Category Archives: 4 hearts

The Great Gatsby [2013] The Great Gatsby [2013] 4 star

May 17th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“Do you think it’s too much?”
“I think it’s what you want.”

I’ll be honest – I had such high expectations for this movie I kind of had to be numb to them. Baz Luhrmann has been one of my favourite directors for a long time now and I didn’t even want the fear of a letdown. Though none of them struck me as anything special the first time round (some of them, actually, irritated the heck out of me), I’ve come to view every one of his 4 previous features as a pretty unbroken chain of perfection.

Some people found the idea of him doing The Great Gatsby – in 3D, no less – was a bizarre move. I immediately thought it sounded perfect. Luhrmann has always – even when working in a low budget with his first, Strictly Ballroom – revelled in excess. “But Gatsby isn’t about excess! It’s about the folly of excess!” I’ve heard some cry. Yes. But you have to show the excess in order to criticise it, and Luhrmann does just that, as only Luhrmann can – did anyone think the garish design in Strictly made that world look desirable? If the image of Gatsby alone in his coffin with none of his party “friends” around at the bitter end doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what to think.

At first I feared perhaps the whole thing was too Luhrmann, with particular reference to Moulin Rouge. Nick is a single writer who stumbles into this world of opulence, our representative, just like Christian in Moulin Rouge, the camera swooping through “oldefied” New York streets, and into Gatsby’s party mansion, extraordinarily similar to our introduction to the famed Paris club in 2001.

But as the movie settled into its own thing, I thought maybe this familiar entry point was sort of deliberate. I read “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager at school and its been sort of tainted for me ever since. At the time I struggled to understand it at all – I’m sure less to do with the book’s quality (it’s quite beloved, don’t you know…) than a teaching method that gave me no way in to the material. I passed whatever exams that quizzed me on it, I guess, but I was only ever regurgitating what I’d been told. I can honestly say that till I saw the last moments of this movie, though I could’ve told you what that last sentence of Fitzgerald’s novel meant, I honestly didn’t understand it in my own way. It could even be an age/experience thing – maybe at 33 I could read the book and get so much more out of it now than I did then. But I’m 33, slightly lazy in such things, and probably wouldn’t have even considered reading Gatsby again if not for Luhrmann’s movie.

I was surprised in the run up to the film’s release that most of the buzz pertained to the Jay-Z soundtrack and I’m even more surprised having seen the movie. The whole hip-hop idea doesn’t seem nearly as well developed and integrated as Luhrmann’s musical ideas, in particular, for Moulin Rouge and Romeo+Juliet. Most of the music in fact seemed to me to be Craig Armstrong’s characteristically lush and emotional piano and strings (I don’t like being hit over the head emotionally by many people but Armstrong, like Luhrmann, is one of the few.)

I try to avoid mentioning the 3D when I see these movies because I don’t believe it should matter and be more of a kind of garnish – the movie should still work (and I’m sure it does) without it, but it’s just a nice little extra. From first shot and title sequence to last, honestly the 3D here puts all others I’ve seen (and I’ve seen most of the big ones) to shame. I’d entirely forgotten about the whole “green light” thing in the book but the first shot of it here knocked the breath out of me… just the most perfect use of depth I have ever seen. Of course there’s the sheets, shirts, sparkly things, gimmicky 3D stuff as you’ve seen in the trailer, but there’s plenty of beautifully subtle stuff too.

I saw some criticism of Carey Mulligan’s portrayal of Daisy who (at least in the opinion of whoever wrote it) was (apparently, I can’t remember) much colder in the novel. As with much of the comments (many before actually seeing the movie) about the use of 3D, I feel this misses Luhrmann’s intent. She’s clearly still cold in her actions at the end of the movie – what we’re seeing in Mulligan is perhaps what Gatsby sees in Daisy, and what Nick sees in Gatsby… what does drive a person so lost to hold such hope?

As I said, I’ve never warmed fully to Luhrmann’s movies on a first viewing. But clearly this one (perhaps because it’s the first I’ve watched on the big screen?) is an exception, so I look forward to seeing how it holds up to further viewings (probably without the 3D – though the upcoming 3D Doctor Who special certainly has me tempted to save up for a 3D set). Clearly I’m not coming to it as a great worshipper of the novel (I certainly intend to give it another go after this though) – but what I loved most about it is that, however he went about it, Luhrmann gave me a way in to understanding Fitzgerald’s work on my own terms – I either never was told about the “extraordinary gift for hope” in Gatsby when I was at school or I had just not suffered enough disappointment at the time to see it for myself – or maybe Luhrmann was the only person who could show me. I know some people don’t need that kind of accessibility, but a lot of people do – and what he’s done with Fitzgerald for me here is as miraculous as how modern he made Shakespeare’s words sound back in 1996.

Iron Man 3 Iron Man 3 4 star

April 25th, 2013 by surlaroute

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The first words that came to mind in the deliberately disjointed first few minutes of Iron Man 3* were “fast and loose”. We see the image of a row of Iron Man suits exploding in slow motion as an almost clichéd weary narration by Robert Downey Jr. begins to tell the story before stopping and deciding to start over at a much earlier point. But “fast and loose” doesn’t really begin to describe the freedom Shane Black seems to have been given on this, quite easily the best and most fun instalment in the trilogy.

Of course I came to this movie well prepared in terms of the Avengers franchise – this week in anticipation I watched both of the first Iron Man movies and last year’s team effort again; but in terms of the tone Shane Black brings to the table, perhaps I would’ve been less surprised if I’d also seen his debut feature Kiss Kiss Bang Bang first. I finally watched it the minute I got home from Iron Man 3 and the “fast and loose” made a lot more sense – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is just as much of a delirious overturning of genre – but it’s still a pretty big shock that Black was allowed to play so much with such a huge property here.

“When are we gonna talk about New York?”
“Maybe never?”

The movie is so much fun in the end that it’s easy to forget how brutal it is initially in setting up the stakes. There’s some real nastiness here from Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin and all he represents that is every bit as bold from a mainstream American blockbuster as all its ultimate slapdashery. Given Kingsley’s very bearded similarity to one of America’s most recent enemies and images of Tony Stark having fever dreams and anxiety attacks over his recent encounter with unprecedented attacks in New York, it’s hard not to see the clear parallel being made here. We’ve seen a lot of depictions of terrorism in movies since 9/11 but perhaps none quite so close to the bone as this. The anti-American diatribes uttered by the Mandarin are the kind that almost have you convinced he might have a point. A musing on the phoniness of the fortune cookie – an invention not Chinese but American, and therefore “hollow and full of lies” – leads into a larger more tangible statement, the bombing of something equally artificial, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre… a moment that strikes one as being as much anti-Hollywood as it is anti-American (not to mention being a particularly unsettling watch in light of even more recent events…). There are early references to America’s genocide of the Native Americans, and even a callback in the middle section of the movie where Stark, lost and suit-less in the middle of snowy Tennessee, calls home and tells Pepper Potts, “I just stole a poncho from a wooden Indian,” having done just that outside a gas station.

“The second you give evil a face, you give the people a target.”

It’s hard to talk more about Ben Kingsley’s performance other than to say it is at turns chilling and completely in keeping with the more riotous tone of the movie – to say more than that would be to ruin one of the movie’s biggest surprises. I’ve probably already said too much – but I honestly lost count of how many times I couldn’t believe what I was seeing during this movie, so it’s pretty hard to spoil completely. I expressed astonishment that a movie like The Hunger Games got made by Hollywood last year. Let’s just say, what that movie had to say about the duplicity of power was nothing compared to the even harsher indictments of the modern Western world up the Mandarin’s sleeves…

The Mandarin’s minions are pretty scary individuals too – bio-engineered into either weapons or bombs (it depends how the treatment “takes”) – the “burning embers” flesh effect here is perhaps the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in a comic book movie since Robot Vera in Superman 3. The visual effects of the various havoc they wreak are quite something to behold, and particularly visceral when contrasted with the snowy setting of the middle section of the movie.

Then there’s the “barrel of monkeys” scene. I probably would’ve seen the movie in 3D even if I didn’t want to since that was all that was on offer in the way of a midnight screening and usually I’d say I can take or leave 3D (especially when it’s post-converted as here, something I only learned shortly before seeing it), but this free-fall sequence isn’t just one of the best uses of 3D I’ve seen but also one of the most basically uplifting action scenes too.

The movie isn’t without its little wobbles. In the Tennessee midsection it strays dangerously close to MacGyver territory as Stark resorts to building an arsenal of weapons out of bits and pieces purchased at a hardware store, and the young boy who becomes a kind of sidekick is something of a worry when he first appears, but what can I say? Like everything else, Black pulls it off – some of the funniest and most cheeky lines come between Stark and the little boy, in fact.

Likewise there are more than a couple of “deaths which turn out not to be deaths” that would normally annoy the hell out of me but for some reason – perhaps because this movie just isn’t like other movies – they didn’t. Perhaps it’s that the first of those “deaths” is oddly the more moving of the two (I don’t want to spoil, but hopefully this will make sense when you see it). Incidentally this is another thing I might not have found so strange had I seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang first – in which Black actually brings all his dead characters, plus Elvis and Lincoln (and why not?), into a final scene to make a funny point about one character surviving and happy movie endings in general.

Which brings me to Christmas. Of all the surprises Iron Man 3 has to offer, this was the one which makes it likely to be the Avengers movie I will wind up watching the most in years to come. Because Iron Man 3, it turns out, among other things, is an instant Christmas classic. An early scene has two kids approach Stark in a restaurant and ask for his autograph – one is a little blonde-haired boy in glasses to whom Stark quips, “I loved you in A Christmas Story by the way…” The movie begins with Stark buying Pepper, much to her consternation, a ridiculous oversized bunny for Christmas but ends with him offering her a much larger (literally and emotionally) gesture. There’s Christmas songs on the soundtrack. There’s snow. There’s redemption. It’s not just a movie that happens to be set at Christmas – it’s an honest to god Christmas movie. It’s bizarre they didn’t schedule it for a November/December release (though I’d neither want an unfinished movie nor to have had to wait 8 more months…) – but that’s when I’ll be watching it in the future.

Iron Man 3 winds down very much as if it means to be the closing out of a trilogy that has done as much for the comic book movie (remember just 5 years ago when an Avengers movie was like a distant dream? I was barely even interested!) as it seems to have done for its star. When Downey Jr.’s narration speaks of the Iron Man suit like a cocoon it’s hard not to feel like he’s talking about himself and his much storied past problems. Like Stark, he immersed himself in this role that seemed at first so at odds with his image, and he seems to have emerged a far better man. I was reminded of the even more troubled Mel Gibson’s narration at the end of The Beaver – “This is a picture of Walter Black, a once hopelessly depressed individual, who had to become a beaver, who had to become a phenomenon, so that ultimately this could just be a picture of Walter Black…” For all its eye candy this is a franchise that has real characters with demons working through real recognisable issues at its core, and it’d be a jaded soul indeed that didn’t recognise how wonderful this is to find in what will certainly be one of the biggest movies of the year.

* (I’m usually as picky as the BBFC at typing film titles exactly as they appear in the opening credit but “Iron Man Three” just looks strange so I’m sticking with the 3)

Side by Side Side by Side 4 star

March 8th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“What was ever real?”

(I’m afraid this might read like an unstructured babble that almost makes watching the movie unnecessary, so… spoilers? I was just desperate to post something here as it’s been nearly a month since I did lol and this one really gave me a lot to think about…)

If I never said so before – though I’m sure I have in one form or another – one thing I always want from a movie is for it to be more than what it seems on the surface… if I have expectations, for it to exceed them. I knew I’d find this documentary marginally interesting based on its subject and interviewees (not just the big names on the poster) – even though I don’t have a strong opinion (though I didn’t know why that was until this documentary – which I’ll explain at the end), the whole film/digital debate has of course been something I’ve followed as a cinema lover.

So while on its surface this is a documentary about the digital revolution, particularly as it pertains to film – a lot has been said in the past year or so about “the end of film” with film labs and camera makers actually shutting down and most recently with half of the Oscar nominated films being shot digitally – Side by Side goes far, far deeper, eventually becoming more about all our potential fears of the digital nature of our lives. Anybody could’ve found talking heads to talk about why they favour the old or new mediums, and there’s certainly plenty of that here – but this film looks beyond the actual celluloid and/or pixels at other ways technology affects expression.

There’s discussion with actors and directors about how the ability to shoot nonstop with digital affects performance – while John Malkovich talks about how stifling it was to have to wait when shooting on film when the performance was ready “now”, there’s talk of another actor who left bottles of urine around a set in protest at being constantly on record. The whole subject of dailies is covered, with one contributor saying, with digital, they’re “no longer dailies… now immediatelies…” and how that instant access to playback can also affect both performance and technical things like lighting, for better or worse. Robert Rodriguez makes a beautiful comparison about the delay between shooting and developing film as being like “painting with the lights off”.

Crucial analogies are made here – the film retraces points in film history covered plenty in other documentaries where technology advanced cinema and we either embraced it or didn’t notice – the boom in digital effects around Jurassic Park, digital colour correction coming from music videos, and way before that, digital editing systems and audio. One of the big questions asked is, we didn’t care when everything else went digital, why are we so hung up on the image?

The big plus touted in film’s corner is its archival value. As digital stands there are just too many risks and continuing format changes alone make it difficult to keep a backup for more than 10 years even if the file survives, while film always works as long as you have a light to shine through it – I think it’s David Fincher talks about having to put an actual reader in with any digital archive to be sure of being able to decode the format in the future. But one person rightly, again, looks beyond cinema and, while acknowledging the problem, states, “there’s too much digital information out there not to figure out a way to store it forever.” I’d like to believe this is so. It seems ridiculous if not, right?

The other quite amusing issue addressed in all this is the new abundance of content that digital brings. Everyone has a camera and access to YouTube now – yes, the democratisation of the art form is wonderful, “Everyone’s interpreting reality – or what they think is reality – through a lens,” Martin Scorsese says, but some of the more stuffy contributors fear that this will just result in noise. A telling moment makes clear where this film stands on this, when one of these anti-digital folks moans, “There isn’t a tastemaker involved!” and a voice from behind the camera simply says, “Wow.”

My big takeaway from this movie was that it’s really all the same. The abundance of content we face now? It brings to mind that commonly stated factoid that 90% of films made before 1929 have been lost. There’s always been a lot of stuff to watch. Maybe loss is a fact we have to face in art as much in digital as ever. Film may have the edge on digital as far as archival storage goes, but it’s still only got 100 years on it, it’s as young as anything. Any global event large enough to have a devastating impact on our digital storage would likely affect our film storage systems too.

More than this? I found myself thinking, what if it all did disappear? Would that be so bad? We didn’t have sound recording technology when Mozart and Beethoven were around. We don’t even have photographs of the first performances of Shakespeare. But it all survives. Even if all the great films of our time were somehow snuffed out one day, as long as there were people, they’d survive because we talk about them with passion constantly. Something will always remain of art or ideas that change the world – even if it’s just a memory handed down and bent out of all recognition. One of the greatest benefits of digital is immediecy, and perhaps the fact that its ubiquity makes it so fleeting is what finally makes the moving image as an art form complete.

Room 237 Room 237 4 star

February 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

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Room 237 opens with a surely deliberate attempt to cheekily mislead. We see footage from Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, only… is Tom Cruise looking at a poster of The Shining? People less familiar with Kubrick might accept it as actual footage, like the rest of the footage that makes up the bulk of the image portion of this documentary, perhaps knowing or having heard of Kubrick’s more subtle intertextuality (a 2001 soundtrack album is hard to miss in one scene of A Clockwork Orange, for example; Quilty refers to himself as “Spartacus” at the beginning of his Lolita; there are many YouTube montages of breathtakingly similar shots from all his films). Even Kubrick fans, though, might think to themselves, “I can’t have missed that… can I?”

The Shining poster doesn’t appear in Eyes Wide Shut but this moment does come back into one’s mind later when some of the more visual theories about The Shining (the one that really knocked me back was the pattern of the carpet reversing from shot to shot) are discussed and footage is shown as “evidence”. I don’t doubt for a second that the other footage presented here is untampered-with, but I guess what I’m saying is, boy does this documentary make you want to go back and watch the movie again (and I’ve watched it a lot recently, working through Taschen’s Kubrick Archives book and the recent Movie Geeks United Kubrick series).

Speaking of those other extraordinary Kubrick works (the Taschen and Movie Geeks United podcast series – particularly the latter’s episode on The Shining – both musts for any Kubrick fan), what most impressed me here was that Room 237 never felt redundant. Even when discussing theories I’d heard before, the use of Kubrick’s own footage only hammered it home all the more. There’s an enormous disclaimer right at the start of the movie and I’m assuming it’s the only way they could get away with using so much of the man’s own imagery in conjunction with often controversial ideas of what he meant by it. It’s one of those documentaries that benefits hugely from this somewhat official blessing – like the use of the Sherman Brothers music in a documentary I recently watched, The Boys, or the slick old horror documentary Terror in the Aisles hosted by Donald Pleasence, it makes it so much more than if it were just a series of talking heads (which is essentially what the soundtrack consists of). It’s more a jumping off point for infinite further discussion than a definitive collection of theories and interpretations, but the fact that it managed to thrill me so much by the end after having heard so many of the stories before is the highest recommendation I can give.

The Master The Master 4 star

February 4th, 2013 by surlaroute

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My favourite shot in The Master (after this first viewing, at least – it’s about as futile to talk about this movie after seeing it only once as Prometheus but I’ll try) might be of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in adjacent jail cells. Phoenix is strait-jacketed, sweaty from thrashing around, the toilet in his cell shattered by a single kick. Hoffman is suited, calmly urinating into his. It’s the kind of perfect expression of duality I expected the moment I saw the trailer for The Master, in which every single beautifully composed shot reminded me of a different Stanley Kubrick movie. The Master is about much, much more, but on this first viewing it was this story of two entirely different men – animal and civilised – though both a little trapped, that struck me most.

From all the talk around the movie (mostly about its possible Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard angle) even before its release I imagined Hoffman’s character would be much more clearly painted as the “bad guy”, but this is one of those “bad guys” who is all too seductive – who, when presented alongside the all too headstrong arrogance of Phoenix, seems like a much more appealing bedfellow. But he isn’t necessarily shown to be always in control either – he snaps multiple times when rationally questioned by others, and a key scene has his wife, played by Amy Adams, masturbate him into a sink in a way that resembles his own controlling process on others, as she warns him off his attempts to tame Phoenix. She does a similar thing with Phoenix, too – without the hand job – catching him in-between sleeping and waking, trying to get him to stop drinking. In a way Adams kind of dominates the movie, arguably giving it a slight feminist bent similar to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In this sense the movie is less about good/bad/right/wrong and more about cycles of control – we all wish to control, manipulate or direct the universe around us in our own way and reality is just the balance.

I find criticisms of The Master‘s lack of plot if anything more bewildering than the ones I saw of Magic Mike – there’s a very clear narrative here, at its simplest a Pygmalion story. I think people’s responses to this movie are really split into two – those who need to make a snap judgment the moment the credits roll and move on, and those who know that some things need to be left to stew a while, possibly years. It’s the reason I don’t find the movie’s seemingly low score on the IMDb as I post this worrisome – why I don’t feel odd giving the movie only 4 hearts right now even as I want to call it a masterpiece. It took me nearly 15 years to see Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut for the perfect summing up of what he was always trying not to say… I’m willing to give The Master even more than that. I think Paul Thomas Anderson himself knows it too, as an exchange between Hoffman and Phoenix goes at one point:

“It’s a hard, slow process.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. That’s why we’re here.”

Wreck-It Ralph Wreck-It Ralph 4 star

February 4th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“Are there medals for wrecking stuff really well?”

[SPOILERS]

For a good chunk of Wreck-It Ralph I really wondered and worried exactly what it was trying to say. The Toy Story like story (“in a world where games come to life when the arcade is closed…”) has Ralph, the bad guy in an old 8-bit game, decide he doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore and set out into the wider world of gaming (from 8-bit all the way to modern) to find a gold medal. The trouble is that without a bad guy, Ralph’s game (“Fix-It Felix”) will be reported as broken and be put out of service; and his forays into other games threaten to cause similar problems to those games too. In one game, “Sugar Rush”, he meets Vanellope, a “glitch” with a similar desire – she wants to be a part of her game. But if she becomes a part of the game (she is told) her glitch will be seen, be reported, and the game will be over. It’s a hell of a dilemma, and it’s presented in a way at times that truly suggests that the moral might be to “know your place”. Thankfully, as always, Disney know better.

Somewhere towards the beginning, an animated sign in “Game Central Station” (there’s a lot of these puns – Nesquik-sand, “I’m not a glitch, I’m just pixlexic!”, “Are you hurt, sire?” “No he just glazed me!” and for me they did get slightly irritating and Aardman-ish – there’s an hilarious Wizard of Oz reference involving Oreo cookies, however) has Sonic the Hedgehog for some reason informing passers-by, “If you die outside your game you don’t regenerate, ever.” The intention may have been for this to merely add a note of peril to the seemingly harmless environment but my problem, which might make sense if you read my Frankenweenie and ParaNorman reviews, is I took it a little further. When a big sacrificial moment is suggested towards the end, I really braced myself for something profoundly emotional – even more than a heartbreaking moment earlier when Ralph “wrecks” something very precious to Vanellope – and it never came.

This moment is followed by something that threatened to make me give up on Disney entirely as I almost did after Enchanted. I’ve never liked movies where a hero or heroine (usually heroine) has to essentially integrate into society to be accepted by it – it’s the reason I will take any opportunity to tell people Grease 2 is better than Grease, and, closer to Disney, why my heart always sinks a little when Violet seems relatively “normal” at the end of The Incredibles. The way Vanellope the glitch’s story plays out here, then, is kind of wonderful. What actually happens when she becomes part of her game is, the game “resets” and her glitch disappears. She literally becomes a princess, complete with puffy pink dress – at which point my face must have been a picture – which (yay!) she promptly glitches out of, because that’s who she is.

I guess what I’m saying is, I really didn’t know what Wreck-It Ralph was doing half the time, which is probably a good thing. For now I really don’t know where it sits for me as far as Disney are concerned. It’s almost simultaneously a step forwards, backwards, and sideways for them, feeling more at times like a (albeit good) Dreamworks animation – perhaps because of the more recognisable voices of John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman and Jane Lynch – and with a much more complex message than even their most recent work. It’s certainly one I’ll revisit – it’s possible my experience a second time could be wildly different if I know what’s coming.

I Am Nancy I Am Nancy 4 star

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

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“I’m Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street.” “Oh really. Where’s Robert?”

You’d think I would’ve had enough of Nightmare on Elm Street extras after the 8 hours of Never Sleep Again and all the other Elm Street stuff I spent weeks watching a couple of years ago but I’ve actually been looking forward to seeing this, which has now seemingly been rebranded as “Never Sleep Again 2”, for over a year now. I don’t really know which is the higher praise – that it more than deserves to sit beside the vast array of material in Never Sleep Again, or that it made me appreciate again the original movie – which I’ve said before is one of those movies that have kind of grown a little stale to me over time through over-watching – more than any other horror documentary I’ve ever seen.

As the title suggests, this is billed as Heather Langenkamp’s story but in all honesty her contribution is not as total as I expected. The documentary is split into two major parts: footage of a horror convention celebrating the original Nightmare’s 25th anniversary where Heather spends most of her time asking people “what about Nancy?” and looking for an action figure of herself (one that doesn’t suck – she finds a “freezing cheerleader” in one Nightmare board game but no Nancy), and a great extended interview with the creator of Freddy and Nancy, Wes Craven. This interview is intercut with another interview with his daughter Jessica, holding a baby daughter of her own – Jessica explains that she may have “inspired” Nancy by saying of Craven’s Swamp Thing 2 years before Nightmare, why are the girls always falling down in your movies?

The documentary reaches some real moments of honesty towards the end – I’m incredibly cynical about emotional moments in these things since the whole reality TV boom but (though not quite as tragicomic as Best Worst Movie) there’s an awkwardness to the human interactions here that I believe can’t be faked. The parade of fans lining up to get her autograph in the convention segment is really something to behold – a worrying moment has one fan pull out a machete to be signed, then there’s a deaf girl with her father, a lot of young children, a guy who wants to tell Heather all about his recent break-up, and most notably a British girl in a wheelchair who moves Heather to tears telling her what Nancy and the Elm Street movies meant for her. Langenkamp’s mission is to get all these people, and us, to “be Nancy!” through the dark times – it sounds corny, but I couldn’t believe how good this movie made me feel.

Amour Amour 4 star

January 29th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“Don’t you know we’re worried?”
“Your worries are of no use to me.”

To read the synopsis of this movie and see all the mainstream accolades that have been bestowed upon it you’d be forgiven for expecting something incredibly emotionally manipulative until you saw Michael Haneke’s name on it. Within the first half hour I was making comparisons in my mind to Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, but the illness this one deals with is much more brutal, painful and quick. The movie begins with the sad end to the story so there’s no need for spoilers here – this is a movie about an elderly couple, and about the wife dying slowly, senses first, as the result of unsuccessful surgery on a brain tumor having made the husband promise never to take her back to the hospital.

I’m sure the ending has sparked many a heated discussion – even those who found themselves in favour of personal choice when it comes to euthanasia may find it difficult to judge if Anne would like the ending she receives. Emmanuelle Riva is heartbreaking in the role – it’s rare a movie so completely devoid of music as this is can move me to tears – but the movie really for me centres around that line above delivered by Jean-Louis Trintignant’s (who is equally deserving of Oscar recognition) Georges to their daughter who, previously distant, after Anne’s initial episode, suddenly decides she wants to play a role in the drama. The daughter is bitterly representative of many modern “adults” – her idea of bedside conversation is her own less life-threatening woes buying and selling houses (there’s a very well written counter-argument to this here, incidentally – I’ve personal experience of being offered nothing but “concern” when concrete assistance or, actually, nothing, would be less insulting, so this is where I stand…).

I don’t think Amour really offers a straight opinion on what Georges does to Anne at the end, on whether euthanasia is right or wrong. I think what it offers is a powerful picture of love and death as an extraordinarily private and complex act which no one but those so close that it hurts can fully understand; where, therefore, outside opinions are moot …but oh it’s at pains to make us hurt that bad.