Like an apprentice Terrance Malick movie. Highlights: the law men descending from the patch of trees toward the house in the middle of nowhere, the snow being thrown on the frozen blue-ing body of... that guy they killed... (I'm writing this a long time after watching it...)
It's hard for me to really fault a movie for trying to be a Terrence Malick movie, but I thought it could've been improved by just completely going for it in a few places where it didn't quite.
Especially, I'm thinking of, the scene when someone is approaching from the horizon on horseback, and his approach is framed by a doorway, and on the inside of the doorway its not quite (very very close) black, and outside the sky is gray and the ground is white, and there's this slightly curvy but essentially straight path of darker gray dirt, and the guy on horseback approaches right down this path, and I know it would have been a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally long shot, but I found myself wishing very strongly that the shot would have been held in real time for the guy's entire approach, where instead he faded out from the distance and faded in into the foreground. Boo...
But the colors and the light throughout was spectacular. I wanna watch it again for that reason.
I wasn't really interested in the whole epilogue part, though. Or, I mean, I don't think I'd want to watch that part again. It was good information-wise, I guess.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
We Own the Night
Pretty much exactly as good as I thought it'd be. At some point I'm going to have to forgive Joaquin Phoenix the grudge I hold him for being in Gladiator and then further soiling my memory with his performance in Signs, cuz he's really actually a pretty good actor.
The car scene, in the rain, was easily the best point of the film: the way they used no (or almost no?) incidental music through the thing, no exaggerated speed noises or screeches of tires, the way the overwhelming color was the actual blue color of rain, they way they kept the jump-cuts pretty minimal. It could've been better if they'd have let the seen run up a little bit before the point when you realize what's happening, with maybe a lighter beginning in the car or something, but the actual action itself was extremely well done, and in a subtle way you usually don't see in huge mainstream flicks like this: of course, it was allowed to do it that way because it's a cop drama, not a cop action movie.
But then they followed it up with the scene in the hotel room where Eva Mendez finds out that Joaquin "Bobby" Phoenix is taking the cop exam and gets upset, followed by Joaquin doing some serious "acting" like slamming his fist on the counter and tipping over the bottle of whiskey and screaming at her. It was such a half-assed scene, poorly acted by both the characters but it would've been hard to act right because of how poorly it was set up and the really bad dialogue for them to try to act around. Also, it'd been so long since we'd really seen anything of their characters by that point that there really wasn't much of a sense of who they were anymore.
There were some real chances for good shots in this: especially in the climactic scene, the wide shot of the grass burning and the overall scene of Bobby walking through the tall grass hunting Vadim, but the movie didn't linger enough for them to work like I wanted them to. (I'm thinking along the lines of the scenes in the grass in The New World, maybe).
I also kind of felt like the movie was working too hard to try to make a point at the same time that it was working too hard to appear like it wasn't trying to make a point. So you're supposed to walk away thinking, "Well, Bobby joined the side of the 'good guys,' right, but look where it got him? His dad's dead; his girlfriend's gone (highlighted by Bobby's misrecognition of a face in the audience at his graduation ceremony); and now his brother's getting a desk job so he won't get to work with him, either. He's really alone. So maybe he'd have been better off to stay out of it or something?" I don't know. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like that interesting of a question; especially because the binary between a rich life with lots of friends and the ascetic life of the strait and narrow is one that the movie totally created in the first place (not that it "created" it since it's obviously a long-standing idea in human consciousness, but that it created it for itself).
But, whatever. Could've used more and better eighties music, too. At least some New Order in the background or something.
***
(10/18)
The most actually interesting thing about the movie was the way it kept reiterating that the bad Russian guys "were not afraid" of the police. They didn't view the police as all-powerful, and they didn't see them as anything but another group of guys trying to fuck with their shit. The movie itself seemed to go a little out of its way to present the police as just another group of guys, as well. Most of the cops know Bobby, and the fact that his father and brother are high-ups in the department make all the actions of the police toward Bobby seem to be, at least to some extent, just and extension of Bobby's father's power. Similarly, Bobby's "conversion" to the good guys only comes about because he wants revenge against the guys who shot his brother and murdered his father, and it's really his family connections more than anything that makes it possible to join the police and suddenly be assigned to the same case that his brother's working on. The most hammer-over-the-head moment along these lines comes when Bobby's kind of beating up his old friend, and he says something like "I'm a cop now, so I can do anything I want." In other words, to a degree the film is trying to expose the monopoly on power that the police have as being nothing more than just their assertion of that monopoly, not something granted them by God or, more mysteriously, "the public." The police in the movie behave in pretty much the same way you'd expect a rival mafia to behave if the movie were just about two mafias. Even the film's title, which apparently comes from some slogan on NYPD badges is just an assertion of power, nothing at all like the mystical force for good we're conditioned to believe to be the case in our society.
Really, though, I wonder how different this is than a lot of cop movies, like even Dirty Harry, where the cops are portrayed as loose cannons, etc.? The most important difference, I guess, is that even in the Dirty Harry movies, the organization of the police itself is never really exposed or questioned, it's only the individual cops. And, actually, I do think the movie succeeds a little bit in its attempt to expose and critique the state monopoly on power, but I wonder if, by making the film a period piece, it might not weaken the critique just a little bit.
Here's James Gray on Bobby in his movie: "He became a police officer and abandoned his true self." Gray seems to think that's the heart of his movie that everyone's missing. It seemed pretty obvious to me. There's the opening scene, with Eva Mendes's boob, and Bobby saying "I could die right now and I'd be happy" and then the closing scene, where Mark Wahlberg says "I love you very much" and Bobby repeats it back to him, but it's obvious that he's not happy. But, I don't know, "abandoned his true self?" That's such a lame problem, this pining after yr "true self," like that's some actual thing out there that you have to discover and then adhere to. In a more realistic interpretation of Bobby's character, his problem at the end seems to have a lot more to do with loneliness than any true self abandoning. He loved Eva Mendes but he lost her because he acted like a dick and treated her like an accessory to his own, more important life. But he was kind of doing that before he abandoned his "true self;" at least some of why he chose her as the girlfriend to bring to meet his family was that he knew bringing a Puerto Rican would piss his dad off, and making out with her in the stairwell while the cops had a moment of silence for a fallen comrade was consistent more with that. But that's enough psychology. There's too much shoddy psychology in movies, this one included.
The car scene, in the rain, was easily the best point of the film: the way they used no (or almost no?) incidental music through the thing, no exaggerated speed noises or screeches of tires, the way the overwhelming color was the actual blue color of rain, they way they kept the jump-cuts pretty minimal. It could've been better if they'd have let the seen run up a little bit before the point when you realize what's happening, with maybe a lighter beginning in the car or something, but the actual action itself was extremely well done, and in a subtle way you usually don't see in huge mainstream flicks like this: of course, it was allowed to do it that way because it's a cop drama, not a cop action movie.
But then they followed it up with the scene in the hotel room where Eva Mendez finds out that Joaquin "Bobby" Phoenix is taking the cop exam and gets upset, followed by Joaquin doing some serious "acting" like slamming his fist on the counter and tipping over the bottle of whiskey and screaming at her. It was such a half-assed scene, poorly acted by both the characters but it would've been hard to act right because of how poorly it was set up and the really bad dialogue for them to try to act around. Also, it'd been so long since we'd really seen anything of their characters by that point that there really wasn't much of a sense of who they were anymore.
There were some real chances for good shots in this: especially in the climactic scene, the wide shot of the grass burning and the overall scene of Bobby walking through the tall grass hunting Vadim, but the movie didn't linger enough for them to work like I wanted them to. (I'm thinking along the lines of the scenes in the grass in The New World, maybe).
I also kind of felt like the movie was working too hard to try to make a point at the same time that it was working too hard to appear like it wasn't trying to make a point. So you're supposed to walk away thinking, "Well, Bobby joined the side of the 'good guys,' right, but look where it got him? His dad's dead; his girlfriend's gone (highlighted by Bobby's misrecognition of a face in the audience at his graduation ceremony); and now his brother's getting a desk job so he won't get to work with him, either. He's really alone. So maybe he'd have been better off to stay out of it or something?" I don't know. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like that interesting of a question; especially because the binary between a rich life with lots of friends and the ascetic life of the strait and narrow is one that the movie totally created in the first place (not that it "created" it since it's obviously a long-standing idea in human consciousness, but that it created it for itself).
But, whatever. Could've used more and better eighties music, too. At least some New Order in the background or something.
***
(10/18)
The most actually interesting thing about the movie was the way it kept reiterating that the bad Russian guys "were not afraid" of the police. They didn't view the police as all-powerful, and they didn't see them as anything but another group of guys trying to fuck with their shit. The movie itself seemed to go a little out of its way to present the police as just another group of guys, as well. Most of the cops know Bobby, and the fact that his father and brother are high-ups in the department make all the actions of the police toward Bobby seem to be, at least to some extent, just and extension of Bobby's father's power. Similarly, Bobby's "conversion" to the good guys only comes about because he wants revenge against the guys who shot his brother and murdered his father, and it's really his family connections more than anything that makes it possible to join the police and suddenly be assigned to the same case that his brother's working on. The most hammer-over-the-head moment along these lines comes when Bobby's kind of beating up his old friend, and he says something like "I'm a cop now, so I can do anything I want." In other words, to a degree the film is trying to expose the monopoly on power that the police have as being nothing more than just their assertion of that monopoly, not something granted them by God or, more mysteriously, "the public." The police in the movie behave in pretty much the same way you'd expect a rival mafia to behave if the movie were just about two mafias. Even the film's title, which apparently comes from some slogan on NYPD badges is just an assertion of power, nothing at all like the mystical force for good we're conditioned to believe to be the case in our society.
Really, though, I wonder how different this is than a lot of cop movies, like even Dirty Harry, where the cops are portrayed as loose cannons, etc.? The most important difference, I guess, is that even in the Dirty Harry movies, the organization of the police itself is never really exposed or questioned, it's only the individual cops. And, actually, I do think the movie succeeds a little bit in its attempt to expose and critique the state monopoly on power, but I wonder if, by making the film a period piece, it might not weaken the critique just a little bit.
Here's James Gray on Bobby in his movie: "He became a police officer and abandoned his true self." Gray seems to think that's the heart of his movie that everyone's missing. It seemed pretty obvious to me. There's the opening scene, with Eva Mendes's boob, and Bobby saying "I could die right now and I'd be happy" and then the closing scene, where Mark Wahlberg says "I love you very much" and Bobby repeats it back to him, but it's obvious that he's not happy. But, I don't know, "abandoned his true self?" That's such a lame problem, this pining after yr "true self," like that's some actual thing out there that you have to discover and then adhere to. In a more realistic interpretation of Bobby's character, his problem at the end seems to have a lot more to do with loneliness than any true self abandoning. He loved Eva Mendes but he lost her because he acted like a dick and treated her like an accessory to his own, more important life. But he was kind of doing that before he abandoned his "true self;" at least some of why he chose her as the girlfriend to bring to meet his family was that he knew bringing a Puerto Rican would piss his dad off, and making out with her in the stairwell while the cops had a moment of silence for a fallen comrade was consistent more with that. But that's enough psychology. There's too much shoddy psychology in movies, this one included.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Eastern Promises
Kudos to Cronenberg for keeping me completely in the dark until the big reveal of Mortensen's characters true nature, and similarly for not treating it like this huge deal, like the way Shyamalan or even someone not quite that shitty would've. Also for not having Mortensen really give away his secret to Naomi Watt. But I really did not buy the kiss between them. It was the type of kiss that only happened because this was a movie; there's no way two people in the situation would've decided to kiss. It was just ridiculous. Did some suit make Cronenberg do it, or was that really all his decision? Or in the script I suppose...
Micah thought this could be a good set up to a series of films, and maybe it could be but I think I like it as just it's own. It's pretty obvious where Vigo's going from there, and subsequent films would just consist of arbitrary complications in order for there to be a plot. All the big work that the film wanted to do is already done, I think.
Really, really great Russian accent by Vigo. I wish I could do a Russian accent like that. I wonder if that's even an actual localized accent he had that was in some way different from the accents of the other characters?
It's almost kind of funny how obvious it is that Cronenberg wants to really show us the gore: like the shot of the frozen finger being snipped off or, especially, the kid pulling down his scarf so we can see the slit in his throat and the blood starting to come out. And, like KSM mentioned, how obvious the prosthetics are sometimes: especially the guy in the barber's chair.
In retrospect, though, it doesn't make a whole of sense for the barber guy to make the kid do it. It seemed like it was setting something up at the time, but I'm not sure that it ever paid off.
Micah thought this could be a good set up to a series of films, and maybe it could be but I think I like it as just it's own. It's pretty obvious where Vigo's going from there, and subsequent films would just consist of arbitrary complications in order for there to be a plot. All the big work that the film wanted to do is already done, I think.
Really, really great Russian accent by Vigo. I wish I could do a Russian accent like that. I wonder if that's even an actual localized accent he had that was in some way different from the accents of the other characters?
It's almost kind of funny how obvious it is that Cronenberg wants to really show us the gore: like the shot of the frozen finger being snipped off or, especially, the kid pulling down his scarf so we can see the slit in his throat and the blood starting to come out. And, like KSM mentioned, how obvious the prosthetics are sometimes: especially the guy in the barber's chair.
In retrospect, though, it doesn't make a whole of sense for the barber guy to make the kid do it. It seemed like it was setting something up at the time, but I'm not sure that it ever paid off.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Mean Streets
It's kind of unbelievable how good this movie gets in the third act. Not that it's bad before then, but even though you know it's going to explode eventually, even though you see it coming through the whole movie, when everything goes to shit it's still shocking. And wow could Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro act back then. Did they just get sick of it or something?
Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.
It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.
I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.
Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...
Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.
It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.
I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.
Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...
Friday, October 12, 2007
The Darjeeling Limited
This was certainly better than I thought it'd be, I guess because for some reason I was thinking Wes Anderson was bound to descend into a mid-career slump of crap for a while here... Not sure exactly where I got that idea. But I would say he hasn't exactly entered that phase of his career. Though he has got the point that I don't think he's really trying to figure out anything new; he's just working on perfecting what he's getting at. I'm worried he's getting close to arriving there, and I hope he knows where to go from there.
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.
What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.
***
(10/18)
The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.
What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.
***
(10/18)
The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.
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