15 posts tagged “movies”

Did anyone else die laughing when they saw this image from '2012' in the New York Times?

It's like Thomas Kinkade started taking commissions from end-timers.

for the first time since 'Captain Eo' at Disneyland when I was 12. I found the 3-D-ness kind of distracting, actually, but I bet people found color and sound distracting, too, when they were first introduced. Luckily the movie was 'Up', which is good no matter how many dimensions its in.

For some reason, this video reminded me of that

and thought it was utterly amazing, and probably the best 'show don't tell' argument for why I turn off most movies after 20 minutes these days.

Officially, it's a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. But it's really a home movie by Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, who bought a video camera for $20 off the street the day before the storm and kept it on almost constantly for three days in their attic, camped out on a neighbor's top floor and, eventually, in a Red Cross shelter. The movie's tied together by some post-production and some title cards, but mostly its just the Roberts trying, first, not to drown and, second, to sort through the rubble that the storm makes of their lives.

It looks like a liberal guilt-a-thon, right? I know. What the movie's really about, though, beyond the platitudes, is the insufficiency of fiction to address genuine tragedy. It's amazing how the Roberts survive the hurricane and its aftermath, but nothing about the movie could ever be pitched as a 'triumph of the human spirit.'

Both Kim and her husband are former (and possibly current) drug dealers. They steal a truck to get out of New Orleans and keep it. Kim's brother is in prison. Kim's using the publicity from the film to launch a rap career. Her husband doesn't have a high school diploma, and you can hear real bitterness when he explains his return to New Orleans from Memphis with, 'they only hire graduates up there.' A fiction film would never give its protagonists so many empathy obstacles.

But that's the whole point. We're all adults, we shouldn't need our heroes and survivors to come complete with college diplomas and sparkling intentions. The Roberts aren't 'good people who took some wrong turns in their lives' or however our binary moral compasses want to preserve their hero-ness. They are simply compelling. That's all they, or the movie, owe us.

Lately I've decided the only movies worth watching are the ones that are either painstakingly realistic or aggressively stylized. Somehow I fear that this movie went for one and ended up the other:

The sound you hear at the end is a million gays at their laptops whispering 'fabulous'.

And not worth commenting on at length, but was I really the only one who noticed that the only black character in the movie was named fucking Tyrone?

but that doesn't stop me from completely agreeing with it:

People often have an instinctive belief that the creator of an artistic work is the best interpreter of the work, but there’s no reason to see it that way. Indeed, the fact that all real Star Wars fans reacted very negatively to Lucas’ most recent Star Wars films is an excellent indication that Lucas himself has a fairly weak grasp on the material.

I totally agree with Wolcott. I made it 25 minutes into this voiceover slideshow before I found something more entertaining to do, like clipping my toenails.

So finally last night we decided to watch Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, figuring it probably wasn't the warm balm of restoration and wry observation that critics such as the Davids (Denby and Edelstein) were making it out to be--a refined dip in the sun as the antidote to a pasty soul--but that it might be reasonably diverting; we didn't think that was asking too much. But it was. It was asking for the moon.

What is wrong with movie critics today? Are they so on autopilot that they can't see through the golden cellophane of the cinematography into the poverty of invention in this vacuous travelogue?

How can they not be driven spidercrawling mad up the screening room walls by the inane, banal, uninflected voice-over narration that sounds like it was written for an after-school special ("The next day Maria Elena went out photographing with Cristina. She had a superb eye and knew a lot about the art of photography and taught Cristina much about the aesthetics and subtleties of picture-taking," "Later, they bought candy and cakes at a charming sweet shop, which were homemade and delicious," "He took her to lunch with his friends, who were poets and artists and musicians. Cristina held her own quite well"--thanks for the riveting report), or that damned Spanish guitar forever strumming on the soundtrack like the aural equivalent to a bullfighter's poster, to keep reminding us we're in SPAIN and not the summer Hamptons. (You can tell Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an idyll because nobody seems to work--everybody bobs along on an airy revenue stream of free time and invisible money.)

Allen's Manhattan-centric parochialism is exposed as smug, incurious, philistinism that relies on cultural stereotypes and travel-brochure images because anything wider or deeper would take him out of his comfort zone, a zone that has been shrinking for thirty years until it's little larger than a couple of square tiles beneath his feet. The sheer boringness of this movie is an insult, as if Allen couldn't be bothered to put more work into his skeletal script.

Woody Allen is one of those filmmakers who I simply, irrevocably cannot bear. There's nothing academic about this. I can't make an aesthetic argument, or a promiscuously-syllabled treatise about why he is an inferior filmmaker. To me, Woody Allen movie is just a crying baby on an airplane. I don't care about explanation or understanding, I just want him to stop.

Incidentally, on the same flyby where I caught the Wolcott piece about Vicky Christina Barcelona, I also read a review of 'Fast & Furious', which dryly noted:

It's a revenge tale that frequently takes pit stops from its action to portray Dom's grief, which in this case amounts to watching a darkness-shrouded Diesel stare blankly off into the distance to the tune of sad electronic muzak. Diesel is akin to a less-than-incredible hulk, epitomized by his taking a bullet in the shoulder and responding by simply turning around angrily.

[emphasis of awesomeness mine]

It is ridiculous that this paragraph actually makes me want to see 'Fast & Furious' more than ever, but it does. I'll take Hollywood's sincere vapidity over Allen's fake profundity any day.  

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1. Is it OK to dislike a movie for having too-humble ambitions?

2, The other day I saw 'The Wrestler', the new movie by Darren Aronofsky, the dude who did 'Pi', 'Requiem for a Dream' and 'The Fountain'. I won't say I unreservedly loved all three of those movies, but at least I felt like I wanted to talk about them afterward. Aronofsky seemed like he was getting more ambitious, interesting and ... cinematic, I guess, with each movie.

3. Which is what makes 'The Wrestler' so disappoiinting. The only way I can describe it is that it's precisely what you would expect a movie about a washed-up wrestler to consist of.

4. Seriously, you could have diagrammed the whole thing on a napking during the previews. Dude has health problems. Dude doesn't perform as well as he used to. Dude reached his peak decades ago (telling that story would have had much more potential for Big Drama, making it unsuitable for Indie Storytelling). It gets even more standard as it goes along. Dude has an estranged daughter. Dude falls in love with a stripper.

5. Literally the only detail of the movie that was unpredictable was that his daughter is a lesbian. Eyebrows raise, lower. That was the only exercise I got.

6. It sounds like I'm bashing the movie, but I don't really mean to. All the performances are great, it never panders to you and it hits Roger Ebert's 'three great scenes, no bad scenes' rule of Great Movies. 
 
7. So it's not painful. It's just that it hits its verisimilitude marks a little too hard. The camera is shaky, the dialogue is succinct, exposition is kept to a minimum and each character's arc is shallowed down to real-life scale.

8. But that's sort of the problem. So-called 'indie' movies have become as formulaic as blockbusters. From the hop-right-in beginning to the unresolved ending, I've seen all this before. And I don't even watch that many movies anymore.

9. I went out of my way to see this movie because I thought Aronofsky would do something interesting with a genre that needs a facelift more than Mickey Rourke ever did. All I could really say after seeing 'The Wrestler' was 'It is what it is.' That's what I said after I saw fucking 'Get Smart'.

10. I'm getting to the point where I'd rather see an ambitious failure than a day-labourer like 'The Wrestler'. Again, it's not that it's bad. It's just that, considering the talent-density of the opening credits, it's like having dinner at Julia Child's house and being served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

According to the New York Times.

Jesus, when did anybody? I seriously can't think of anything more boring than talking about George W. Bush at this point. His suck has reached a level of consensus equivalent to the weather. Any attempt to dwell or converse results in rote phrases ('yes, I hate the rain as well'), blahservations ('it changes every fifteen minutes') and arbitrary preferences ('fall is my favorite season!'). Everyone is just waiting until they can move on to another topic.

Why did Stone bother with George Dub? Could he not get the rights to Ryan Seacrest or something?