(3/12/08)
My favorite thing about Be Kind Rewind, and I oddly enough haven't seen this mentioned in any reviews, is how much it actually manages to feel like the type of movie you might have randomly picked up from an old video store, the way that wandering around in a well-stocked video store always made it feel like there were just an infinite number of movies out there and if you were in the right kind of mood you could just pick up some movie because it had an interesting box, and it didn't really matter if it was good or not, it was just that sort-of discovery... or something... Anyway, because video stores really only thrived like that for a certain time period, and because when I was in high school their back catalogue consisted largely of movies from the mid-eighties to the early-nineties, the type of movie that I associate with that video-store discovery is from that time period, and not exactly indie but low-profile enough that I hadn't really heard of it. Somehow, this movie was a really well-done evocation of that. From the not especially well-thought-out characters who make perfect sense within the logic of the movie but who absolutely could not exist outside of it, the one bit of "spectacular" special fx (when Jack Black is zapped by electricity from the power station), etc. Which is not to say that it's like a B-movie by any means, but still that a lot of the charm of this movie is in its sloppiness, or maybe casualness.
And of course there's the pure joy of some of the visual hijinx of Gondry, like the the perfectly camouflaged suits of Black and Mos Def when they're breaking into the power station, and the cardboard gangster cars in the homemade bio of the jazz legend guy.
Let's see... I also really enjoyed that the "villain" in this movie is nothing more than the manager of a local DVD store, who seems to have some unexplained history with the heroes, a history that isn't explored at all or even explicitly commented on in any way. Again, I guess, it was just a charming sort of sloppiness. Not the same sloppiness of a good B-flick, not the same annoying sloppiness of something like that shitty Boleyn Girl movie...
Showing posts with label with Elliot and Erin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label with Elliot and Erin. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Great World of Sound
Elliot said he wouldn't be my friend if I didn't like this movie, and we seem to still be friends, so I guess that answers that question.
I did, though, think, "And here, of all places, I've stumbled across a perfect example case for an argument against trying to make characters wholly believable. Main character guy, the skinny white guy, whatever his name was, (Martin, IMDB tells me) is, I think, supposed to be kind of blank so we, the audience, can feel like we're experiencing the movie from his POV, but he's also supposed to be a fully realized "character," possibly the only real one in the movie. He stares meaningfully into the middle distance in that way that fully realized characters do when they're experiencing crises of consciousness or when they're suffering because their girlfriends don't understand them. He is quirky but not too weird. Etc. Anyway, I believed that he was realistic enough that I couldn't figure out for the whole movie why he hadn't just left this job immediately. It was so obviously a total scam, and the only way I could figure out that he didn't notice as soon as that Shank guy started talking what an absolutely illegal scam this company was is that he must have some sort of mental problem in which he can't really pay much attention to stuff that's happening around him and maybe when total scams present themselves he's busy watching those crazy leprechaun/zebras that keep growing out of the ceiling. Really, the only reason that he keeps the job is because the movie requires that he keep the job in order to get to it's gimmick: the music audition stuff. Which there should've been more of. More music; less Martin and his black "friend" trying to talk them into signing. Showing them do it once or twice outside of the key plot ones would've been enough. So what I meant way back up there at the beginning was that if Martin was not such a total cipher and was instead allowed to be as less-than-three-dimensional as every other actor's character in the movie was, it just would've worked better, and I wouldn't have kept wondering why he was being such an idiot. But, of course, it would've been possible for Martin to be a totally believable character who was just too stupid to catch on to what a total scam everything around him was. Yeah, that would also have worked. But then the filmmakers would've been asking the audience to inhabit a dimmer fellow than themselves, which just isn't really done (and maybe it's impossible?) and they seemed to want us to inhabit the main character so we would feel more strongly the moral dilemma he finds himself in. And that was the thing I liked least about the movie. Because, really, what moral dilemma? That it's bad to scam people? I learned that one already. There was almost no point during the movie at which I thought I couldn't have made a better decision than Martin did; and by "I" here I mean actually not myself but pretty much every person I know." But I was kind of just being a jerk. So what if everything that was really good about this movie was not the main character or his life? He's forgettable enough. Just ignore him and enjoy what's left, which is a lot.
* * *
Still trying to figure out a way to articulate my argument about main-character-guy: I do think a lot of what I find so problematic about him is that the movie makers work so hard at making him a realistic character, but his situation just isn't really consistent with him being realistic. Because he's doing something that's so obviously morally bad, and since the audience is supposed to at once like him and feel that he shares a basic moral set with them, the result is that he has to spend a lot of time in the movie being obviously introspectively tortured about the whole thing. This pops up in the meaningful blank staring that he does at various points as well as in his inability to communicate with his girlfriend: he's so conflicted about what he's doing that he can't focus on communicating with her properly, or something like that. But, again, the problem with all of that is that it doesn't really make any sense, given the presentation we're shown by the GWS folks, that he would ever go along with this in the first place. Contrast to a movie like Bay of Blood where the wife/daughter character is once shown being absolutely horrified by death and murder and then in subsequent scenes she is not at all those things and becomes the most rationally evil character in the movie, killing and encouraging her husband to kill purely for her own financial gain. Of course, the fact that her inconsistencies are not addressed and are ignored as if they don't exist makes the movie a "bad" movie, but, for me, it's just so much more interesting than all the work GWS goes through trying to resolve main-character-guy's inconsistencies. My argument is that the movie would be served better by taking that "bad" movie approach, that is, by having him apparently go along with the scheme in full force through most of the movie, and then having him, at the point of the movie where he needs to be morally superior to the GWS people, suddenly be so.
I did, though, think, "And here, of all places, I've stumbled across a perfect example case for an argument against trying to make characters wholly believable. Main character guy, the skinny white guy, whatever his name was, (Martin, IMDB tells me) is, I think, supposed to be kind of blank so we, the audience, can feel like we're experiencing the movie from his POV, but he's also supposed to be a fully realized "character," possibly the only real one in the movie. He stares meaningfully into the middle distance in that way that fully realized characters do when they're experiencing crises of consciousness or when they're suffering because their girlfriends don't understand them. He is quirky but not too weird. Etc. Anyway, I believed that he was realistic enough that I couldn't figure out for the whole movie why he hadn't just left this job immediately. It was so obviously a total scam, and the only way I could figure out that he didn't notice as soon as that Shank guy started talking what an absolutely illegal scam this company was is that he must have some sort of mental problem in which he can't really pay much attention to stuff that's happening around him and maybe when total scams present themselves he's busy watching those crazy leprechaun/zebras that keep growing out of the ceiling. Really, the only reason that he keeps the job is because the movie requires that he keep the job in order to get to it's gimmick: the music audition stuff. Which there should've been more of. More music; less Martin and his black "friend" trying to talk them into signing. Showing them do it once or twice outside of the key plot ones would've been enough. So what I meant way back up there at the beginning was that if Martin was not such a total cipher and was instead allowed to be as less-than-three-dimensional as every other actor's character in the movie was, it just would've worked better, and I wouldn't have kept wondering why he was being such an idiot. But, of course, it would've been possible for Martin to be a totally believable character who was just too stupid to catch on to what a total scam everything around him was. Yeah, that would also have worked. But then the filmmakers would've been asking the audience to inhabit a dimmer fellow than themselves, which just isn't really done (and maybe it's impossible?) and they seemed to want us to inhabit the main character so we would feel more strongly the moral dilemma he finds himself in. And that was the thing I liked least about the movie. Because, really, what moral dilemma? That it's bad to scam people? I learned that one already. There was almost no point during the movie at which I thought I couldn't have made a better decision than Martin did; and by "I" here I mean actually not myself but pretty much every person I know." But I was kind of just being a jerk. So what if everything that was really good about this movie was not the main character or his life? He's forgettable enough. Just ignore him and enjoy what's left, which is a lot.
* * *
Still trying to figure out a way to articulate my argument about main-character-guy: I do think a lot of what I find so problematic about him is that the movie makers work so hard at making him a realistic character, but his situation just isn't really consistent with him being realistic. Because he's doing something that's so obviously morally bad, and since the audience is supposed to at once like him and feel that he shares a basic moral set with them, the result is that he has to spend a lot of time in the movie being obviously introspectively tortured about the whole thing. This pops up in the meaningful blank staring that he does at various points as well as in his inability to communicate with his girlfriend: he's so conflicted about what he's doing that he can't focus on communicating with her properly, or something like that. But, again, the problem with all of that is that it doesn't really make any sense, given the presentation we're shown by the GWS folks, that he would ever go along with this in the first place. Contrast to a movie like Bay of Blood where the wife/daughter character is once shown being absolutely horrified by death and murder and then in subsequent scenes she is not at all those things and becomes the most rationally evil character in the movie, killing and encouraging her husband to kill purely for her own financial gain. Of course, the fact that her inconsistencies are not addressed and are ignored as if they don't exist makes the movie a "bad" movie, but, for me, it's just so much more interesting than all the work GWS goes through trying to resolve main-character-guy's inconsistencies. My argument is that the movie would be served better by taking that "bad" movie approach, that is, by having him apparently go along with the scheme in full force through most of the movie, and then having him, at the point of the movie where he needs to be morally superior to the GWS people, suddenly be so.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
12:08 East of Bucharest
Romanian movie I got from Netflix a few days after reading a write-up about Romanian cinema in New York Times Magazine... Gosh the internet age is great!
I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.
I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.
The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)
Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.
I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.
I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.
The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)
Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Cloverfield
As a thrill ride, this movie is pretty much a complete success, I guess. Just cuz I'm me, I could quibble about all sorts of things like how they could have had this amazing shot of the monster walking through the city when the characters had pointlessly made their way back into the city and to the top of the building Rob's gf was dying in. That at least would've made their little trek worth it; Beth's impaled-yet-miraculously-spry body on the floor of her apartment did not.
I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.
Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.
I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.
Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.
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