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Of this, The Road and Invictus, all of which left me with very little to say, this I’m sure is the one I’m most likely to see again some time and get much more out than I did here on a first viewing. I realised only recently that the reason I probably grew a little tired of this one is because I’ve been spending a lot of my time so far this year catching up on the whole of Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” series. I’ve watched the whole 7 seasons in a little over 2 weeks. And the basic flow of this movie really feels a lot like an episode of that show, only not nearly as funny and provocative. In place of what’s missing is an introspective look at what might be the reason such things happen to the seemingly nicest of people. On a first watch, like I said, I just didn’t see the appeal it seems to have had for others. It’s a remarkably uneventful movie, the implications of its message being equally remarkable in their lack of consequence. But it’s far more watchable than those other movies that left me cold, and I look forward to seeing if a second viewing is more rewarding.
Posts Tagged ‘religion’
S. Darko
Monday, May 18th, 2009This was a lot better than I expected and reading other people’s reviews of it proved very interesting indeed. One of the first bad reviews I found said the following:
“To me this movie felt like someone watched Donnie a few times, wrote down some key elements from the movie in a notebook and then tried to incorporate it into a new movie.”
What can I say but I’m glad if this was the way they approached it. I have no time for those who think they can fathom the mystery of the original movie. Richard Kelly ruined it with his own director’s cut in my opinion. The mystery was key for me. For me, the things you need to fairly compare this straight to video sequel to are not the original theatrical cut of Donnie Darko (which it could never match) but other straight to video sequels, Richard Kelly’s demented director’s cut of the original, and Kelly’s own output since his ingenius debut. On all those counts, this for me easily comes out on top.
If you had any great love for the director’s cut of Donnie Darko over the original, clearly, this is not for you. You probably love the abundance of exposition in The Da Vinci Code and (I’m told) its sequel. I’m personally a fan of abstract cinema, believe it’s something that cinema does particularly well in fact, and to find that in a movie like this which on the surface at times looks as shallow as The OC or something is a huge relief. Like I said, it’s no Donnie, it couldn’t be. But it is beautifully produced, even the music being impressive; it has many parallels to the original story without being 100% rehash; and for a moment or two at least it even took my breath away a little. The ending kind of fizzles rather than blazes as it should and it’s an homage to the original too far that just doesn’t work, but otherwise, for what it is, I was very impressed with this movie.
(PS. Another of the reviews I just read said it was ‘worse than Grease 2 …’ which to my ears is really counter-productive, lol)
Religulous
Monday, February 9th, 2009One of the parts of Borat, director Larry Charles’ last movie before this one, that always lifts the movie to a higher level for me, that really for me clarifies the slightly ‘higher’ meaning of that movie, is the moment when Borat stumbles into a religious convention. I really don’t get enough of Bill Maher but I definitely like what I’ve seen and heard from him. So I was really looking forward to this, even if, from the outset, it was pretty much preaching to the converted. I agree with all Maher has to say here, but one has to wonder immediately whether it’s likely to reach those most likely to benefit.
There’s an odd change in tone towards the end as dramatic music kicks in and Maher just about literally begins to preach to the camera, and as it began I thought I’d be writing of it that it’s kind of a shame considering how (relatively) balanced the rest of the movie is. But y’know what, the guy is just plain right. It’s sad that it clearly takes so much gumption these days to say the things Maher says at the end of this movie when, as he clearly shows, people going so far the other way are not only accepted but bountiful and revered. Maher doesn’t even say anything false like they do. It’s like the new Lily Allen album, “It’s Not Me, It’s You” … the biggest truth that more and more people are coming to now is that the idiots of the world cannot be reasoned with – so the hammerlike (“Fuck You” in Lily Allen’s case) approach really is about the most ingenious solution. I personally prefer this kind of approach to religious madness than the mild-mannered Milk‘s to homophobia, or W‘s completely wasted treatment of Bush, for instance. It’s difficult to decide if this is a relief (that it’s finally happening) or kind of depressing (that it had to come to this at all).
Doubt
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Darn – I’m running through reviews I’ve stalled on for too long and it’s on this one that I find myself confronted with an entirely blank space, no notes or anything, lol. This is another ’08 movie that came along just as I’d really given up on the year as being capable of producing more than a handful of genuinely great movies and really surprised me. As with Changeling, my main prejudicial hang-up on viewing the trailers and promotional materials etc was that the production design of this movie looked to be almost a brick wall to me getting engaged with anything it had to say. The mere look of Meryl Streep in costume just kinda made me smirk. I was pleasantly surprised, then, that within about 10 minutes these characters could’ve been wearing anything. There’s a combination of great acting, dialogue, music, and a wonderful participation of the very elements themselves here, the wind always beating at the windows and leaves and threatening to whip up a very physical frenzy to counter the emotional one we’re witnessing, that makes this movie an electric treat from start to finish. It goes without saying that Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann are fantastic – but even Amy Adams, though I doubt she’ll ever top her performance in Junebug since that role was so perfectly matched to what (the more I see of her now) was clearly just herself, has some fantastic moments as the impressionable innocent caught between one extreme of the past and another of the future. The most special thing about this movie is the very fact you never discover just exactly what the truth of the matter is – it’s genuinely just about how these things spin out of control by themselves once the corrosive key words of the time are spoken. It’s an actor’s showcase more than anything, but that most of these other elements are in place too is the icing on the cake.
Alice, Sweet Alice aka Communion aka Holy Terror
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Weird how I hadn’t seen this one yet. I thought (particularly after the super-obscure Cathy’s Curse) I pretty much knew where all the devil children were 
I have to admit I was a little disappointed first when I realised Brooke Shields wasn’t the Alice of the title and then when I saw her vanish entirely from the cast within about 15 minutes of the runtime, lol; but it didn’t deter me too much from sticking with it. Shields’ performance has nothing on, say, her work in Pretty Baby a couple of years later, but really none of the performances here are particularly noteworthy – though there’s something particularly haunting about the face of the girl who does play Alice, I’m sure Brooke would’ve done just as serviceable a job.
It’s kind of like Don’t Look Now meets Mystic River at the start, with a tone similar to Mommie Dearest (but maybe that’s just the deceptively innocent sounding title working its incidious charm, hehe). In the end it’s one of those 70s horror movies that “just works” despite its flaws, and I could’ve pretty confidently told you as much before even putting it on. I know that I say that often, but somehow I can’t help it. It’ll be interesting in 20 or 30 years to see if people 20 or 30 years younger than me start saying the same of the crappy teen “horrors” of this decade, that’ll be a real noodlebaker, but for now, I can just repeat what I’ve said before, that though the technical stuff was often sprayed on the wall like so many guts in these productions, they really knew how to up the freakout factor and haunt you, be it with music, images, blood, or sound.
As I said the performances are lacking – it’d be easy to call the whole production frankly shocking, in fact. But such is the story that I’d prefer to call it abysmally stylised. Like Happy Birthday to Me, Bloody Birthday, the Slumber Party and Sleepover Camp movies, I’m even willing to give Black Christmas another shot … it was more worth my time than a lot of things lately.
The Mist
Thursday, July 10th, 2008“He’s right. As a species we’re fundamentally insane.”
I want to get to my Mamma Mia! review so this might end up a bit short and sparse lol. I didn’t know a lot about this movie, had never read the Stephen King novella, and I guess the best way to begin here is to say: if the critics of The Happening were so negative because they were coming straight off the back of seeing this, then, I guess I can understand where they were coming from. If it’s fear, nightmare, social commentary and sheer hopelessness you were looking for, then The Mist is absolutely the movie to plump for.
Like The Happening, this is clearly not without its influences – in fact, if anything they’re only more obvious. The Fog is clearly there; that the movie restrains itself to the confines of a mall only a few minutes in immediately recalls Dawn of the Dead. But from there onward – I really can’t detail it because of the joy I got from not knowing what was coming – it’s really quite on its own.
Anyway, I’ve been a little lax in my movie watching of late due to the overwhelming distraction of TV and Second Life – I haven’t even felt comfortable in watching movies in “background mode” ‘cos my attention’s so much in the virtual world, lol. So I guess it’s high praise for me to say that I couldn’t take my eyes and ears off this one. The business of the opening scenes is superbly handled by Darabont introducing us to all the different characters we’ll be stuck with for the next two hours. When the weird happenings start happening, I was far more unsettled than I was by The Happening. And when the, uh, “other stuff” started happening later on … I really didn’t know whether to laugh or hide, and I did plenty of both.
A lot of people have talked about the ending and how down and unpredictable it is. I have to say, I didn’t find it so much surprising as it was inevitable. You kinda know what’s gonna emerge from the mist when that time comes following the incident everyone’s so shocked by. But that second vehicle that passes … that’s the one that really killed me. It’s still a cornier ending than I expected, rather like that “alternate ending” of the man with the X-Ray eyes when he plucks his eyes out and yells, “OH MY GOD, I can still SEE!” lol … but it’s still handled superbly by Darabont. It’s definitely Halloween viewing, that’s for sure.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008“I’ve got something to tell you -”
“Don’t get sentimental now, dad -”
“The floor’s on fire. And the chair!”
The opening of this one is a clunky, cheesy, bitter disappointment after Temple and even after that it takes a while to get going, but I think once I got a severe case of the giggles over the old man/rubber stamp scene I found myself back in the mood that these movies require (it was definitely a good idea to re-acquaint myself with them before seeing the fourth tonight: I’m sure it’ll be awesome but you certainly need to be in the right frame of mind to get the most out of this franchise). Once Sean Connery shows up, of course, the movie enters a league all its own.
It’s a little clinical and clunky in production quality for me in the end, with as many duff notes as there are sweet ones. It feels a lot more like an Indy movie once they get inside the Holy Grail place at the end, and that “Let it go,” line from Connery really caught me offguard, I hope there’s something “deep” like that in the new movie (as well as the insanity of the end of Raiders and the whole of Temple). I’d really take the more iconic original or the joyous second over this any day, but in the end it’s still all good.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems, oddly, to look like the best film I’ll have seen so far this year come later on this evening – okay, I haven’t seen much, but there hasn’t been much to see … and it’s Spielberg, I’ve got faith. Though I was never a massive fan of this series, except in that horrid way that young boys are compelled to be rabid about such things, I’m pretty excited about it, so I’m watching the originals in preparation, I’m sure I’m not alone 
The thing that I noticed more than ever before watching this installment was just how episodic the script is. I know this was like the whole point, etc, to recreate the old 30s and 40s serials and what-not – but it never before struck me as so crazily disjointed, each segment is its own separate short movie almost.
In so many ways, it’s an un-reviewable film: personally because I seem without ever really trying to have committed the whole darn thing to memory; because the Macfarlane/Groening/etc parodies in the intervening years make it impossible not to smirk in inappropriate places; and generally, because you can’t deny how perfectly iconic it is and how huge an impact it made on movies. John Williams’ score is one of the greatest, Karen Allen is gorgeous (very excited about her being in the new one) and the finale is awesome, even more of a WTF moment, again than I ever recall it being – I mean, the movie’s just so nice and gentle up to that point, lol!