Posts Tagged ‘art’

Taxidermia

Taxidermia

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

I didn’t really have the option to watch this one a second time before reviewing it – it’d been sitting on the Sky+ for quite a while and I watched it in the end simply to free up some space, so it was deleted right after – and though it might’ve helped, I don’t think I could’ve brought myself to watch it again so soon anyway. This is a bizarre, sprawling, ugly movie that you can’t deny is slightly fascinating, but I wouldn’t really wish upon anybody.

The movie comes in three distinct acts, three generations of one family, the taxidermy of the title really only coming into play in the final third (though I’m sure there’s some clever way in which the title applies to the whole movie – I really haven’t been able to think about it that much lol). The first segment has a soldier escaping from his drab existence into perverse fantasies which ultimately cross over to reality where he impregnates his superior’s wife, leading to his execution. In the second, we see the child of this strange beginning as a champion speed eater in what feels like an origins story for Augustus Gloop of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, lol, only again it’s repellently filmed. The third segment has this man’s child, a scrawny taxidermist reluctantly taking care of his enormous (seriously… enormous) father and feeding up equally enormous caged cats with butter until he accidentally leaves the cage open… as always, I’ll leave off the even more bizarre final turns of the story summary.

If the movie’s trying to say anything, it does so with unwavering pretension. The ending of the movie has a sort of cutting comment to make about art, the final image being (trying to avoid spoilers) a work considered as art, over-elevated as such, which through the course of the movie we have learned enough to know better. Or something. I’m not gonna pretend to have made up my mind about this one, lol. I think it’s the first Hungarian movie I’ve ever seen, it’s certainly unique, it certainly got a reaction out of me, and it’s certainly very well made technically (I don’t think I’ve ever seen such horrifyingly realistic cinematic vomit). If like me you appreciate anything different and can stomach almost anything, this is absolutely worth the time.



Fame [2009]

Fame [2009]

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Here’s another that I looked forward to for a long time once it was announced, though perhaps in a different way entirely. The trailers for this and an interview I read with its screenwriter really got my hopes up for this one, and really even as time wore on I never truly thought it was capable of being as bad as so many first expected and later reported it to be. I love the original movie, it works and I believe still would work for a teenager today who was truly interested in entering the arts; this looked simply like an attempt to update it for the X Factor generation, and I figured (and stand by this): if all it is is “better than X Factor”, then that’s better than it could’ve been.

And it is. I was really surprised by how much remains here not only in spirit but actually whole plot points etc of Alan Parker’s original movie. The grit has been removed, yes; the songs, all but one (“Out Here On My Own”), changed entirely or updated (the “Fame” remix)… amazingly, more than a few of these new songs ain’t half bad, like the replacement for “Is it Okay if I Call You Mine?” The cast of teachers: Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, Charles S. Dutton, the mighty Debbie Allen herself, can only be a good thing, right? And the movie still actually makes this path in life look pretty damn hard: something I really didn’t expect. In fact, I found the movie felt so little at times like it was reaching for that reality/talent show type of fame-seeking audience that I wondered who the heck it was trying to appeal to.

No, it’s not great. Yes, the original is the one you should watch. But this is so much better than it could’ve been, better than countless dance movies of the past decade, better, nay, a thousand times better, than the stage show adaptation I had the misfortune to see in the early 00s. That’s all, really: it’s not bad, and certainly not the crime it could’ve been.



Flesh for Frankenstein [3D]

Flesh for Frankenstein [3D]

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

This was on this week in the UK as part of Channel 4’s 3D week which I’ve become increasingly excited about since I first heard about it (it’s not hard to get me onto a 3D kick really). This was to me the clear star item on their schedule, not just because it had never aired on TV like this before, not just because Mark Kermode (my favourite film critic, who despises the resurgence in 3D of late) called it the best of the old 3D back catalogue, but also because it’s just such a curiosity … I knew nothing of it really except of course some link to Frankenstein and that Andy Warhol was connected to it. I really expected something supertrashy … but as the word “End” appeared on screen at the end, I found myself speechless.

There is something Herschell Gordon Lewis / John Waters / Roger Corman -ish “trashy” about this movie … there’s plenty of gore and gratuitous sex (the camera literally just goes in on a woman’s bare breasts at one point “just because it can and it’s 3D!”) and lines like the insanely brilliant, “To know death… you have to f*ck life in the gall bladder,” and (from a man who just lost his hand), “It’s all your fault!” call to mind the deliberately shambolic humour of The Rocky Horror Picture Show … and yet, there are fleshes of real and genuine art, romance, tragedy in this story that frequently had me with a sort of lump in my throat. I just, I don’t know, felt like I really “got” this one.

I still frankly don’t know what to make of this first viewing except for the certain, that this film is surely unique. I would love to see it again in the better polarized, cinema variety of 3D; failing that, just to see it again without the 3D effect and see if it works on me the same way again that way. The use of 3D is better than most I’ve seen, incidentally; the feeling of depth extends even to scenes that don’t exploit it, though again there’s plenty of that throughout from a grisly beheading (really, if only Tim Burton had been onto 3D when he made Sleepy Hollow …) through to the bats that plague the children as they hide from their father, the aforementioned requisite 3D boobs right to the final extraordinary shot that is best kept to myself as I’m guessing most that read this won’t have seen the movie yet. I just found the experience truly mesmerising, and there’s not much more you can ask for from a movie like this.



Circle of Two

Circle of Two

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

… ‘cos I may as well run with a theme. I held off watching this one last year when I was having quite the Tatum O’Neal feast while reading her autobiography because she hasn’t made a whole lot of movies and I felt like I had to save something. Though this movie sounded tacky as anything and the cheesily soft romantic opening credits did nothing to change the expectation, you kinda can’t go wrong by me if you put her and Richard Burton on screen for 90 minutes.

At least, that’s what I thought. Though initially this partnership works as expected – their first conversation in the restaurant, for instance – sadly, as this particular 90 minutes goes on, it gets more and more tiresome and unconvincing. It’s like the film makers started with a perfect pairing but are dead set on finding the sourness that just isn’t there in the actors’ chemistry. There’s a double climax sequence where first Tatum strips for Burton, and he tells her to “Get Dressed!” several times, unfortunately with a more age-appropriate suitor of hers (played by Michael Wincott of all people) peeking through the door; she flees and encounters him in a corn field of all places … “You’ll undress for anyone but me!” he declares, and then proceeds to try and rape her. It really shouldn’t be funny, but it’s such a laughable progression of incidence that it’s hard to stifle a titter. The rest of the movie flows predictably moralising the whys of why relationships like this could nevah!, evah! work.



Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

The words “New Woody Allen” haven’t appealed to me for a while now, if indeed ever (even though I like plenty of them); throw in “beautiful people”, particularly Scarlett Johansson, and “exotic locale”, and you’ve perhaps got my least anticipated movie of the past 12 months, lol. Well, my interest perked up a little with Patricia Clarkson in the first few minutes … however, just ten minutes later the movie didn’t even need her anymore to keep me hooked. I was honestly pretty shocked by how much I enjoyed this movie. It does have the kind of characters at its core that I expected, that usually turn me off a movie immediately … the casual sex and everything, just not at all my cup of tea, in fact at worst I can get pretty passionately anti this kind of thing – and yet they are just so interesting here that I don’t have time to get annoyed.

All the players are pretty much at their best- and when those players include Scarlett Johansson who I’ve really still never liked much since The Horse Whisperer, that’s really saying something. Throw in some serious surprises towards the end and you’ve got one 2008 movie I’m actually stunned to say I’m likely to watch at least once over in the near future. It really is just a lot of sexy European fun, the kind that even I can’t resist.



My Kid Could Paint That

My Kid Could Paint That

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

This is almost one of those movies I could almost have reviewed perfectly well without even seeing it. As expected, it raises questions both about the exploitation of the young and of the questionable judgment of the modern art world.

It’s about a little girl, Marla, whose paintings somehow got to the level of success that most professional artists would be envious of. We meet the dealer who discovered her, looking scarily like a drunken fratboy who’s faced a lot of rejection in life simply stoked by the little girl’s popularity, who speaks of her within minutes of our meeting him in undeniably creepy terms: “Marla, when you see her, is a doll … both [her brother] and Marla could be Gap ads …”

We’re told that four-year-old Marla is “blissfully unaware” of the bally-hoo around her, but even as we hear those words, they’re juxtaposed with the image of her looking around one of her exhibitions confused at why so many people are calling her name.

A journalist involved at the start of the phenomenon says of the guy who ‘discovered’ her, “He framed it to me as a family human interest story.” Another guy talks about Pollock and other works selling for millions not perhaps because of the art itself but because of the story behind the art – which would completely explain the Marla thing, being as it is an interesting story, which explains the movie. It’s one of those issues that just triggers a chain reaction of questions when you ponder it, “the thin line between prodigy and freak,” “it must be art, look what people are paying for it!” “But why do they want it, hmm?” To the evil looking dealer guy’s credit, even he acknowledges this “value of marketing” in the process.

It doesn’t swing me anymore towards the whole outsider/modern art thing … and like, if anything could, you know what I’m gonna say, then it’s a beautiful 4 year old girl. There’s a montage of the paintings towards the end and to me, they just look like the same scribbles you hurry past in the Tate Modern – like, it amazes me how many people in the movie are seen to be demanding proof that little Marla painted them, like, seriously, is it that hard to believe when you look at them? Worst of all, in this montage, and later when we see the dad selling them, the things bear titles. Which is fine when the title is something like “Blue Sun”, but when you get to “Ode to Pollock” and “the triptych”, surely even the most open-minded pseudo-intellectual is gonna go, “Yah-huh? A four-year-old?” How the power of words can sometimes make me sick.

What can I say … it’s interesting, it’s 80 minutes, and a lot of it is a cute four-year-old girl scribbling in her underwear lol. You kind of know whether you’re gonna like/be interested in this kind of movie from the summary, a review is pretty pointless. Like I said, I could’ve pretty much written this without even watching it.



Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Well, finally, I loved this one so much it went over A Clockwork Orange in my 1971 list and thus shot straight to the top of my favourite movies of all time … kinda knew that’d happen sooner or later. Again, there’s little to say that I haven’t said below or that others haven’t said before, but I noticed a couple of cute things this time around worth mentioning, both of them costume related; the way Harold is dressed exactly the same as the psychiatrist in their first meeting, and the way Maude is dressed almost exactly the same as a little girl walking in the same way as her behind her at one of the early funerals … Maude, though, carrying that bright yellow umbrella that makes her look more like the little girl, lol. It’s just an absolutely beautiful movie I could quote or talk about scenes from for hours. “For me, they will always be glorious birds …” – “Most of life’s sorrow comes from people who are this – but allow themselves to be treated like that …” I probably should’ve saved it for Valentine’s Day … though that’s reserved for Hannibal still this year :) One day I’ll write a much longer review … for now, just consider it an even higher recommendation, if you’ve not seen it yet, than I gave for Beautiful Girls a few weeks ago.

January 5th, 2006:

I’m surprised by how much I said in my first review of this (below). I really can’t think of much to say about it right now, I need to watch it so many more times. I want to know ths movie by heart. Everything about it is perfect. Its offbeat take on life, death, and love is beyond compare. Maude is one of the greatest movie characters ever.

18th October 2004:

Someone recommended this movie to me a while ago and I already knew about it and knew it was a movie I wanted to see, and after that recommendation, I wanted to see it even more. I don’t know why it took me till now to finally see it.

I was barely even in the right frame of mind to watch it, nevertheless it belongs forever in my top 100 movies of all time. It’s only just at 100 after a first viewing but I just know it’s going to rise and rise. These two characters are people I want to hang with forever. Harold and Maude belongs in that group of movies that just tell you to grab life by the balls. It’s almost terrifying in that aspect, Maude is so free-spirited she would make almost anyone on earth feel somewhat lifeless.

And the soundtrack by Cat Stevens … well, it’s awesome, but more than anything makes me want to hear more Cat Stevens. Why is this soundtrack never uttered in the same breath as Simon and Garfunkel’s The Graduate and Aimee Mann’s Magnolia? I see something of Cameron Crowe’s influence coming from this movie too, I wonder if he’s ever mentioned it on a commentary anywhere – I’m going to have to watch Almost Famous again.

Definitely one of the most romantic movies of all time.