It's rare when it happens that I really want to write a blog entry on a movie but I don't have much idea of what I could write about it. I think that in the history of this blog I had like two-three situations when I felt the need to not let a title move by without pointing something out about it, but struggling to do it, and being aware from start that besides saying the movie's good I don't have much else left. Well, maybe there were more similar cases when I wasn't aware it happens :) What's certain for "Suzume" is that we're in such a situation. So...
What we have here is an anime where the background story is some sort of Japanese fantasy, in which a giant worm symbolizing the earthquakes and other natural disasters, escapes from time to time through some doors meant to be closed by somebody called, well, a "closer". The somebody meets during such a journey with Suzume, a teenager on her way to school, who eventually takes over the closer role. And from here on we step into a semi-fantasy road trip, which in my opinion is, as I said already, just a background story. Or a context to build metaphors, and maybe surprisingly, a very.. abstract one.
Let's move quickly over the technical part where, for an anime, the visual experience definitely deserves a viewing. I'm actually sorry I missed this on big screen. Now, we're getting to the part where I don't really know what else to say. As in other more "classic" anime movies, where obviously Miyazaki comes to mind, there are parts far enough from reality to be hard to get their meaning and even slowing down the movie. Still, these are also part of the metaphores set, and I believe each of these can be understood differently depending on who's watching it, which is probably the most interesting thing in the entire movie build-up - somebody could relate something with his or hers own life in a very different way than somebody else will probably do it. It might sound cryptic what I'm saying, but it's more practical to experiment on your own and see if it checks. Maybe I'm wrong :)
There's a while already since I'm not going to cinema as often as I used to, but there are exceptions. "Oppenheimer" is one of these. Reasone: top 250 IMDb, Nolan and a feeling that it deserves a big screen viewing. TL;DR: I think its place in top 250 is justified, it's not Nolan's best - but it's probably among the top half, about the big screen.. I wouldn't call it a "must see", but it's true I didn't watch it in IMAX.
Who read my blog knows that I'm not really fond of biopics. Besides that, Oppenheimer's life is not the most offering subject movie-wise, despite his importance in the context of WW2 and his major contribution in the development of the first atomic bomb. That's why the best part of this production is to squeeze out a script that wouldn't probably be easy to top with anything else covering the same subject. The story builds up on three temporal lines, started simultaneously. The main one is the "classic" type, following the biography of the main character since his student years up to his involvement as a chief physicist in the Manhattan project and to the detonation of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This timeline merges afterwards with a second one, probably less familiar, covering "the trial". In brief, after WW2, Oppenheimer's activity became much more politically oriented than scientifical, implicitly drawing enemies and culminating with a closed hearing meant to revoke his security credentials, but which discredited him publicly. A third timeline, suggestively nuanced in black and white follows the reversal of that episode, happened a couple of years afterwards, when the principal political adversary behind Oppenheimer's hearing gets his own "trial" when attempting to occupy a secretary of state position.
"Oppenheimer" has perfect screenplay construction. A review that I read before watching it was saying something about the long length it has, where the third hour, coming ofter the nuclear explosions, is dilluting the effect and the movie should stop before it. I believe that's precisely the third our that makes it worth watching it. Even if in its beginning we have some dialogues that are a bit supperficial, the ending is filled with much more fine and mature nuances, some of them quite deep. From aspects that relate to form, like using the first person plural - a natural thing for a researcher given the typical writing customs - in complete opposition with an attorney's perception that interprets that as a lack of responsibility, to the fundamental idea that is built as a warning: mix science with politics and the last will bury you. There are some details, which I believe are more evident for who had some experience in research, and in particular in technical research. There's a point when somebody working in this area will most certainly have some opinions or even get forced by circumstances like management or other collateral activities, to take a position concerning more.. "humane" matters than the scientific niche. However, who's getting drawn too much into this direction will involuntarily end up sacrificing the other, which in an optimistic scenario will at least cost time, but worse might make the person a lamb to slaughter in a political jungle (the case of the movie). There's rare the case when somebody manages to fight both fronts and keep the standards high - because a technical area has a dynamic that sometimes is hard to keep up to even without something else distracting you. Anyway, we got into a very particular niche :) so let's move back to the movie.
As a cinematic experience "Oppenheimer" is ok, but not impressive. We have some nice shots, but overall its camera work is not spectacular. I appreciated the reserve on using CGI - I think it's better like that, but on the other hand I'm convinced that cinematography could've been better. The sound, as the editing are typical for Nolan, meaning a bit too aggressive, at least for start. Nevertheless, towards its end the video editing fills the gaps you fill in the cinematography, the result being probably the best edited movie hour I've watched in the last two years. The jumping between timelines begins in adagio and gradually advances to a tense allegro, which in the last ten minutes builds up into a sensory impact explosion.
My casting opinions are typically subjective, so we can move quickly over - what's obvious is that both Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. will probably collect plenty of nominations in the upcoming awards season. I didn't talk at all above about the biggest star on the poster though... = the bomb :) This will generate a long boring philosophical paragraph. To summarize it, unfortunately, despite the setting being more than 50 years ago, the movie is very timely. As I was saying about "1917", or more recently about "Im Westen Nichts Neues", it should probably be included on a mandatory watching list for many heads of states. I'm not sure though how much would they understand it...
The conclusion: it's a long movie and it can get boring. As I got bored by "Mank", "The Iron Lady", "Mr. Turner" or other biopics over the years. It probably won't happen though if you have some interest in history or some minimal technical background. And the latter can make you a bit subjective ;)
It's probably obvious from the frequency of my blog entries that I didn't have time, and honestly neither much mood for movies lately. I'm considering to compensate a bit more during this summer time, but we'll see... For now I stopped at "Maggie Moore(s)", which I also mentioned in the previews entry a couple of months ago, a title that afterwards received some mediocre ratings on various sites, but which I still decided to watch. And I liked it. Therefore, the current subject.
Probably the best fit for mapping this movie to a genre would be dark comedy, drawing apparently some inspiration from some creepy true events. In the suburbs of some town, some Mr. Moore doesn't get along well with Ms. Maggie Moore, his wife, and Mr. Moore also has some shady relation with an expired foods supplier for his franchise restaurant. When Ms. Moore finds out and threatens to call the police, Mr. Moore decides to hire a local thug to scare her. Unfortunately the scare goes a bit too far and Mr. Moore loses his wife. Through some unfortunate coincidence, Mr. Moore finds out about some other Maggie Moore living in the same area, and an idea pops up... What if, for building a solid alibi as a grieving husband, to hire again the same "assassin" to execute the same scare job on the second Ms. Moore, which would make the first "accident" to really look like an accident with a wrong address. To add more to this plot, the second Ms. Moore proves to be a likely target for some other people, which results in the most complicated case the local police chief ever encountered. Top that with a side romance + a comic relief offered by the bad jokes thrown in by the deputy.
The movie clearly doesn't fit the trend of the last years, and is more likely close to a TV production or to an episode from some crime mystery series. Overall though has some particular charm of a calm story but not a boring one, funny but not childish, "spicy" but not exaggerated. It's a perfectly fine movie if you're looking for one hour and a half of chill time, but still active for your brain, because the script is dense enough and well written. It probably becomes dull for the expectations of the mainstream critics who I guess got used during latest years either with the action box office standard not delivering much substance, or with the range of Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and others. Something in between... bit more hard to get accepted. For me it seems way too underrated. But, watch it and then judge it... Maybe I'm just tired :)
I know that I'm relatively behind the release date of what seems like a first iteration of a novel "Dungeons and Dragons" series, but 1) I didn't have much time for movies lately and 2) I didn't really trust the subject. So it took a while to decide watching this. But probably both 1 as well as 2 had a subjective contribution to my final impression = it was clearly beyond my expectations.
To clarify a bit point 2 above, I'm not a complete stranger from the D & D universe. Sometime, like 15-20 years ago (when my amounts of free time were different) I had some contact with the video games niche placed in the same fantasy setting, which originate from board games started long long ago. The contact was enough to realize that the bunch of repetitive quests like talking to character X who can be found in tavern Y for finding the object Z from location Q were usually mingled in a gordian knot, making hard to believe that this kind of stuff can be easily adapted for a screen story. But it seems it can. If there's something to appreciate most about this movie it's the screenplay. In a fantasy universe that's pretty common with what we know already = people, dwarfs, druids, good wizards, bad wizards, dragons, etc, somehow we can find a story that's not told so many times to bore you. For the connoisseurs it keeps the D & D feeling using a series of nuances like: the ensemble of different characters typical to a game - "the party" - where each has specific abilities, the NPCs = non-playable characters who you can add temporarily to a party but at some moment they go on with their lives, the classic quests mentioned above, and others. For who's not familiar with the D & D lore, these nuances are difficult to observe but don't bother either because the movie adds anyway an excellent dose of humor set in such manner to mock all aspects that would bore even an experienced gamer = why a spell meant to interogate zombies must really force you to ask 5 questions when you need only 2, why do you need a path more convoluted then everything you've seen in a Indiana Jones movie to cross a trapped bridge, and again many others.
I didn't really say much about the subject, right? That's because the subject is typical to D & D, meaning exactly what I was mentioning above - we have the heroes of the story trapped in untangling some tangled threads of what proves to be a diabolical plot of a necromancer to corrupt the living world via an evil witch, who raises to power with the help of a crook that manages to usurp the throne of... Whatever, it really doesn't matter that much how many threads we have but more how these are tangled, with anything that comes by along the script = acting, sound, camera, for which the description here is useless; it's better to watch the movie. It's refreshing ;) And I'm not really in a moment to say this about anything, no matter how subjective I might be after my low expectations.
As it happens lately, my mood for writing new entries is "incapacitated" due to various reasons. I'm still trying though to keep this blog alive, and since we reached the usual time for the preview of the next six months, that's making my job easier. After all, here it probably matters more what trailers I include in the enumeration than what I'm rambling besides these => it allows me some economy with the extra comments. So, let's check out what we have on a short list...
In June, "Maggie Moore(s)" makes a difference in the typical scenery of summer blockbusters, reason why I decided to choose it to start the list, hoping for something more original. It looks like a mix of a mystery thriller and a dark comedy. We'll see how that works out.
It's rare when I refer to biopics on my blog, because it's definitely not among my favorite genres. However, for "Oppenheimer", announced for July, I decided to make an exception. One reason is the direction by Nolan. The second reason is because (unfortunately) the topic seems to become more and more timely.
I didn't have much choice of trailers for August, so I'm skipping through to September when we have "The Creator". The movies's baseline is overused, and I doubt it can reach the heights of predecessors like "Terminator", "Matrix" and others. But at least is a "clasic" SciFi (not a SH = "superhero" movie), which is a genre that we don't see very often.
In October we have the official release date for "Killers of the Flower Moon", the most recent film by Scorsese. After the Cannes pre-screening, the reviews look good.
I'm closing the list with "Dune: Part Two". All I can say is that I hope they'll keep some limits on the adaptation freedom we've seen in the first part, although what's already done is done. Except that, we'll see how it goes in November... Let's get there first.
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