I ignored for a while "Don't Worry Darling", simply for the reason it was bashed by critics + neither the scores on IMDb, RT, etc. didn't help it. I was wrong. Not that I wouldn't know that lately it's better to be skeptical about the aforementioned ratings.
The movie is set sometime close to the '50s, taking place in an isolated community - "Project Victory", somewhere in an oasis at the edge of the desert, where the life seems stuck to the typical American stereotype of the period = each couple has a home with a backyard and each housewife tends to the house chores for the entire day waiting for the beloved husband to return from work. The "work" seems to be a top secret engineering project coordinated by Frank, the community leader, which is developed at a couple miles away from the settlement, in a place more restricted than Area 51. The plot is centered on a couple formed by Alice and Jack, their idilic life starting to shake after she begins observing that some things are not as fine and well as they seemed to be. Beginning with another wife who miraculously survives an inexplicable suicide attempt to a plane dissapeared without a trace after an apparent crash that passes by ignored by everybody. The mystery advances with the rhythm of a psychological thriller, in which Alice slowly becomes the pariah of the community due to the unnecessary tension she creates around. Somewhere at around three quarters of the movie we get our answer for the whole thing. What I can say without spoiling anything is that I didn't expect "the twist" I got this time. My mind went more towards something like military experiments at the beginning of the Cold War. It's not that. Still, unfortunately, the answer the movie offers come either too early or too late - therefore, probably some reason for the harsh reviews it got.
Even if there are some parts that might disappoint a bit, these definitely aren't on the technical side where the movie is top notch - from camera work and production design that provide an excellent support for atmosphere of the middle 20th century to the soundtrack that mixed together with the rest gets you the vibe of an erie episode from "The Outer Limits". The actors are a bit overshadowed by Florence Pugh's performance in the title role, but still, you could say her role is already enough for what the movie needs. The ending is indeed unpolished. However, concerning the criticism on having nothing new in the main twist, I'd be curious to see which movie that turns towards SciFi really brings something new, especially counting probably less than 5 I've seen released for the big screen this year within the genre. And actually, I could say there is some originality even just for the psychedelic contrast placed on top of the retro look. To conclude, I don't know what did or who upset Olivia Wilde, also directing this besides having a side role, to get such an avalanche of bad reviews. For what I can say the movie's not a masterpiece, but definitely above average.
With that I'm also closing more-or-less metaphorically the year of 2022 in a note of "don't worry" :) = I can hope for a more "retro" careless time with a density of entries more close to the blog's origins. Obviously, I'm delusional.. Anyway, Happy Holidays! ;)
Usually, if there's nothing to cause a delay, I'm posting the "traditional" seasonal entry before the actual beggining of the "season". Now I'm a couple days late, and not only due to lack of time, but mostly because of the lack of content... Maybe I got struck by some winterish very gloomy mood and I dislike everything. But let's see what can we put on the table...
I know there are other high budget and more marketable titles announced for December, but the only that I thought it's worthy to stop to is the already delayed "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish". Unfortunately even here, as in many of the recent animations, and not only, the trailer gave me the impression that the coffee or sugar consumption at Hollywood is exaggerated. This hyperactive pacing is tiring, and the density of light jokes present in anything that has a touch of comedy doesn't help. What follows is not far from that...
In January, we get the same hyper-glicemic rhythm in (apparently) a completely different genre - the next movie by Guy Ritchie: "Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre". Given the way the trailer goes, starring Jason Statham as the "classic" lead, if you wouldn't know it's a movie by Guy Ritchie, your chance of guessing would probably be higher than the chance of getting some snow this winter. Anyway, this wouldn't be a problem if so much of the action wouldn't be spoiled already. Like that, what's left to see is only if there's enough room left to expect to see more.
The fact that for February I didn't manage to find anything more promising than "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" says a lot. Between this and "Cocaine Bear", well.. maybe I shouldn't think twice on it.
March: no escape from sequels. At least the trailer for "John Wick: Chapter 4" looks more exotic than "John Wick: Chapter 3". And the hope that will be more close to "John Wick: Chapter 2" stays alive.
I'll move over April and stop in May at the single entry of this list that I can say I'm looking forward to watch, even though again there's not something new: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3". I still think, James Gunn, the director + writer, is pretty much the only one who managed to move out of the typical Marvel line and to provide some distinct personal touch, the first two GotG being in my opinion by far the best movies out of the most profitable = commercial super-hero universe. On the other hand I can't say the trailer looks very promising this time, but well, as above, the hope remains.
For the 15th year of my blog, I intended for a subject worthy enough of a round anniversary. Obviously, I didn't have enough time to find anything new and I'm again forced to recycle something. This spring, if I remember well, I've rewatched Kieslowski's colors trilogy, supposedly connected to the French Revolution symbols through the well-known colors of the flag - bleu, blanc, rouge. I've always found it a bit overrated, maybe except for the second movie, "Blanc". In essence, it's a comedy, slightly bitter, but that's what makes it special.
Karol Karol is a Polish barber, who recently arrived in Paris, and even more recently left without a dime by his ex-wife after a quick divorce motivated by his incapacity to perform his duties as a husband. Losing his passport, without speaking much French, and with his hair salon set on fire by his former wife, he ends up with a big empty suitcase as a beggar in the metro station, singing with a pair of... combs. The Polish tune catches the attention of Mikolaj, another Polish guy, considerably more wealthy, who offers a deal - to kill somebody who wants to die but doesn't have the guts to do it by himself (we finally find out that "the somebody" is Mikolaj, but let's save some of the story). Karol says no, but Mikolaj finally decides to help him by arranging an illegal journey to their home country, packing Karol in his empty suitcase. Long story short, Karol gets back to Poland barely alive, and slowly starts building a revenge plan. How does that go? It's probably better to watch the movie than read it here :)
Unlike the rest of Kieslowski's trilogy, "Blanc" is more a Polish production than a French one. Besides the story, slightly unrealistic at some point, but dense enough to keep you watching - we definitely have a subject here and it's probably better to keep the current entry spoiler-free - we have very well-picked casting. The score is also surprisingly good and allowed me to discover Zbigniew Preisner (the composer), my only reference until then in Polish film music being Wojciech Kilar. The cinematography is nice, but that's valid for the entire trilogy. Each movie shows an obvious intent to bring forward as much as possible the color set in its title.
As far as I know "Blanc" is mostly considered by film critics a good movie, but still the weakest of the three. Maybe because it's the one with a rich plot, drawing attention there instead of being centered on deep philosophical questions. Concerning that, I didn't care much about the references it draws to "egalite" = the middle link between the "liberte" and "fraternite", as it's considered to be, but I've seen it simply as a stand-alone picture. A "revenge movie" in the end, which surprisingly presents itself this time as a comedy packed within a drama. Or the other way around :) Pretty much like the life of the main character. Maybe that's a reflection theme that's deeper than others ;)
Unfortunately, during latest months I didn't have the time and neither the mood to watch any movie worth writing about. Somehow though, I got to spend my hours before going to sleep with the two prequels mentioned in the title for "Game of Thrones", respectively for "Lord of the Rings", and even though I don't usually write about tv stuff, I said it might be a a good subject for an entry (+ I don't want to let the blog die for good yet). Besides that, being released at about the same time, the two series seemed comparable, therefore, the idea to put them one near the other, although I don't really have the same opinion at the end of the first season.
"House of the Dragon" has a soap-opera-like development bringing dragons as the unique element of fantasy, while "The Rings of Power" is a pure fantasy, or at least that's what it wants to be. This is where my negative bias ends for the first one, and the positive one stops for the second. The new soap (unsurprisingly after the original GoT) is wrapped in a very smart screenwriting, which somehow masks the typical lengths where nothing of much imporance happens, crowning that with an extremely efficient "refresh" in the second part of the season by jumping over some years in the action timeline, telling you basically: look, we didn't try to squeeze out some useless episodes to fill up the season, exactly when this seemed to be what's coming. On the other side, with all the fantasy elements LotR tries to add to its checklist, and despite limiting the first season to just 8 episodes, the script is horribly "economical" in the narrative development. Practically, if you extract some key elements out of three episodes or so (1,6,8) it's most probably enough to jump directly to the second season, whenever that might be released. The rest of it feels like empty filling bringing on top of it a bunch of cliche in the writing, which might be normal for a production, but it's not so normal to be so obvious. You can have some cliche in a script, but you need to alternate that with some more natural dialogue. Here what you get are lengthy sequences, spanning minutes of lines, which lead you to the "classic" question - who's talking like that for real? The lack of experience of the two lead writers is obvious - which you can confirm by a quick check on IMDb and find out that's basically the first production in their carreer.
If the narrative is "the root of all evil", more limited in GoT, and more obvious in LotR, unfortunately the balance between the two is completely messed by the rest of the production elements. If GoT benefits of an exceptional production design for a tv series, LotR is far far away to live up to some titles in the online press referring it at some point as "the most expensive series ever". The comparison is almost moot. You can only look at the CGI in LotR, which is either sloppy or absent, leading to hilarious scenes in terms of amplitude, such as the battle for Southlands between men and orcs limited to something like a handful of people in a small village with a few houses, somewho lucky enough to be found by the reinforcements arrived from across the sea, having a perfect sync to find exactly that place on the Middle-Earth map and land perfectly on time to change the fate of the battle (as I said the script is the "root of all evil"). To pick something ample enough for comparing, you can pick for instance the coronation scene in GoT's 9th episode, where I don't how much is the part of extras and how much is CGI, leaving the dragon aside, but in any case the whole sequence is impecable, not ignoring apparently trivial details such as the size of the place where the action takes place. Besides that, if we got to this, it's one of the two scenes in GoT that creates a powerful emotional impact on the viewer through all it brings along, including the actors and the score. The second scene is the one of the king's entrance in episode 8. Both scenes are very carefully built and could very well stand as a subject of a more complex analysis in something like New York Times' "Anatomy of a Scene". In LotR we don't really have something on par with that, maybe the ending of episode 6, where we basically watch the creation of Mordor, but even that seemed partly failed to me from the directing perspective, wasting some of its potential. To compare yourself (more-or-less), with a strong spoiler alert, I included in the end a capture with what transpired on YouTube from all the above mentioned (although I don't know if it will last long).
Some other parts where GoT shines and LotR struggles are the casting and the soundtrack. You can see again here, what's probably the experience of HBO's casting crew. Generally, I don't like expressing opinions about actors because this is subjective, but here the overall difference is obvious. With some exceptions, in LotR we have quite a lot of "flat acting". It's true that again... it the script offers you one cliche after the other, you probably need to struggle to make a believable impression. Concerning the sountrack, even the piece on the main title by Ramin Djawadi recycled from the original GoT has a stronger impact than what Howard Shore did for LotR, apparently brought in especially for that. Besides this, I think that Bear McCreary who has the credit for scoring the episodes content is a good composer, but even in "The Walking Dead" it took something like five seasons to release a pice that fits so well with a scene to stick to your head and make you search it after. For the moment here is completely "forgettable".
I must say that I'm not at all a fan of prequels - it always seemed to me the perfect example to find an opportunity to squeeze the last drop out of an used subject. In a sequel, at least you get a new ending that you wait to discover. In a prequel, you pretty much know the ending, which from my perspective reduces quite a bit the potential of the narrative to catch your attention. Besides that, I somehow had low expectations from "House of the Dragon" after the messed up ending in the original GoT, and I had somehow higher expectations from "The Rings of Power" after the previous experience with an excellent Amazon adaptation for "The Man in the High Castle". This probably contributed at least a bit to a completely reverted effect in my opinion after watching the first season of the two... In any case, my feeling is that LotR doesn't have much chance to grow unless the radically change the production team, and for GoT I think it's hard to keep the current level without getting affected by similar narrative issues, but we'll see.
It looks simple but it's quite complicated to make a wish that you're certain it'll come true. It's close to impossible to get to three wishes. At least that's the message sent by "Three Thousand Years of Longing". Among others...
Alithea is a single woman with a university degree in letters, and more precisely active in the niche of mythology, legends, fantasy in general. During a trip to Istanbul she finds in a bazaar "the magic lamp" (= actually a bottle), holding a djinn who presents her the standard offer of three wishes. What's not so standard is the offer presentation, once that Alithea, having some experience with stories of golden fishes ended badly, has some doubts in placing the first wish. That's where most of the movie's set - finding out from the djinn's three thousand years experience what side effects a too quick decision might yield, and how much entangled are the ways this can generate.
The movies first looks like a "1001 Nights" mixed with Terry Gilliam's Munchausen or "The Fisher King". It's neither. You can feel a bit of the typical chaos you encounter in other movies of George Miller ("Mad Max"), but this is a calm chaos and somehow more... organized, despite the complexity it grows to. The movie advances a lot on the different threads of the djinn's life history and of the wishes he had to fulfill, a bit too far and with too much naration added, although we're carried through it by the stunning visuals of the old oriental world, which compensates a bit. Sometimes the story gets so dense that seems more like a philosophical audio-book. It's ok if you have some years behind you and the right mood to meditate on the various meaning that you can extract and maybe correlate with your life experience. Unfortunately though, it loses points on engaging a less tired viewer, who might get bored. For me, fortunately, or actually.. unfortunately :-) the first category above fits better...
It's been a while since I've watched "Kundun", and unfortunately I didn't have time to write a fresh entry. So, we'll deal with one a bit more stale, but somethin' is better than nothin'.
The movie, directed by Martin Scorsese, relates the history of the last living Dalai Lama since his early childhood up o the exile in India forced by the Chinese troops invading Tibet. It's debatable how well the movie presents the main points of Dalai Lama's ruling as the de facto leader of the second largest Chinese province. It's also debatable what connection you can draw, in the sense of "history repeats itself", between what happened more than 60 years ago in the far east and what happens now in the closer east. But this is not a blog for politics :) So, thinking on some of the latest more or less controversial positions expressed by a man that got through most of his life, probably it's more important to get to live in peace and harmony with the people around you indiferent of their urge for singing whatever national anthem. So, let's keep things peaceful and get back to the movie.
It's neither the best, nor the worst film made by Scorsese. It's definitely not on par with Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor", but it has its own merits and some distinct nuances still raising it to the level of a classic epic movie. First of all, I don't know if there's any known name in the entire cast. On the contrary, there are quite a few actors for whom this was their only movie in their cinematographic career. I'm not sure how Scorsese worked here = how many are amateurs, how many are stage actors, etc - but there's nothing to complain in the end. Besides Dalai Lama, we have some other characters with relatively consistent parts, like the chancellor for example, an excellent actor who in his real life is actually a tibetan painter. The cinematography of Roger Deakins and the minimalistic score of Philip Glass transform the movie in a visually-audible jewel. There are movie with a good subject, but where you have moments when you just drop out of the story, just to better sense some seconds or minutes of camera work mixed with sound. That's what I like to call "cinema movies", because there you get the max effect out of this. Well, getting over all the small issues in the story, maybe some lightness in dealing with a heavy subject here and there, and an ending that's a bit abrupt, for me "Kundun" remains a "cinema movie" - and there are less and less that provide this feeling.
When I first watched the trailer of "Lightyear" I've asked myself how entangled can the subject be to get from "Toy Story" to a space oddisey. I've got my answer in the first 5 seconds of the film: “In 1995 Andy got a toy. That toy was based on a movie. This is that movie.” I must say I admire this as the simplest, elegant and most open way to create a spin-off that I've ever seen on screen. Unfortunately it's pretty much the only thing I can admire here.
I've never been to drawn into the "Toy Story" universe, and probably that's why the last iteration left me with the best opinion, contrary to the general appreciation. I guess that's also the reason why I had high expectations from something announcing itself quite different from the usual "Toy Story" contexts. In "Lightyear", Buzz - the guy on the poster - is an astronaut on a ship carrying several thousand people, apparently during an exploration mission meant to find a habitable planet. When stopping on a potential candidate that finally proves unfriendly due to the indigenous fauna, Buzz damages the ship so badly that discovering a new fuel is required for flying back to "infinity and beyond". Feeling guilty for the situation, our astronaut dedicates his time for testing diverse variations of space fuel. However, each flight of several minutes costs him several years on the planet time. And the life on the planet moves on, finally getting to a fully organized colony, where people moving to the next generation start forgetting that they want to leave. Exactly when, finally, the last tried formul for the space-propelling cocktail seems to be the right one. The problem gets more acute when Buzz, after the first successful test, lands back in the middle of an alien invasion led by the evil Zurg, who somehow seems strangely interested exactly in the newly found space fuel. Well, up to this point the movie was fine. From here onward, it's somehow predictable what happens = Mortal Kombat: Buzz vs Zurg - where finally - big spoiler, we find out that Zurg is actually an older Buzz who discovered also the time travel and wants to "fix the past", but ran out of gas. Even that is relatively fine in the economy of the story, nevermind my debatable and ethically questionable decision to support Zurg's side in this case. And on top of everything the whole SciFi universe created by Pixar, despite the logical flaws, is actually really immersive due to the amount of details. So, what's wrong with this picture?
Warning: my thoughts might get a bit off the rail from here on. The wrong part I've seen in this movie is the "dream team" that sticks to Buzz for helping him to get the planet free from Zurg. The team is formed of three characters who Buzz finds quickly after his last landing, apparently the only who escaped capture by the enemy, and also enrolled as cadets in the space rangers training programme. In brief, the three seem to be in a continuous competition on who's messing things up more often and showing how unprepared they are for their "job". And all this stuff is supposed to be funny. Well, it's not. Also, all this stuff should appear as having a minimum importance in reaching the obvious happy end - keeping the politically correct spirit of "anybody can be a space ranger" no matter of how persistent you are in doing the same mistakes. I might agree witht the first part, but only if you're striving to succeed. Here, at least for one of the characters, it's obvious that placing him under quarantine would considerably increase the probability that the rest of the team survives. But of course that won't be an acceptable course of action - the movie getting quite explicit in a scene where it teaches us that's intolerable to not tolerate the mistake. So... no matter how light the context is in an animation, and as weird as it may be that I'm giving so much importance, I find disturbing to see in a movie that finally targets mostly children that the idea of tolerable mistake is always valid and that "rocket science" could be your path in life, no restrictions set, even though you might be alergic to space dust - but well, let's not discriminate. Even the subliminal supports the same direction by changing the purpose of Lightyear's actions, finally giving up on the goal of fixing his initial mistake and preventing also Zurg to fix it, ending up accepting the planet as it is. I can understand the educational reasoning of introducing even in animations elements of equality and tolerance - concerning gender, race, human behavior, whatever. But it finally depends on where all this stops. Leading such "accept anything" policies so far that you get to prioritize an idea of equity over other aspects as competences, and presenting the triumph of mediocrity as a success... well, that's dangerous. And maybe I wouldn't have written so much about this, but I can spot this tendency too often lately... and sometime during a sunny day, it might bite back, and hard.
Rating: 3 out of 5 - because if you can ignore the last paragraph above, it's actually nice as a SciFi animation
IMDb double tags "Secrets & Lies": comedy + drama. Unfortunately IMDb doesn't also mention how much of the one or the other you get, and I assume the ordering is alphabetical. So, a warning - what we have here is about 95% drama, a maybe a 5% of bitter comedy. Fortunately, that doesn't spoil the movie (well, at least if you're not looking for a comedy).
The development is a bit long, even though it somehow follows two lines of action. We're introduced in the life of a family living in the London suburbs of the '90s. On one side we have a single mother of modest condition, a factory worker, close to depression and in constant conflict with her soon-to-be 21 years old daughter. Give the occasion, the uncle, a photographer somewhat more successful in life, at least financially, tries to plan a barbecue reunion. Meanwhile, an adopted optometrist, decides after the death of both her parents to search for her natural mother. Probably it won't be a great surprise where the investigation leads.
The movie is built on top of this story, maintaining a slowly but steadily increasing tension level up to the climactic meeting in the end. The risk is to get you bored if you're not patient enough to digest all the symbolic elements - for example, the photo sessions that insist on the idea that there aren't any ordinary people free of troubles. All this slow development is meant to also define in more detail the characters, the actors doing an amazing job. The characters are relatively diverse, so until the end there is a chance to start relating with one or the other. That's probably the main strength of the movie, because otherwise it doesn't excel technically. Probably the screenplay could be easily adapted to a stage play. The finale comes with a predictable climax, but is also somehow cathartic, which, depending on the person, could exert a strong impact. Not necessarily concerning the family situation in the movie, but the generally entangled family situations where it's sometimes awfully hard to maintain a balance. But well, as someone told me once, "families are always getting complicated" :)...
I guess that my subconscious related the words in the title - "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" - with some recent episodes I got through in the local medical system, without any connection with the movie, but making me to choose this as a subject. Because I actually don't have much to write about it...
The first "Doctor Strange" was slightly different than the rest of the Marvel universe, reason for I decided to give a chance to the sequel too. Even though the reviews are not stellar. And indeed it's not on par with the initial movie, but I think it's still a bit above the level where the Marvel fan armies set the production compared to others. The subject is a bit messy, keeping the spirit of the title, in a minimalistic description revolving around a good wizard battling an evil witch through various universes within the multiverse. I'm really not in the mood to provide more details for what is nothing more than a children's fairy tale.
The main criticism the movie received, from what I heard, targeted the direction of Sam Raimi. About that, even the story is not the best, I can say I felt somehow pleased that finally somebody had the guts to leave some of his own touch to distract a bit the attention from a Marvel multiverse filled with cliche. It's probably not visible to most of today's audience, but for who intersected a bit with Sam Raimi's older movies, not that much the initial Spider-Man trilogy but others like "Evil Dead" or the '90s series of Hercule and Xene, you can feel here a bit of the slightly dark humour from back then, as well as a characteristic "chaos" that provides a nostalgic charm. Three minutes of Bruce Campbell as a pizza salesman is just an example. For these crumbles I'm gonna give it a...
The shortest summary for "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" would be: a larger budget replica for what was "JCVD" for Jean-Claude Van Damme in 2008, but this time dedicated to Nicolas Cage. In a slightly longer summary, we have a fiction where the main character is the real actor that gets into a "filmic" situation. The concept is not new, but is so rarely used that looking at what we had on the big screen during latest years it's quite refreshing (ironically, given the amount "historical" references).
Nicolas Cage is.. Nicolas Cage, an actor with a declining career path, taking a "job" as special guest to the anniversary party of a superfan, who is also super rich, living on the coast of Spain. We quickly get to find out that the guy is the main target of an entangled investigation covering the kidnapping of a politician's daughter, contacts with the Napoli mafia, and pretty much everything we could find in a classic "action movie". Like that, Nicolas Cage gets promoted from action hero to real agent working for the CIA. And from there the real life starts mixing with the movie life, up to reaching a classic happy end.
The movie doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's good that gets clear from start in a script with a bunch of self-irony, the typical exaggerations found in a '90s action movie, and lots of references to the top box-office roles made by Nicolas Cage during that time. I imagine that quite a lot of the younger public would be lost and not get all the references to "Face Off", "The Rock" or others. It's clearly a movie dedicated to who has watched Nicolas Cage in his top action star period. That's the main ingredient required for getting a real taste of this movie. If you cut this part, what's left is a light comedy with plenty of action, relatively fine as script complexity for this genre. This is different from "JCVD", which I'm not remembering that well, but it left me an impression of more substance within the self-irony at the time I watched it. In the current case, what we have fits to the category "guilty pleasure, fun to watch", but not more than that. Which is perfectly ok, if that's what you'd expect ;)
Rating: 4 out of 5 (I'm nostalgic = quite subjective on this one)
I'm not in the best period healthwise lately, and therefore, not in my best mood to restart blogging. However, I decided to make the traditional quicklist for this period of what's announced for big screen release during the the next half of year. As in my last enumeration of this type I'll go for the ultra-selective variant = let's solve this quickly.
As much as I liked the return to the "Jurassic World", as bad it seemed for me the sequel in "Fallen Kingdom". Still, I'd check on the list the third part of the reboot too = "Jurassic World Dominion" - announced for June. After all, if the expectations are low... who knows ;)
Also in June we have "Lightyear". How did we arrive from the "Toy Story" universe to what we see in the trailer seems to be a mistery deeper than the deep space itself. But I'm sure we'll get the answer in the movie (if it doesn't get swollen by some black hole).
In July, with a feeling of a mix between Tarantino and John Wick (hopefully closer to the second of the series), we'll get to see "Bullet Train". Surprisingly maybe, despite the clear looks of an action movie (with lots of action), this is apparently based on a novel. A Japanese one, as the setting.
I don't see anything else besides "Luck" to worth mentioning for August. Not that I'm expecting much from this one, but since I didn't write for quite a while about an animation, I thought it might be a good idea to check two in the current list.
"Don't Worry Darling", to be released in September, has a promising trailer, which doesn't spoil much of the story. That's the good part. However, I found some red flags looking at the screenwriters team, where the previous work is either in the light rom-com area, ranging towards "Titanic II". Hopefully the current one won't sink...
Unfortunately October-November are a bit blank at the moment regarding released trailers, and I don't have any of the titles announced on my waiting list anyway, so we'll stop here. Maybe we'll have a better "harvest" closer to the winter season.
Most probably five, ten years ago, or maybe even two or three, I would've been terribly bored by two hours of romance-drama mix set at the end of the 19th century. Now, however, "The Age of Innocence" was... comforting; I guess that's the best one-word decription I could use.
I didn't read the novel, but I was expecting something between "Howards End" and any adaptation based on Jane Austen's works. It didn't thread far from that. The surprising part was to find this to be the most non-Scorsese movie out of all the movies I've watched directed by Scorsese. The cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, even though it's clearly not the single collaboration between the two ("Goodfellas", "The Departed", "Gangs of New York"), it's probably more close to the camera work in Coppola's "Dracula", and has some very peculiar nuances (e.g., without any specific reason, we're treated very often with frequent insertions of... food frames :)). The score by Elmer Bernstein fits perfectly, although if you'd separate the soundtrack from the movie it might seem very old school, more towards the '60s-'70s. Finally, the cast, excepting Daniel Day-Lewis, doesn't seem to have many other names in common with the usual list of actors we see in Scorsese's movie credits. What's certain is that all of the above, under his direction, sums up to a movie that doesn't really fit on a home screen. I didn't have the feeling of watching something so clearly made for cinema for quite some time. And considering my 27 inch screen + headphones, unfortunately the reason for that it's not that I have some cinematic experience conditions at my place and I can't make the difference anymore. It's strictly about how cinematic the movie is ;).
I sort of skipped the subject this time. Maybe because 'til the end of the movie what's above was more significant to me, and "the story" was left behind. Briefly, this is about a love triangle in the New York's pre-1900 high society - and all the context seems somehow supperficial. Upt to a point, where, suddenly, and again surprisingly, the development takes a very mature turn as reflection on life & relationships. But, probably that's where the movie's importance falls short, and the book prevails, which as I mentioned, I haven't read. A good extra reason to stick to my spoilers free policy and end this here ;)
I kept thinking if I should or shouldn't write a blog entry this month, not really knowing what movie to pick for it. "1917" was a good fit for the current times - not that much given its context, but more for what's expressing. But 1. I already wrote about it in another entry, a couple years ago and 2. I doubt anyway that my blog's audience intersects with whom I was saying there that should have it on their mandatory watch list. On the other hand maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for more people to watch it or re-watch it. Although, again, it's debatable if the movie's not either too deep for some to get the actual sense in it, or too depressing for who relates too closely to an armed conflict context. So, I got to "Licorice Pizza" - or the first hippie alternative I could think of.
I don't intend to write a long review. Actually, I don't intend to write an actual review. "Licorice Pizza" is some sort of weird romance with lots of comic nuances set in the 70's California, and a much betted movie I'd say than "Inherent Vice", which takes place during the same time and was written and directed by the same Paul Thomas Anderson (more known probably for "There Will Be Blood"). There's a perfect chemistry between the actors, the writing is excellent and the story... not so important.
More important is that "Licorice Pizza" is what we could call a "comfort movie" as an analogy to a "comfort food". Something you really need from time to time. If not for something else, at least to find out if you didn't know that in 1973 (and a couple times after) there were periods of "oil crisis". And most probably that's something you can survive ;) - at least as long as the rest doesn't get much more close to "1917".
"Drive My Car" is a long slow movie. So long and so slow that the intro credits come after more than half an hour into it. But it's a "slow burn". In different words, I think it's worth getting to the end of it.
The movie's based on a short writing of Haruki Murakami. Also, it's very entangled with "Uncle Vanya" by Checkhov. Unfortunately, my readings never intersected with the two, and that I think made me lose some of the hidden meanings in the action. This is centered on a period from the life of Kafuku, a theater actor from Japan in his 40s, who's losing his wife in the beginning of the movie as a victim of brain hemorrhage. Fast forward two years from the tragic event, we find Kafuku as a director somewhere in a delegation, tasked with staging the mentioned Checkhov play. The rules of the theater company require him to take a professional driver, a young woman. Initially he's displeased with this, on the ground of breaking his habit of rehearsing the play lines while driving, but he's finally compelled to accept. From here on, the movie starts more often to signal the "slow burn" I was mentioning, delivering between periods of calm some scenes that are either thought provoking or their construction is sufficiently strong to keep you hanging on. Probably one of the first such scenes is when the casting of the play takes place, where a former lover of the deceased wife shows up, a character to whom Kafuku surprisingly decides to give the title role. But let's leave the rest of the story for the viewing I'd say. There's not much of a twist in it after all - the whole charm of the movie's set in its construction with all the details, and a summary in this case would not make justice on giving you the same impression as the complete package.
There's a symbolism in this movie from which you can understand more or less, either as you want to perceive it or how the director intended :) What's important is that's there and keeps your mind busy, from the red SAAB with the wheel on the left driven a lot over Japanese roads, only to find it in the end on a Korean highway where the rule is "drives on the right", up to the interference between Checkhov's lines in repetitions and the moments in the lives of the people saying the words, when you're not sure anymore what's part of the play and what's real. In brief, the direction and the script are top notch, although probably the most obvious contribution to the impact of the movie comes from the actors' side, in particular from the lead.
It's hard to qualify "Drive My Car" as a niche movie, because it doesn't move much beyond the usual pattern of a drama. One thing that's certain though is that's not a movie for everyone. I doubt that 10 years ago, maybe even one year ago, I would've had the patience to digest this properly. I'm not sure I did it now, or better said I'm pretty sure there are more meanings in it than I was able to discern. It's a movie that requires some dose of life experience to understand the feelings of some characters, to be able to empathize with them, at least in part. And if that doesn't happen there are good chances the movie will be dreadfully boring for you. Besides that, it's a movie that has a lot of the typical Japanese calm in its action development - which again you might be able to get a taste of if you're in a period when you unconsciously need it. Then, I can say it's relaxing, and you'll feel that stronger as you watch it. Otherwise, I guess I would've slept through it. But I didn't, and the ending, more or less bitter, brings you one of the best acted scenes I've ever seen in a movie, a dialogue from "Uncle Vanya" partly said using the sign language, and which in essence could be summarized in a line from a previous scene - "we must keep on living".
Three days ago, I was looking again for a cinematic "sleeping pill", and so I ran over "The Milagro Beanfield War". A totally wrong choice for the intended purpose, as I found out after watching it. And when I found out I decided I must write a blog entry about it. So here we are...
The movie is directed by Robert Redford, which "recommended" it for my search. With all respect for his acting skills, I don't think there's any other directing attempt from Redford to impress me in any way. It's true I've never got to watch "Ordinary People", considered probably his best movie, but out of the rest of what I've seen the script or the subject typically saved the movie, and the directing always felt somewhere between bland and absent. That's why here I had a shock, experiencing exactly the opposite.
There's no complicated subject in this movie. We're somewhere close to the US border with Mexico, in Milagro, a small forgotten town, with a predominantly hispanic population, close to its extinction being overshadowed by a residential complex in development. In this setting we find Jose aka Joe Mondragon who dares the unthinkable - to use water spilled from the property of the landlord who bought almost the entire region to irigate his own field of beans. People start talking, panicking and get close to rioting, splitting between the two sides - pro and agains the capitalst opression. And like that, we get a series of events that lead to a mini "revolucion". What's really catchy in the movie is how this series of events is staged...
I'd say that although produced more than thirty years ago, the movie fits quite well with the more recent trends, drawing some clear lines like anti-system and others. I'm more and more bored of overusing stuff like that in a media like movies, where in more than one hundred years propaganda was way too often present (whatever kind of that was), trying to overshadow the artistic or even the entertainment side. However, unlike the increasing accent on such direction in the latter years, here I can appreciate the fact that this comes second, much less obvious than in many recent movies, and that's thanks to the direction. The movie has a character and situation comic that's so present, fortunately raising on top of other nuances and preventing these to become too.. "aggressive" (maybe less in the end). It's an excellent mix between the acting, the symbolism, a bit of romance, a bit of fantasy, and lots of humor. The actors have a merit, the script has its merit, the score has a merit, but on top of everything, it's clearly, by far, the best movie directed by Redford I've seen by now, and I think the direction has the largest merit in the final result.
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