Control

Yeah, really very beautifully shot, no doubt. But ultimately it runs into the same problem that almost all musician bio-pics tend to run into, or troubled genius bio-pics run into, which is that it focuses too much on the turmoil in his life to the exclusion of his artistic life. Not that there should be less of a focus on his life. In fact, I do think that specifically for this movie at least, one of the things that it does right is that it doesn't really forgive Ian Curtis for being an asshole. (Even better, it also never really condemns him for it. It does really a pretty good job of letting us see how much of an asshole he ultimately is being while also allowing us to see how from his perspective he's just in an impossible situation and he doesn't know what to do about it.) Further along those lines, it does manage, mostly, to not add a whole bunch of extra symbolic meaning to Curtis's suicide. It kind of just seems like a particularly jack-assed thing for him to have done, in the end, and you don't really get a sense that he thought he was accomplishing much of anything by it. So, anyway, it does those things right. But it also falls into this very common trap of not portraying the creative process at all. Which I could forgive the movie for if it had at least tried, but it doesn't even care to look especially like it's tried. We see at the beginning that Curtis is a kid with exceptional musical tastes and capable of quoting Wordsworth and stuff, but he doesn't really ever talk about music with anyone and he doesn't really do a lot of writing throughout the movie. It's just like, he goes to a Sex Pistols show, then he tells the New Order guys that he should be their singer, and the next thing he's singing these amazing songs, and we're left to wonder where they've come from. It's like he just decided to be the singer in a band and all of a sudden he's singing songs. We don't even see him figuring out how he wants to sing or anything. (Also, the staged performances are really pretty spectacular. They almost make the movie worth it. Or they almost make up for the movie's giant gaping flaw.) And the fact that they didn't even try to put any of that creative process into the movie ultimately makes me assume that the director just must not have been very interested in it, which makes me not like him a lot, and made me spend a lot of the movie griping to myself that it was kind of a waste of time.

INLAND EMPIRE

The ending of this movie, and I mean actually the closing credits of this movie, are one of the weirdest things Lynch has ever done in a movie. It's unclear at the end if Laura Dern is supposed to be Laura Dern or one or all of the characters she played in the movie, and then there's that chick from Mulholland Drive, the dark-haired chick, who wasn't even in this movie, blowing a kiss to Dern, who returns it. And then a bunch of girls who at first seem like they're the prostitutes from the movie because they're dressed like them but then you realize they're not all come out and dance and lipsink to a Nina Simone song. And it feels genuinely joyful and alive in a way that I don't think anything ever has in any Lynch movie before, even Straight Story. That is, it's obviously a staged moment, but it's also a staged real moment; it doesn't even pretend to have some symbolic referent that you might be able to get at to understand why it's there. It's just a bunch of women dancing to Nina Simone, plus Laura Dern and a few other people who are all pretending to or all actually are and probably a little bit of both enjoying it. I mean, the movie closed with a music video pretty much the way TMNT II did. That's fucking weird.

No Country for Old Men

First Coen brothers movie in how long? I'd look it up, but I don't really care to. Definitely a return to an older style for them, having more in common with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing than The Big Lebowski or The Man Who Wasn't There. And maybe more in common with Blood Simple than any other movie they've made due to the fact that it didn't seem like a rehearsal of a type of movie the way almost all of their other films do.

I actually did think a few more scenes could've used incidental music, but that's probably because I think the score from Fargo is so good and they use music so well in a lot of their other movies. The lack of it through most of the film definitely made the one scene where it finally showed up, when Tommy Lee Jones arrives at the hotel to find Moss dead, way more moving than anything else in the movie. They way Moss's death happens off-camera seems even more jarring in the film than in the book, since you kind of expect even more of a film that it will include you on everything important, and certainly the death of the guy who up until then seemed to be the protagonist is an important thing. But they got that structural move from the book, so they get props I guess mainly for recognizing how important it is for what the book/story is trying to do that there not be some kind of climactic battle scene between Moss and his killers.

I never thought I'd say this about any movie ever, but Tommy Lee Jones might've been the best thing about the movie. He was absolutely note for not perfect.

Watching the movie after having read the book so recently, and noting especially how closely they adhere to the book and to what it has for dialogue, the one glaring change they made really stuck out. The conversation between Tommy Lee Jones and his old uncle, the statement his uncle makes to him about thinking that the world has gotten so much worse on his watch being just vanity, seemed like the Coen brothers responding in kind to McCarthy, as if the movie was both an adaptation of the novel and a way for the Coens to respond to the book--I'd say engage the book in dialogue, but it's hard for me to imagine a way that McCarthy would then respond to the movie, so they kind of automatically get the last word in, which isn't really a dialogue.

*****

(11/14 10:30 PM)

I was also wondering a little bit about the female characters in the movie. The Sheriff in the book goes on at length a few times about how great his wife is, and how Llewelyn's wife is really the better half of that pair, and how he's sure Llewelyn knows it and whatever, and I'd say what you get of the female characters in the book kind of backs that up. The female characters are certainly not violent at all, and seem mostly unaffected by that whole violent world of drugs and money, up until Chigurh goes to visit Llewelyn's wife at the end. But her demise is described as Llewelyn's fault by Chigurh, and it either is or it's Chigurh's fault. In any case, the women are truly innocents. But they seem like real characters just as much as any of the men are real characters. In the movie, I'm not sure quite that that came across at all. I don't think the Coens were really interested in that aspect of the story much at all. Llewelyn's wife mostly seemed kind of hapless, and like just the type who sits and stares at the television and that's all she's good for. Of course, her mom was comic relief, and I think she mostly was in the book, as well, but it's weird that the only female character from the book that really got fully translated in the movie, and even got sort of amplified, is the elderly woman for comic relief. The Sheriff's wife was in the movie, and I can't remember if she actually appeared in the book or if she was always only discussed by the Sheriff. But she was very genuinely important to the Sheriff in the book, very genuinely important as a person, as his wife, as sort of his moral compass or something. I think she just kind of seemed like a benevolent non-entity in the movie. It would be hard to convey the importance of someone who's even more beside the story than anyone else in a movie, I guess. But they included the Sheriff voiceover stuff, and none of his discussion of how important his wife was made it into the movie. I think there was a subtle point being made by McCarthy in the book, and I think the Coens just ignored it or didn't notice it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point he was trying to make, but it did add a level of nuance to the novel that I think would've not been a bad addition to the movie. This isn't really all that much of a criticism, I'd say, but I did come up with it pretty quickly when I was thinking of something more to discuss about the movie to add the dialogue of the dying Mexican in my cover of the first chapter of No Country for Old Men for my National Novel Writing Month novel.

There Will Be Blood

There were so many amazing things about this film that it's kind of a shame the final fifteen minutes had to happen. I guess there needed to be some kind of final confrontation between DDL and preacher-guy, at least from the standpoint of narrative and story arc and everything, I mean that it "needed" a "climax" to properly follow the rules of movie-story, but the scene kind of fell victim to that old Great Acting = screaming idea, and the only redeeming thing about the final scene was that there was, indeed, blood.

I suppose, since PTA aspires so much to be Robert Altman, that, like his hero, you just have to take the good with the bad. There was even some of that in Punch Drunk Love, when PTA let Phillip Seymour Hoffman go nuts with his little scream/acting bug.

Enough complaining, though; this movie was incredible right from the start. It was at least ten minutes in before there was any dialogue, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that the opening wasn't a pretty direct reference to 2001, with all the origins-of-man symbolism that might entail. The pan up to the hills with Jonny's score climaxing in a long martian-chord drone, and the score's subsequent descent as the camera pans back down, that whole little shot was easily one of the best bits of film I've ever seen. Worth the price of admission alone.

And it might even have been out done by the well explosion sequence: the way it comes out of nowhere, the totally arrhythmic beating and hammering that gradually finds its way into an insistent pounding not unlike a heartbeat, with the long takes of so many men running around frantically, and the oil geyser burning bright orange against a deep blue sky. I wish I could watch that scene over and over again. It was incredible.

Jonny Greenwood's score is incredible, and PTA is proving with this movie and PDL that he knows how to use scores better than almost anyone else out there, with the possible exception of that guy who made Huckabees, whatever his name is, which I should be able to remember but I can't.

No discussion of this movie should exclude a mention of Paul Dano. DDL was great, of course, but he kind of always is, and he's kind of always great in the exact same way. Paul Dano, though; wow. He might be the best American actor to hit the scene since Johnny Depp. His performance in Little Miss Sunshine was probably the most overlooked thing about the movie, and probably because of the fact that he wasn't speaking for most of the movie. Here he has no shortage of lines, and he should get some kind of Oscar recognition just for completely holding his own in every scene he shares with DDL. I'm really looking forward to watching this kid's career.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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.

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.

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.