One of the best movies I've ever seen. Everything the movie tries to do it does perfectly.
It's almost too bad that Mungiu chose to center the movie around an abortion, since abortion is one of those things that is just an "issue" and that is almost impossible for people to actually talk about in any truthful way because it's so hard to see past the "issue." It's not "almost too bad" because it's in any way a flaw of the movie; in fact, among the many many amazing things about the movie is the fact that it is a movie about an abortion--and the trouble that surrounds having an abortion in a place that it's illegal--that actually manages to not be about "the issue" of abortion (that is to say, the characters and the plot and stuff never once come even close to becoming allegorical). It's just too bad that because the movie is about an abortion, so many people will probably end up not seeing it or not being able to see past the abortion issue to the actual movie. It's one of the most incredible movies ever made by human people.
I'm still kind of in awe right now.
* * *
(next day)
I had the same type of feeling after seeing this movie that I first identified after reading Endgame by Beckett, which is that the subject matter of the movie is really pretty depressing, and the whole move makes you feel very tense (Robin said, "I just need a drink!" while we were on the bus after the movie, and a random other bus passenger then said, "Did you just see that 4 Months movie, too?"), but despite that and what most of the reviews I've read have referred to as the "bleakness" of the movie, I left feeling totally exhilarated, and that exhilaration was just about how incredibly made the movie is. It's like this exhilaration about the sheer amazingness of human creation, and when it's this good it really trumps any level of bad shit (ie, existential angst, trying to obtain an abortion in Ceausescu's Romania). I mean I feel like it actually completely overcomes it. In some way. Or something. I don't know. This movie is just frickin' good, though. I'm still thinking about how perfect random shots were, and there really wasn't a single one that wasn't perfect. God. Wow. Shit.
* * *
I just got a new high score in Jetman! 2479! While I was playing, I was thinking about this movie and how a lot of other movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, largely based on the really long takes, which isn't really an especially useful category, but I was thinking that a lot of movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, like movies by David Gordon Green and Lost in Translation and Cuaron's movies, that a lot of the complaints about these movies is how "nothing ever happens," in them, or how they generally also avoid a tight plot, seemingly as a part of their adherence to greater realism or something. Which I would sort of agree with although it's not really a "complaint" in my book. But one of the things that was so incredible about this movie was how it was a "like this one" movie (duh!) that also was super tightly plotted. The plot was done so well because it never felt like the plot was driving the movie along, but it was definitely very tightly plotted. Reviews say almost Hitchcockianly so, which just makes me realize I need to watch more Hitchcock.
And also about the absence of music, which never felt like a device at all, it just seemed like it didn't need music, and I had this idea that most other movies that don't use music totally use it as a device although I can't really think of any good examples except No Country for Old Men, and not that that's bad to use no-music as a device, but that it's impressive to use it not as a device. Although maybe it still is. Anyway, that scene of blondie sitting at the chair and not saying anything, after the dude left, that went on for quite a long time, that scene would have been absolutely ruined by music. (Rififi, of course, used the abscence of a score to incredible effect, although that was only for part of the movie. That may be the only example I can think of that used it so effectively.)
Then I started thinking about how I totally set a new high score in my Jetman game and that I did it while thinking about this movie so I should totally blog about it. Then I tried to not think about that but instead to think about this movie some more, but it didn't work. Then I lost.
Showing posts with label with Robin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label with Robin. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(along with Bay of Blood)
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
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