Gone fishing
I have a few updates in the works but things are tight as I'm prepping a Big Move to NYC next week. (On the plus side, once there, film-viewing opportunities will skyrocket.) That said, I got caught up on three more bait front-runners this holiday week:
Critics have The Savages tacked as the bee's knees in character drama this year, and while the movie is elegant and complex in its interpersonal relationships I kinda felt gypped by the end. It's too pat, too self-aware (Laura Linney's playwrite character continually asks things like, "You didn't think it's self-important and bourgeois?") and too readymade to really jump off the screen. Instead it goes down too easy.
For example, the elderly dementia-addled dad (Philip Bosco, wonderful) has so poorly defined a character that his two middle-aged kids can ably project whatever they want - love, concern, bitterness - onto him and watch it stick. Isn't the whole point that he's a bastard? Why not show some of it? Obviously he has dementia, but who ever thought of that as a McGuffin?
Jenkins ultimately ties everything up in ribbons & bows without asking much of her viewers - but the standout, again, is Hoffman. In a rare turn, he plays a healthy, well-rounded guy (or at least, compared to his sister.)
I know it shouldn't matter too much, but some behind-the-scenes interviews with Julian Schnabel have me convinced that the director retooled Jean-Dominique Bauby's paralysis (and subsequent death) into something like a spiritual autobiography. Whereas Bauby's actual personal life was murkier (he was the big boss at Elle, for chrissakes), Schnabel's version comes around to reaffirm the worth of his children - and, to a lesser extent, the estranged mother thereof.
Much of Diving Bell's camerawork (which is innovative only in its persistence; the first 40% or so of the movie is shot from Bauby's one-eyed, bedridden perspective) deserves its praise. But the whole affair feels overdetermined and too folded around the edges; could a real person's paralysis take such a specific trajectory? Of course Schnabel's (surprisingly un-manipulative) use of flashbacks helps enormously in shaping Bauby's consciousness, but it still feels more like a movie-movie than anything else. That said, the cast is phenomenal and I'm anxious to see it again.
Stay tuned for an even less firm (if possible) take on Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood...
Mike Nichols' new movie has little to do with US interventionism, less to do with the American cult of personality-in-politics, and diddly-squat to do with Afghanistan. Those are superficial aspects; Charlie Wilson's War is really about Tom Hanks, and his ability to convince Americans he's a flawed American, when in fact he's just wholesome. (To wit: much of the movie is about a real-life coke scandal that embroiled Wilson for a while, but not once is Nichols ballsy enough to show Hanks doing some blow himself.)
What results is a great night at the movies - Ocean's 11 style - but an offensively whitewashed and irresponsible "political" film. Poised as a rebuke to US foreign policy's aversion to thoroughness, War curiously has no interest of its own in the Afghans bought, championed and abandoned by their American coffers. The "moral" is tacked-on and oversimplified, handled like a brief drag in a tantalizing party. (Keep an eye on those turbans, or they'll come back to haunt you!)
Unless this is some brilliant, wild metamovie-by-incompleteness - and not an inappropriately patriotic vanity project - Nichols, Hanks and Aaron Sorkin should be ashamed of themselves. (Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, is a genius - and lends the movie 33% more gravity by sheer performance.)
Unless this is some brilliant, wild metamovie-by-incompleteness - and not an inappropriately patriotic vanity project - Nichols, Hanks and Aaron Sorkin should be ashamed of themselves. (Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, is a genius - and lends the movie 33% more gravity by sheer performance.)
Critics have The Savages tacked as the bee's knees in character drama this year, and while the movie is elegant and complex in its interpersonal relationships I kinda felt gypped by the end. It's too pat, too self-aware (Laura Linney's playwrite character continually asks things like, "You didn't think it's self-important and bourgeois?") and too readymade to really jump off the screen. Instead it goes down too easy.
For example, the elderly dementia-addled dad (Philip Bosco, wonderful) has so poorly defined a character that his two middle-aged kids can ably project whatever they want - love, concern, bitterness - onto him and watch it stick. Isn't the whole point that he's a bastard? Why not show some of it? Obviously he has dementia, but who ever thought of that as a McGuffin?
Jenkins ultimately ties everything up in ribbons & bows without asking much of her viewers - but the standout, again, is Hoffman. In a rare turn, he plays a healthy, well-rounded guy (or at least, compared to his sister.)
I know it shouldn't matter too much, but some behind-the-scenes interviews with Julian Schnabel have me convinced that the director retooled Jean-Dominique Bauby's paralysis (and subsequent death) into something like a spiritual autobiography. Whereas Bauby's actual personal life was murkier (he was the big boss at Elle, for chrissakes), Schnabel's version comes around to reaffirm the worth of his children - and, to a lesser extent, the estranged mother thereof.
Much of Diving Bell's camerawork (which is innovative only in its persistence; the first 40% or so of the movie is shot from Bauby's one-eyed, bedridden perspective) deserves its praise. But the whole affair feels overdetermined and too folded around the edges; could a real person's paralysis take such a specific trajectory? Of course Schnabel's (surprisingly un-manipulative) use of flashbacks helps enormously in shaping Bauby's consciousness, but it still feels more like a movie-movie than anything else. That said, the cast is phenomenal and I'm anxious to see it again.
Stay tuned for an even less firm (if possible) take on Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood...
Labels: 2007, auteurs, bait, history, indiewood, j schnabel, m nichols, political
posted by Steve Macfarlane | 12:03 AM
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