Almost forgot this! Having a bit of a series of less intellectually stimulating films, it seems. This is great though. Or, rather, the fights were great, everything else was a bit rubbish.
Check it out at 4:09! There might be a fairly nasty arm and leg break in it though, later on. I wimped out and didn't watch it again.
Thursday 27 March 2008
Team America: World Police
Which I watched a month or so ago, and was rather disappointed by. Nowhere near as funny as I was hoping/expecting. Although the America, Fuck Yeah! song was quite good.
The Wedding Party
Brian dePalma's first film, not-quite-starring "Robert Denero". Interesting... (Good for film students)
Saturday 22 March 2008
Nacho Libre
This was done by the guys that did Napoleon Dynamite, which I still haven't seen!
I am, I am, an unashamed fan of Jack Black. Not much else to say really.
I am, I am, an unashamed fan of Jack Black. Not much else to say really.
Syndromes and a Century
This was a wonderful film. The film-maker's name is Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Get practising your prononciation, he'll be on everyone's lips sooner or later.
Using the divisive stylistics of the cinema of inconsequentiality (see my Silent Light review from January) but injects it with a dose of humour and deftness sadly lacking in others. Instead of being as Peter Bradshaw puts it (in his albeit favourable review of Silent Light) "weirdly passionless", this film is full of passion, full of the joy of life. It also possesses one of the best endings I've seen for a long, long time: so surprising, so incongruous and just plain funky you leave the cinema with a grin on your face. If you'd been reserving judgement up to that point, it's hard not to go with it.
It is ostensibly a film about the film-maker's doctor parents and how they met. But there's no grand love story, no embraces set to soaring strings, it's the little things that we see here, those apparent inconsequential conversations that you remember as pivotal. There's a great scene between an orchid enthusiast and the female doctor. They are obviously fond of each other and despite their easy friendliness there's a little tension around them. Leaning on a balcony the orchid fan describes a predicament: he loves someone but doesn't know how to tell them. He quickly tells the doctor it's not her, "someone else", and she asks a few light-hearted questions, her pose relaxed, open. Whilst he talks, the orchid man absent-mindedly peels an orange. Evidently the subject matter is somewhat tough, as the doctor laughs as the orange splits and spills all over the place. "Is the orange crushed?" she asks, in between bursts of laughter.
No-one seems to know what it's really about, but who cares, really? There are nods to Buddhist themes of reincarnation in the repetition of scenes in different cities with different people, as well as in the lingering (and sometimes near-Lynchian) shots of statues in hospital grounds. There's perhaps a discreet comment on the impersonality of modern life in the teenage boy playing tennis in hospital corridors, and perhaps a hint of unrequited love in the short but troubled scenes between lovers. Nevertheless, I totally agree with Peter Bradshaw (again), who found it "a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria". Go see it, if you can.
Using the divisive stylistics of the cinema of inconsequentiality (see my Silent Light review from January) but injects it with a dose of humour and deftness sadly lacking in others. Instead of being as Peter Bradshaw puts it (in his albeit favourable review of Silent Light) "weirdly passionless", this film is full of passion, full of the joy of life. It also possesses one of the best endings I've seen for a long, long time: so surprising, so incongruous and just plain funky you leave the cinema with a grin on your face. If you'd been reserving judgement up to that point, it's hard not to go with it.
It is ostensibly a film about the film-maker's doctor parents and how they met. But there's no grand love story, no embraces set to soaring strings, it's the little things that we see here, those apparent inconsequential conversations that you remember as pivotal. There's a great scene between an orchid enthusiast and the female doctor. They are obviously fond of each other and despite their easy friendliness there's a little tension around them. Leaning on a balcony the orchid fan describes a predicament: he loves someone but doesn't know how to tell them. He quickly tells the doctor it's not her, "someone else", and she asks a few light-hearted questions, her pose relaxed, open. Whilst he talks, the orchid man absent-mindedly peels an orange. Evidently the subject matter is somewhat tough, as the doctor laughs as the orange splits and spills all over the place. "Is the orange crushed?" she asks, in between bursts of laughter.
No-one seems to know what it's really about, but who cares, really? There are nods to Buddhist themes of reincarnation in the repetition of scenes in different cities with different people, as well as in the lingering (and sometimes near-Lynchian) shots of statues in hospital grounds. There's perhaps a discreet comment on the impersonality of modern life in the teenage boy playing tennis in hospital corridors, and perhaps a hint of unrequited love in the short but troubled scenes between lovers. Nevertheless, I totally agree with Peter Bradshaw (again), who found it "a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria". Go see it, if you can.
Rome, Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini (and curiously written in part by Fellini), Rome, Open City was filmed in the bombed out Rome of 1945. As part of the Neo-Realist section of my degree I'd always kept this nugget of information in my head, but not much more. After watching it, that is still my introductory remark: "Yeah, I watched Rome, Open City the other night, it was filmed in the bombed out Rome of 1945." This is partly due to the awful quality of the DVD release that we watched: no apparent attempt at updating and restoring the footage and the subtitler was obviously of the narcopleptic variety, choosing to give us only a third of the speech spoken in the entire film. At one point five minutes of conversation went by without a flicker of a white word at the bottom of the screen.
As such - and, admittedly because I was tired and fell asleep in parts - I don't really have much to say about it!
As such - and, admittedly because I was tired and fell asleep in parts - I don't really have much to say about it!
Wednesday 5 March 2008
Persepolis & Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Persepolis is a film from the book of the same name by Marjane Satrapi, and tells the story of her childhood, growing up at first in the confusing and often frightening Tehran of the revolution, then in Vienna, after being sent there, and follows her through her return to Iran and her giving up of her country for good and heading back to Europe, this time to Paris.
The animation is superb, the style of the book more than ably transferred to the screen. In fact, the liveliness of the drawings perhaps work better on the big screen, especially when the alternative is victim to bad printing, rendering everything far greyer than the deep blacks and whites of the film, as I saw in a copy of the book I picked up in Borders the other day.
Beyond the humour and vivacity of little Marjane and the wonderful animation, this film presents an Iran in 1979 and beyond in a simple way that seemed to be aimed as an introduction to the recent history of Iran. This effect is heightened, I suppose, by the current political climate.
We saw this film in the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, California, a cinema with sofas instead of seats, beer instead of (or rather in addition to) coke and waiter service to your sofa with your pizza!
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Sidney Lumet is one of those cinematic directorial heavyweights that makes you (and actors looking for parts quite possibly) sit up and take notice. This film, coming from the man who directed 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon, has been talked about as a masterpiece to sit alongside those films. I'd have to watch it again to say anything about that. Watch it again and watch it on a screen bigger than the minute screen on the plane back from San Francisco.
Having said that, you were certainly aware that you were in the presence of a master. The convoluted story structure does not buckle from its own complexity as so often happens, and each scene is played note perfect, by the script and the direction (there is nothing so much as a superfluous sigh, flick of the hair, raise of the eyebrows) and by the central performances of Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. That they look nothing alike and nothing in the world would make you mistake them for the brothers they are supposed to be is of little consequence. Other reviewers have noted how this incongruous physical relationship between the two is simply forgotten in the portrayals of a family falling apart.
And it is brutal - there doesn't seem to be much redemption for anyone, which is refreshing. The subject matter dealt with (sons responsible for the death of their mother during a robbery-gone-wrong) does not offer easy redemption. Or difficult redemption. One would assume the natural fallout to this series of events being exactly what is shown in this film - the disintigration of a family, the revealing of long-hidden secrets and the mental breakout and anguish of more than one family member.
The animation is superb, the style of the book more than ably transferred to the screen. In fact, the liveliness of the drawings perhaps work better on the big screen, especially when the alternative is victim to bad printing, rendering everything far greyer than the deep blacks and whites of the film, as I saw in a copy of the book I picked up in Borders the other day.
Beyond the humour and vivacity of little Marjane and the wonderful animation, this film presents an Iran in 1979 and beyond in a simple way that seemed to be aimed as an introduction to the recent history of Iran. This effect is heightened, I suppose, by the current political climate.
We saw this film in the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, California, a cinema with sofas instead of seats, beer instead of (or rather in addition to) coke and waiter service to your sofa with your pizza!
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Sidney Lumet is one of those cinematic directorial heavyweights that makes you (and actors looking for parts quite possibly) sit up and take notice. This film, coming from the man who directed 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon, has been talked about as a masterpiece to sit alongside those films. I'd have to watch it again to say anything about that. Watch it again and watch it on a screen bigger than the minute screen on the plane back from San Francisco.
Having said that, you were certainly aware that you were in the presence of a master. The convoluted story structure does not buckle from its own complexity as so often happens, and each scene is played note perfect, by the script and the direction (there is nothing so much as a superfluous sigh, flick of the hair, raise of the eyebrows) and by the central performances of Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. That they look nothing alike and nothing in the world would make you mistake them for the brothers they are supposed to be is of little consequence. Other reviewers have noted how this incongruous physical relationship between the two is simply forgotten in the portrayals of a family falling apart.
And it is brutal - there doesn't seem to be much redemption for anyone, which is refreshing. The subject matter dealt with (sons responsible for the death of their mother during a robbery-gone-wrong) does not offer easy redemption. Or difficult redemption. One would assume the natural fallout to this series of events being exactly what is shown in this film - the disintigration of a family, the revealing of long-hidden secrets and the mental breakout and anguish of more than one family member.
Saturday 1 March 2008
There Will Be Blood
Everything the critics have written and said about this film is true. They may even have been a little harsh in giving it only 10 out of 10. This film is immense.
Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerising as Daniel Plainview; maniacal, menacing and just plain mean, but also every now and again flashing a glimpse of a heart. He loves his son, that's for sure, the dismissing of him towards the end of the film with the revelation that they're not biologically related rings hollow, the flailing of a desperate man.
Equally compelling is Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, a preacher convinced of his healing powers. His utter creepiness and apparent certainty of belief crash against Plainview's pure greed in episodes of physical and emotional violence. A fantastic scene sees Plainview pinning Sunday to the ground and filling his mouth with oil after the preacher's attempt to extract money from the oil man. "You're a healer are you?" screams Daniel, "then when are you going to come and heal my son" (who has been deafened by an oil well explosion.
The third star of the film has to be Jonny Greenwood's score. It and Day-Lewis's performance seem cut from the same cloth, or I suppose drilled from the same well. The screaching violas, the clicky heart-like percussion, all rolling to enormous crescendos heighten the film's subject matter from the personal to the universal. This is not just a character study of greed or belief, it is the battle between capitalism and religion, the story of the gold of the 20th century. I've read about the operatic-ness of the film, and yes that's an apt description, but this is opera that is relevant and believable, not some snicker-worthy grand dame. Between them, Day-Lewis, Dano and Greenwood, all guided by the considerable wisdom and dare I say it - genius - of Paul Thomas Anderson have crafted something that, in the words of Peter Bradshaw, "all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that."
See it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it......
Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerising as Daniel Plainview; maniacal, menacing and just plain mean, but also every now and again flashing a glimpse of a heart. He loves his son, that's for sure, the dismissing of him towards the end of the film with the revelation that they're not biologically related rings hollow, the flailing of a desperate man.
Equally compelling is Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, a preacher convinced of his healing powers. His utter creepiness and apparent certainty of belief crash against Plainview's pure greed in episodes of physical and emotional violence. A fantastic scene sees Plainview pinning Sunday to the ground and filling his mouth with oil after the preacher's attempt to extract money from the oil man. "You're a healer are you?" screams Daniel, "then when are you going to come and heal my son" (who has been deafened by an oil well explosion.
The third star of the film has to be Jonny Greenwood's score. It and Day-Lewis's performance seem cut from the same cloth, or I suppose drilled from the same well. The screaching violas, the clicky heart-like percussion, all rolling to enormous crescendos heighten the film's subject matter from the personal to the universal. This is not just a character study of greed or belief, it is the battle between capitalism and religion, the story of the gold of the 20th century. I've read about the operatic-ness of the film, and yes that's an apt description, but this is opera that is relevant and believable, not some snicker-worthy grand dame. Between them, Day-Lewis, Dano and Greenwood, all guided by the considerable wisdom and dare I say it - genius - of Paul Thomas Anderson have crafted something that, in the words of Peter Bradshaw, "all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that."
See it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it, see it......
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