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Posts Tagged ‘race’

New York, I Love You

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

I had a gut feeling I wouldn’t be as crazy for this as I was for Paris, je t’aime as I simply don’t feel the same connection to this city (which I haven’t visited) as I do for Paris (which I have, multiple times). In addition to this, the directors list for this one – Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin and Joshua Marston – does not really wow as much as the list for “Paris…” – which included segments by the Coens, Wes Craven, Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuarón, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Payne and Isabel Coixet.

Overall I was surprised how tonally it felt so similar to the Paris movie – which certainly makes a case for an argument of producer as author, they being the only solid connection between the two movies – and some of the shorts work really well. I made something of a point of not looking up the credits of this movie before watching so I can assure you when I tell you that, it has nothing to do with names when I say my favourite of all was easily the one directed by Shekhar Kapur and written by the late Anthony Minghella. It’s a poetic musing with the stunning Julie Christie, John Hurt and Shia LeBeouf that’s hard to describe as anything but beautiful and worth watching the whole movie for on its lonesome.

The problem with the movie – and I guess I have to admit I can’t really qualify this since, like I said, I haven’t been to NYC yet – is that it really doesn’t ever feel like it’s necessarily about New York at all, as much as the Paris movie felt it was about Paris. It could be about multicultural Anywhere. Maybe that was partly the point, but it seems a kind of senseless waste of the location and title to me.

Tags: age, anthology, city, cuties, multi-culturalism, NYC, race, shorts
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Invictus

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Hmm… I’ve been holding onto this and a couple of other movies to write about for a week now until I had something that gave me a larger body of words to bury them under, lol, because I just really didn’t have a lot to say about them. There was no reason I would necessarily have my attention seized by a story about football uniting people over race in apartheid Africa, but I had more hope for this one than I might have otherwise because Clint Eastwood is frankly on a roll lately. I mightn’t have been personally wowed by Flags of Our Fathers and Iwo Jima but the achievement was immeasurable, and last year’s Changeling and Gran Torino both remain among my top 10 of the year.

This is as solidly built as anything Eastwood has done in the last 10 years, for sure. I just was never going to be interested in this story. I was excited for Morgan Freeman’s performance as Mandela, but if I’m absolutely honest, I even found disappointment here. Freeman is an amazing actor but he really felt lost to me here. He can do a lot of things but this movie shows he is not up to portraying real people of such magnitude. The fact that I was more impressed by Matt Damon’s performance (which is the best he’s been since The Talented Mr. Ripley) really says it all.

Tags: apartheid, race, sport, true story
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Frozen River

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Maybe it was the snowy setting, but I couldn’t help but think of the end of Fargo a lot here – that last wonderful monologue by Frances McDormand, “There’s more to life than a little money … Don’t you know that?” It’s a great line, but the question this movie asks really is what if it seems as if, as so many find themselves today, there isn’t?

I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have watched this were it not for the Oscar nomination of Melissa Leo – as I put it on having read a few reviews containing talk of “minimalism” etc, I dreaded another Wendy and Lucy. I also feared another sad experience after yesterday’s The Visitor. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find neither. This movie has its sad touches and like The Visitor constantly threatens to turn very rotten indeed – case in point being when Leo’s elder son attempts to repair the frozen pipes on their home and I feared something of an Ice Storm moment – but for the most part, this movie is consistently on the up. What gets broken here is all either mended at the end or we’re assured will be mended soon. Kind of like Once it’s a movie that says, is what you already have (or what you’ve thrown away, even) really all that bad? I found this a much more pertinent commentary on the current economic situation than the dull and directionless Wendy and Lucy.

Tags: money, Native Americans, poverty, race, snow
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Gran Torino

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Well holy cow, finally one more glint of hope in a year of things that “just didn’t quite do it for me”. This movie reminded me a lot of David Mamet’s Redbelt in that, as I suppose is to be expected by now of director Clint Eastwood, there’s simply not a wasted moment from start to finish. The characters are painted in strokes so broad that in any other hands it would be laughable – an old coot, disrespectful yung ‘uns, just about everyone a stick-in-the-mud of some variety, but the overall impact of it all is just impossible to ignore. When news first came out about the movie around this time last year, a lot of people, me included, got excited it could be another Dirty Harry – and frankly, it may as well be. I didn’t see the second half of this movie coming quite so brutally as it does, especially as there are far more lighter, even laugh out loud funny, moments in the first hour than expected. Eastwood is as fantastic in the central role as he is behind the camera – having praised Frank Langella for Nixon I really look forward to the Best Actor category at this year’s Oscars as I simply couldn’t choose between these two amazing performances. This really is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year – and there ain’t many of those. The closing song almost had me in tears as much as the similar song at the end of Grace is Gone.

Tags: age, race, revenge
Posted in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews | 1 Comment »

Pretty Persuasion

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

“There are just so many stupid, annoying, worthless people on the planet. They just like, get in the way of what you want.”

The first thing this movie reminded me of was my most shameless personal fave, Slap Her … She’s French (especially considering that movie’s alternate title “She Gets What She Wants”) … but it’s a lot more subtle, extreme and subversive than that. It’s funny I found myself watching it during the BBC’s “White” week, in a way. The moment Evan Rachel Wood starts her speech about how wonderful it is to be white being as she wants to be an actress, all of this told to a Muslim student, listing Asian as her second choice, then Afro-American, and finally Arab … it certainly makes you gasp if anything more than I remembered “Slap Her” did – and where that race line goes in the end … I still don’t know quite what to think of it except to compare it to the other stereotypes in the movie, like, yes, the male and female ones, and say that it is one of those movies where the stereotypes really never bother me quite as much as they should, basically because the script just oozes smarts and Wood delivers those smarts in a way I really think nobody else could. It seems like she gets better with every film I see her in, and the final shot of her here is just phenomenal. James Woods, Jane Krakowski and Selma Blair are the icing on the cake.

Tags: court, cuties, high school, lesbian, media, race, religion, suicide
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The Wiz

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Lawd. I started watching this the other night but I was too tired in the end. I came to it today truly wanting to like it. I love the concept – I love the normality of the opening with Dorothy at the family get-together, it’s just so beautifully down-to-earth and the music is great there too (“Don’t know what I’m made of / Why am I afraid of … feeling?”)

But then Dorothy goes to Oz. Now, ever since Meet the Robinsons, I’m pretty careful about first impressions, and the “look” of Oz here certainly had the same effect as the future did there. The make-up (by Stan Winston no less) is hideous, the costumes wild but pretty lazy in all (like someone just went into a thrift store or a school’s theatre wardrobe and grabbed anything wild-looking)

My head just got buried more and more in my hands as the music got more indigestible and the Sesame Street quality just devoured the thing entirely. I don’t want to compare it to the 1939 movie – pretty much anything looks bad by comparison – but even coming to it with the highest desire to work with it and find the goodness with in it, I struggled painfully. I nearly died laughing when the lion lets rip with, “I’m a lion!” ROFL … I just kept feeling like Homer Simpson in the “Homer’s Phobia” episode of The Simpsons in the steelworks … “oh my god, what’s happening now?!” lol. Then it goes absurdly dark at the end! Then they all get naked? lol. It’s just a maddening mess.

I’m inclined to say it could be the worst film I’ve ever seen – but there are a lot of plus points that make me understand where its fans are coming from. The sets in themselves are often stunning. Some of the music is catchy, even in the case of “Can I Go On?” slightly moving. The rainbow in the sprinklers at the end is simply inspired, and Richard Pryor completely steals the movie when he finally appears. I’m interested in a review I read on the IMDb that says how the Broadway show was pretty spectacularly different. Whatever … it’s certainly a curio, worth watching if you’re a fan of cinema, musicals, or just plain Oz … but I personally found it pretty damn excruciating, in a geniuinely “Make it stop!” kind of way. I think the credits say it all – written by Joel Schumacher, produced by Rob Cohen, and directed by Sidney Lumet. Too many cooks spoil the broth indeed … especially when they’re that differently minded.

Tags: fantasy, musical, race, Seventies
Posted in 2 hearts, Movie Reviews | 1 Comment »

Remember the Titans

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

As a sports movie, this was obviously gonna be a hard sell for me – its sole achievement threatening to be that it makes Friday Night Lights seem even more pointless. But when I love a movie as much as I love Uptown Girls, I don’t let the subject matter get in the way of catching up on the director’s other work.

The complete lack of any conflict or drama in the movie’s first half hour doesn’t help. This is a movie about a mixed race school football team, and the set-up is that they put this team together and everyone is pretty much fine about it. Luckily there’s an “ah-ha” moment around 35-40 minutes, though, where they enter “the real world” and things get tough – but it’s Disney, so, not that tough.

It’s watchable. But knowing me I’m probably only being nice ‘cos Hayden Panettiere (who it took me a while to recognise but I got there eventually – I guess I just always figured she was older than she is in Heroes lol) is cleverly planted in just about every other scene – her football crazy daughter of one of the coaches is about as funky as the rock ballerina girls in Uptown Girls and a little of a lot of cuteness like that (especially when it’s unexpected as it was to me here) goes a long way in a movie like this, lol. I’m sorry but I laughed my ass off at the “nanana, hey hey hey, goodbye” ending That tops Shrek the 3rd‘s use of “Live and Let Die” for most inappropriate funeral scene ever, lol.

Tags: accident, cuties, football, high school, race, Seventies, sport
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Cool Runnings

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Well I can’t believe I just teared up while a Classic Eighties Movie Slow Clap^TM was going on in the background

It somehow felt like it was finally time for me to watch this – a recent Channel 4 thing about the best family films brought it to the surface, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Facebook listing it as a fave – but within minutes I was questioning if that was a good idea. There’s an old me that would have been far from impressed with this movie for the exact same reason the me of now ultimately fell for it today. This is guilty of just about every cliché in the book of late-80s and early-90s cinema. It pulls every faux-pas that practically threatened to destroy the artform during that period. But, somehow, it works.

It didn’t make me laugh at loud much at all compared to some. But there’s just something else under it all – perhaps highlighted by the Dark Moment (let’s use the proper template terms here, it couldn’t be more by the book I swear) … which is actually really dark, I mean for a movie that seems so silly and light from the outside that crash is nasty – it’s perhaps the fact that it does follow the old screenplay paradigms and wot-not so to the letter. I don’t know. All I know is, I wasn’t bored, I laughed a little, and I was embarrassingly moved by those final moments.

Tags: Nineties, race, snow, sport
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