damon's character, and his relationship with Siddig's reform-minded Gulf prince. It is simply an event, not a lesson.
That's not to say that there is not drama in the film. Once the smoke clears from the climax, and you finally realize what's been done to both the characters and to the audience, you see just how carefully constructed it all is. It feels almost free form while you're watching it, but it's actually meticulously composed for a certain effect. The difference between the composition of Syriana and the construction of Crash is that the "message" of Syriana is earned by over two hours of atmosphere, information, and characters that we actually care about. There is investment there. Crash's "message" is all it has. It is high drama from scene one.
Syriana is not perfect. It doesn't quite trust its characters to exist solely within the film, and so it tacks on a drunk father (maybe narcoleptic?) for Jeffrey Wright and a distant son for George Clooney, neither of whom do anything but provide requisite and throwaway "backstory". And the crescendo of intercutting that provides the film's climax is (I am loathe to admit) a little much. But the film is so concerned with verisimilitude (or at least the appearance of such) that it earns its moments of melodrama.
Playtime
Jacques Tati, 1967
Yesterday, for the first time, I saw 70mm projection of a film that was shot on 65mm film. The film was Jacques Tati's Playtime. As you probably know, most commercially produced films are shot on 35mm and projected on 35mm. Usually, films that are shot on 65mm (2001, Lawrence of Arabia, the forthcoming New World) are not even shown on 70mm (as most theaters don't have the capability). And so, seeing the film this way was a treat.
It's like Tati throws you the keys to a new set of eyeballs, and it's your 16th birthday and you catch them and lock eyes with him and you both know that nothing... will ever be the same. And then you hop into your eyeballs and tool around the clinically urban streets, weaving to and fro around mise-en-scene and depth of field. Aw man. It's a party. A sweet sweet party for your eyeballs.
The movie's amazing, and I think can probably only be seen this way. I don't mean to sound like an entitled asshole, but I've seen the film twice before, and I could never really get comfortable in it. But when seen projected this way, it's pretty liberating. You can wander away from what's going on in the foreground and enjoy characters or events far in the background or to the side. In fact, you kind of have to. That's all the film is is background, periphery, and hazy non-event. Wandering is something you can't really do on DVD (Criterion or no!).
I never realized before how beautifully lame so many of the jokes in this film are. It's that naivety, when marooned in the heartless machine of modern Paris, that makes the film work. It's Modern Times meets L'Avventura: just as warm and wonderful as the former, just as distant and disheartening as the latter.
He spat in my Balzac!
Between Michel Simon, who proves here that he's the best thing that ever happened to anything ever, and the photography that's as smooth as a waterfall, Renoir's Boudu is just about perfect. Simon is Boudu, a vagrant who is rescued from suicide by a stuffed shirt bookseller. When Boudu comes to live with the bookseller, his snooty wife, and his maid (and mistress), hilarity ensues!
No... it really does. Renoir sets a lot of his scenes as if on stage, and yet somehow the photography feels as natural and organic as documentary.
The film loses a little of its naive timelessness in its denouement (two words: hilarious rape), but when coupled with some of the beautifully clunky technical aspects of the film, it almost becomes a part of the charm. I don't mean for that to sound condescending. But that's one thing that Boudu has in spades: charm. The film doesn't quite coalesce as cleanly to pack the humanitarian beauty and bite of Renoir's La Chienne, but Criterion just released it, and I recommend it if you're in the mood for sweet sweet cinematic candy.
