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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/19/2006 : 19:24:59
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Rang De Basanti
Translates literally from the Hindu as Paint it Yellow, but the subtitled version calls it The Colour of Sacrifice, far more apposite. A Sanskrit quote at the beginning alerts you to the themes of sacrifice, passion, and betrayal; whether the apparent futility of challenging the status quo and its consequent brutality is worth the sacrifice in order to effect real change.
This elusive but extremely powerful film from ex-commercials director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has so dominated the Indian box office that government ministers are reported to be taking it very seriously as a harbinger of socio-political discontent on the streets and in the colleges and universities.
It's actually several films in one and more of that in a moment. Absolutely towering above everything here is the remarkable performance by one of India's top stars Aamir Khan, his sizzling good looks a dead-ringer for the young Tony Curtis. That Khan gets the opportunity to display so many of his amazing acting skills is part of what's wrong with the film, which nevertheless catches you, entertaining, dropping you, and recapturing you by turns. Among some wonderful ensemble acting, Khan is largely responsible for most of the best moments. From the first time we meet him as an arrogant but adorable show-off we're hooked by his charisma and charm. He turns on a dime from light and delicate to moody and philosophical, all perfectly within character. He can dance, he can sing, he can act; what he does most effectively is make you care about what's happening to him and what's going to happen.
The power of his performance catapults you squarely into the convoluted story which jumps back and forth from the contemporary Delhi student setting to one of the most sinister and bloody populist rebellions against the death-rattle of the British Raj in the 1920s. The link between these worlds is Sue, a young documentary film-maker, effectively played by Alice Patten [daughter of Chris Patten, former Tory minister and the last UK governor of Hong Kong]. She's just been given the news by the UK tv channel she works for that they're pulling the funding on a story she's been researching for two years: that aforementioned rebellion. Sue's got a special interest in the story since it was the military journal of her officer grandfather which documented his complicity in the repression of the people and torture of the rebel leaders. It's their story she wants to tell, but from the Indian point of view, higlighting the sacrifice of the Freedom Fighters which paved the way for independence just 25 years later.
Undaunted, she travels to Delhi and with the support of her Indian friend Sonia sets out to make the film herself. Sonia introduces her to a group of students themselves grappling with personal life choices as well as an unfocused discontent about the political corruption they sense controls their society. This is polarized by a faction of near-fascist nationalists who want to clamp down on those students who seem to be moving further and further from traditional values of prayer and abstinence, and which foments bitter feeling between Hindu and Mulim.
Director Mehra, also partly responsible for the screenplay, deliberately and not all that subtlely, draws parallels for any who care to see them with similar scenarios in other parts of the world.
Sue and Sonia convince the boys to take the lead parts in the film, and while they're working we learn about each of their personal lives. Poetic Karan, for example, son of an easily manipulated local political figure, and who carries a torch for Sonia though she's in love with one of his dear friends who's a pilot in the Indian Army. Muslim Aslam whose strict father demeans his association with Hindu boys. And Laxman, a member of the neo-cons being groomed for political office.
Mehra's structure is the weak point of the film, though he's deliberately tried to retain the skeletal demands of traditional Bollywood fare, counterpointing and commenting on personal relationships and plot developments through both lyrical and up-tempo song and dance sequences. His new wrinkle is to integrate the numbers into the action instead of breaking off to the Indian equivalent of Busby Berkely numbers in those 1930's classics. Tied into all this, and just when you think you've got a handle on what kind of film this is, it takes a horrific turn opening a portal through which all the strands can merge to underscore the themes.
Shortly after the idyllic afternoon when Sonia's pilot proposes in front of the gang who all celebrate the news, he's involved in a fatal crash which becomes the catalyst for virulent public dissent involving government corruption. Our gang of friends find themselves mirroring the roles they've been playing in Sue's film. They decide to take action to avenge their friend's needless sacrifice.
To accommodate all these strands, including occasional flashbacks to the sepia-tinted 1920's tale, there are wandering gaps. We lose both Sue and Sonia several times before bringing them back into the inevitably brutal conclusion. And just in case that's all too heavy, we get a spiritual coda almost straight from the most saccharine Disney stable.
Is it worth seeking out? Yes. Certainly for that seminal performance by Aamir Khan, and for some truly moving moments that bring you closer to important social questions, moments that speak to the commonality of human experience.
And now I get a viewing break till Volver on Tuesday!
Enjoy your weekend.
*********************
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 01/05/2007 09:25:33 |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/22/2006 : 10:48:31
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Volver Slight spoiler, but I've tried to be careful!
The title of this truly entertaining Pedro Almod�var dark comedy means 'to return, or revolve.' And from the iconic leitmotif images of whirling wind-farms to the posthumous appearance of Anna Magnani in a television clip from Bellissima the film is a veritable roundelay of come-backs.
As I watched, engaged, laughing, teary ... I was reminded of Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, and not merely because of some directly parallel scenes. No, it was more the tone, mixing elements which, however outrageous, fulfil the logic demands of Almod�var's world.
It's a world divided into past and present, country village and city, respectable and criminal, ideals and realities, comic and tragic, and above all emotional imprisonment and freedom. The plot driving these themes takes off from an all-too-familiar domestic scene: a marriage whose magic has vanished, a nubile daughter emerging into adulthood yet dependent on her astoundingly beautiful hard-working mother Raimunda [a stunning and powerful Penelope Cruz in her own return to her pre-Hollywood roots], the off-screen encounter between father and daughter which results in his murder, and the actions of the mother to clean up all traces of the incident. And yes, Almod�var finds humour in the situation, which as in all good drama, serves not to detract from but to heighten the pain. It's the preservation of that sense of ordinariness which makes this possible, and it's that which reminded me of the Hitchcock film.
But to build the film only around that incident wouldn't stretch the course, so into the mix we get the other family-related elements. Raimunda and her sister Sole visit their elderly, dying Aunt in their native village outside Madrid. It's on their frequent trips that we pass the wind farm, blades continuously slicing through the air, capturing power from the invisible air. It's on these visits that we're introduced to the family's secrets: four years previously the sisters' mother Irene disappeared, allegedly killed in a fire along with their father. Coincidentally the hippie mother of their neighbour also disappeared; the neighbour Agustina, their playmate from childhood, has been keeping an eye on the sisters' Aunt.
Agustina herself is an arresting figure, close-cropped hair, smoking joints to work up an appetite to stave off the inevitable end from the cancer she knows she has. She, along with most of the village is convinced that Irene's ghost has returned to care for her dying sister; she's never seen this ghost but desperately wants to question her about her own hippie mom's disappearance. She also reveals to Raimunda that her parents and Agustina's mother may not have been as blissfully happy as they recall from childhood.
How all these strands play out and how Raimunda learns to reconcile her life form the heart of the film. And heart is what it's loaded with. That you care so much about each of the characters is a combination of a beautifully observed screenplay, witty and profound in a most accessible way, Almod�var's deft, unfussy directorial hand, and most particularly of the formidable acting of everyone. Even the smallest roles are performed with truth and gusto, each character's history implicit. It's unfair to single people out of the ensemble, but special praise belongs to four of them.
1. Cruz displays the staying power behind her star quality, not only is she gorgeous she rips passion from the mundanity of Raimunda's life, imbues her with an easy wit, and puts you firmly on her side, despite her crime. The Magnani scene was included partly to parallel the story of devoted mothers, but also to suggest that Cruz is fashioned in the mould of the supreme Italian actress of passion. That was always what critics were saying about Sophia Loren when she first appeared, and always they maintained that no one could match Magnani's talent. It's irrelevant. Screen mantles aren't passed down like that. It's enough to say that Cruz has a far wider range than Hollywood was offering her.
2. Her mother Irene is played by another Almod�var return, Carmen Maura, star of his international hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. She has the pathos, depth, and twinkle of Fellini's wife, the late geat Guiletta Massina. She's heart-breaking and adorable.
3 & 4. The restraint of Blanca Portillo as Agustina, and the comic and wise portrayal of Sole by Lola Due�as also add contrast and dimension to the mix.
Yes, the film strays occasionally into sentimentality, but it's not the mushy kind and always feels genuine. When you leave the cinema you feel good about people and uplifted enough to return to your own life.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 11/22/2006 14:29:39 |
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Whippersnapper. 
"A fourword thinking guy."
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Posted - 11/22/2006 : 13:03:26
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An Almodovar film is always an event to look forward to. As his films are released in Spain several months before they hit the rest of the world I had a pretty good idea that a good film was coming.
�Volver� in Spanish has several meanings. Although it means to return and revolve it also means to turn inside out and to turn over, like a pancake, and so reveal the hidden underside. The word is used in many idioms, including ideas such as starting over and surviving. All of these ideas are relevant to the film.
In Spain, the place of birth, particularly if it is rural, is like a third parent. Whatever a Spaniard does, wherever he chooses to live and for however long, he remains �from� that place. On a spiritual level there is no getting away from it. And so the main character, Raimunda, played by Penelope Cruz, a village girl living in the city, the journeys between the city and the village are journeys between the present and the past, the modern and the supersticious, symbolised with delicious irony by the turning modern turbines she drives by, a perfect synthesis of the modern and the mediaeval � this is Castilla La Mancha and those turbines are the descendants of Quixote's windmills and she the descendant of the traditions (and eccentricities) of rural Spain. And the past has, both metaphorically and literally, come to haunt her. This film is about that resolution - of Raimunda coming to terms with her personal ghosts, and, indeed, vice-versa.
Don�t expect any positive male role models in this Almodovar film. The only occasions when men make an impact on the film is by sexual malfeasance of an unappetising nature. Women run this world and men are little more than parasites.
The performances in the film are generally outstanding. Cruz more than returns from Hollywood, she returns with a surprising authority and toughness, and Carmen Maura, returning from a long Almodovian exile � imposed, astoundingly, after he accused her of ruining �Muheres� by her performance � is just maravillosa. No doubt the film has made substantial box-office returns too.
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/22/2006 : 14:37:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Whippersnapper
Don�t expect any positive male role models in this Almodovar film. The only occasions when men make an impact on the film is by sexual malfeasance of an unappetising nature. Women run this world and men are little more than parasites.
Well -- not quite true. Restaurant owner and Raimunda's neighbour Emilio, and the guy from the film crew who flirts with her, both seem sweetie-pies, though they're used as plot points and don't take up too much screen time. But definitely not parasites!
As for women running the world -- yeah, right! 
Tell that to those women who can't break the ceiling into decision-making roles in NATO, the UN, most national governments, most boardrooms, most military structures. Women may do the majority of the work on this planet -- motherhood duties included -- but sadly they don't run very much, except to run for the bus. 
I don't know whether it's a factor of his being gay, but Almodovar has always professed a greater empathy with women. He's certainly one of the few film-makers who provide fully-dimensioned roles for them.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 11/22/2006 14:38:41 |
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Whippersnapper.
"A fourword thinking guy."
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Posted - 11/22/2006 : 16:09:26
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
quote:
Originally posted by Whippersnapper
Don�t expect any positive male role models in this Almodovar film. The only occasions when men make an impact on the film is by sexual malfeasance of an unappetising nature. Women run this world and men are little more than parasites.
Well -- not quite true. Restaurant owner and Raimunda's neighbour Emilio, and the guy from the film crew who flirts with her, both seem sweetie-pies, though they're used as plot points and don't take up too much screen time. But definitely not parasites!
As for women running the world -- yeah, right!
Tell that to those women who can't break the ceiling into decision-making roles in NATO, the UN, most national governments, most boardrooms, most military structures. Women may do the majority of the work on this planet -- motherhood duties included -- but sadly they don't run very much, except to run for the bus.
I don't know whether it's a factor of his being gay, but Almodovar has always professed a greater empathy with women. He's certainly one of the few film-makers who provide fully-dimensioned roles for them.
The restaurant owner has failed to run the business profitably - something Raimunda goes on to do - and the guy from the film crew doesn't seem particularly effective or useful - he's part of a group who, for all we see in the film, turn up and eat whilst Raimunda does the actual work. In any case, even if you don't consider these two as parasites, they don't really do anything which affects the plot. They are not protagonists.
And I didn't say women run the world, I said women run this world, Almodovar's world. He doesn't deal with heads of state, NATO, the UN etc. His world is self-contained and whilst it has features in common with the real world its actually a fiction. Sorry to have to be the one to break that to you. It's brutal but someone had to tell you. 
His gayness is vital to his world-view I think. As in this film, he sees little merit in the behaviour of most Spanish hetero males. His sympathetic hetero males are either ineffective or weird or highly sensitive. Even then, they all rely on women, who for Almodovar are the real life-force. I think this world-view is informed not only by his gayness, which is very important, but also his working class village background gave him a strong sense of otherness when he moved to Madrid, which encouraged his empathy with the underdog, and women are the underdogs of Spanish (and most other) society.
On the other hand sometimes his gayness can let him down. In Hable Con Ella, an otherwise brilliant film, we are supposed to believe that one of the lead characters, Benigno, who is rather effeminate, is actually heterosexual. Now while I don't think it's impossible to have a performance which allows me to believe this, Javier Camara's was not that performance (although really good in other respects) and it jars me a lot. I don't think Almodovar was able to see that in the performance, nor Javier, who I assume is also actually gay - he was certainly more convincing as such in La Mala Educacion.
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/26/2006 : 00:50:43
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Pan's Labyrinth
I'm reluctant to over-praise this unnerving del Toro cine-fable since it's so easy to raise expectations about the kind of film you're going to see. Pan's Labyrinth isn't the first film to transcend genre,it isn't even del Toro's first to do so; but I must admit both the trailer and reviewers' hype led me to expect something very differently balanced, more weighted on the fantastical horror side. Nevertheless, fable it is complete with a profound morality, and fabulist in part is its execution. Think Alice in Wonderland by way of Maurice Sendak crossed with Elem Klimov's disturbing Come and See.
In that it is rooted deeply in a relentless and murky reality, Pan's Labyrinth shares much with Klimov's view of obscene Nazi brutality through the eyes of a pre-pubescent child: in the Russian film the child is a boy who becomes deranged by what he witnesses, and in del Toro's post Spanish Civil war setting, it's young Ofelia who is changed utterly, thrust as she is into the daily horrors of a fascist military encampment. The soldiers protecting Franco's Spain against leftist insurgents are commanded by Capit�n Vidal, recently married to Ofelia's widowed mother, who's heavily pregnant with his baby and having a rough time of it. At his most benign the Capit�n merely tolerates Ofelia, and the growing threat of the rebels nudges him steadily to reveal his most malignant essence.
In order for del Toro to immerse Ofelia in an expressionist vision of her real world, the claustrophic world of the encampment - a basic farmhouse in the middle of a wood - is not only devoid of other children, but all the adults are depicted in the simplistic tones that a child like Ofelia would observe. Forget character arc, Vidal is the enemy from the first; the housekeeper Mercedes becomes an early ally; and the woods themselves take on a living presence. A feature of the forest is a stone labyrinth, full of promise and terror in equal measure. And it is to the labyrinth that Ofelia retreats from her increasing discomfort among the adults.
In this created world del Toro embodies Ofelia's sense of danger. This is no cutsey wonderland and its creatures, though visually astounding, bring little redemptive comfort and certainly no humour. Ofelia is confronted by Pan, a faun who seems to be in continual pain but determined in his mission to test the little girl so she can prove her destiny to rule his domain as its true Princess. Neither the bizarre faun nor his tests, mythic as they are and singularly unpleasant elicit any fear in Ofelia, who feels impelled to obey whatever the consequences will be when she returns to the real world. After all, in a world where she has no possibility of exercising any control over her circumstances, Pan's Labyrinth holds the promise of granting her the dominion. That her reign will contrast to Vidal's in its benevolence is the heart of the story.
In parallel to her descent into her internal world, Mercedes and the camp doctor, plot secretly to help the band of rebels hiding out in the woods. Ofelia's mother battles her illness to assure her baby will be born safely. And Vidal cloaks his insecurities, paranoia, and power-lust behind a near fanatical devotion first to the idea of the baby and then to the child itself. His wife, its mother, has become in his eyes a mere vessel to deliver the embodiment of his destiny, his name. She's perfectly expendable and he no more mourns her death than that of the enemies he so summarily kills.
In recognition that the real world holds greater horrors than any invented fantasy del Toro shrouds those scenes in murk and half-light, often draining the screen of all colour, which is saved for Ofelia's forays into the labyrinth, most especially in one of the final scenes of an almost spiritual dimension, radiant with light. The Labyrinth creatures charm us as well as Ofelia in the sense of exerting a potent and magical force. Perhaps it's because we know that Ofelia's relation to these creatures is an expression of her battle with impotence that they're both more and less horrifying than, for example, the monsters in Harry Potter or LOTR.
Pan's Labyrinth isn't easy to watch, but it's rivetting, both as a moral tale and as a truly accomplished piece of cinema.
**************
Flushed Away
From his student days at the National Film and Television School Nick Park showed sign of his genius. That the Aardman producers had the good sense to back him even then proved their acumen at spotting his talent. Eveything he's touched has not only developed his own prowess as a film-maker but escalated Aardman's reputation in the international arena. Unfortunately Nick Park wasn't involved in Flushed Away.
Dreamworks, and more specifically Jeffrey Katzenberg showing his long-standing arrogance, have tried to impose a formula on the Aardman output. The film looks familiar, though for all kinds of technical reasons it became clear that Aardman's trademark claymation had to be ditched in favor of digital animation. What it lacks crucially is Nick's vision, his unique take on what makes a genre film spoof-able, and most importantly, his warmth.
Flushed Away is a one-joke film - exquisitely rendered - whose wafer-thin story just cannot sustain even its 86 minutes. It panders to a moronic sensibility, to an attention span of a mayfly, to a world of action devoid of character. So you end simply by not caring. And these are characters you desperately need to care about.
We hardly have a chance to meet Roddy the pet Rat, left to fend for himself when his family scoot off on holiday. The subsequent scenes of the rat living it large with an unresponsive group of toys may emphasize the ultimate loneliness of his pampered existence, but we find out nothing about him that puts us on his side. When his peace is shattered by the arrival of a sewer rat spat up through the pipes once again there's no time to develop any relationship which might endear Roddy to us before he's flushed down the loo into an alien world of urban rats and slugs with the over-riding dilemma of how to get back home. Along the way he meets Rita, the engagingly independent skipper of a sewer-worthy scow who reluctantly agrees to help him, and a group of bad-guys headed by The Toad [delightfully-voiced Ian McKellen], who's determined to destroy them.
Basically that's it. There's a lot of chasing. There's a lot of equating helping people with getting paid for it. There are admittedly some phenomenal visuals and some adorable slugs and wonderful voice performances. But it's the kind of film that disappears as soon as it's over. And, you know, I can still remember nearly every frame of A Grand Day Out.
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 11/26/2006 : 06:11:06
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| Sorry to hear this about Flushed Away. I didn't know that Park wasn't involved. Shame... |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/27/2006 : 10:49:22
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Bobby
The French have a saying: Plus c'est la meme chose, plus �a change -- the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whatever else Emilio Estevez covers in this potent and provocative film documenting the day of Robert Francis Kennedy's assassination, that's his main message.
I have to admit at the outset this was a difficult film for me to watch because its era features many of the elements that confirmed my decision to leave the country of my birth, never an easy choice. I hope, though, given my professional experience as a critic I've managed to pull apart those feelings like velcro strands from an objective analysis of the film.
It is a very accomplished piece of work not only by Estevez, but his extraordinarily starry cast taking on unexpected roles, all supported brilliantly by the technicians, most especially the camera crew and editors. These elements transcend subject matter, bringing clarity to a deliberately complex narrative, a choppy-changing story-telling reminiscent of Altman's Short Cuts, but more tightly bound together, intercut seamlessly with archived footage, and only truly tied up at the end. It's a matter of melding form and content: the seemingly disjointed narrative beautifully parallels the confusion of the time.
Spring 1968. As it kills more and more US soldiers, a war in a faraway land is questioned more publicly, more vociferously by people who'd normally be chanting support. Young people are becoming increasingly seduced by a proliferating counter culture whose over-riding message advocates dropping off the expected treadmill of capitalism, a message fuelled by a growing availability of drugs. Big business, profiting from both the war machine and drugs nexus, tries to cover-up its less salubrious activities in favour of an emphasis on the more trivial aspects of The American Dream. There is a growing awareness of the polarization between the races, of the inequality between the sexes. The gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. It is the birthing of The Age of Image, of style over substance. Sound familiar?
It's no spoiler to say Kennedy gets assassinated on the very day of the primary election which political analysts are convinced would have confirmed him as the Democratic party Presidential candidate in the fall election. We know that. And, whether or not you buy the crazed, lone gunman theory, what's important is to set the obscene deed in its context in order better to understand what creates conditions that leave so many feeling so impotent that violence appears to be their only option. That Robert Kennedy's speeches themselves - incorporated into Estevez's mise en scene - touch on so many of the narrative themes, makes the film at the very least an important socio-political document, but also serves to connect the several stories played out by the actors.
All based wholly or partly on real people, the cast comprises the campaign entourage at the Ambassador Hotel hosting RFK's California primary speech and party, plus hotel guests and staff. We only learn at the end why these particular people have been the focus of the film, and I won't give that away here. Suffice to say each character's small story serves perfectly to heighten the bigger picture. Take it as read that each of the actors contrives to expand his/her range in these vignettes, so I won't single any out. They really are all that good.
Hotel manager William H. Macy [married to beauty therapist Sharon Stone and having an affair with switchboard operator Heather Graham] feels morally bound to fire his Catering Manager Christian Slater who is forcing the mostly Mexican kitchen staff to work double shifts with no time off to exercise their right to vote in the primaries. One of these double-shifters, hoping to take his dad to watch their beloved Dodgers, is forced to give away his tickets. Choosing not to sell them for profit, he presents them to head chef Laurence Fishburne. These "below stairs" scenes help countermand the prevailing middle-class white attitude that non-whites are all ignorant and lazy, challenged further by RFK's rhetoric. Meanwhile up in the lobby widowed former doorman Anthony Hopkins [one of the film's exec producers] still finds it difficult not to think of the hotel as his natural home, engaging some of the staff, particularly a dignified Harry Belafonte, in games of chess. Belafonte wisely observes that Hopkins only plays him because he knows he can beat him, a telling comment on the times. Also haunting the lobby is a Czech news reporter hoping for just five minutes with RFK, but rebuffed by his campaign manager because she's from a Communist country.
Bridging the gap between guests and staff is alcoholic headliner Demi Moore, tended by her long-suffering husband [Estevez himself] who cleans up her messes and is palpably second in her affections to their dog. Various sets of guests and key campaign workers also play out personal domestic stories as all prepare for RFK's starriest turn, the speech which will enter history as his last, and perhaps of the beginning of the end of a brief era of hope.
The film isn't perfect; it's too long for a start and the impact of the piece wouldn't have been lessened by eliding a few of the story strands. The opening scenes, though useful for those whose history is a bit rusty, use too much raw exposition. But as the film gains pace and momentum, and as it nears its inevitable climax its message becomes so powerful that I don't believe one has to agree with any of the political sentiments to be moved.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 11/29/2006 20:03:16 |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/27/2006 : 20:11:57
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The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
Oooh, oooh, I know what I want for Christmas, Santa. I want you to drop off the end of a pier if this is the way you intend to carry on!
Bad Santa, bad, bad, bad, naughty Santa. Go stand in a corner until you learn some cinema lessons.
Lesson number one: It matters not a jot that Ed Decter and John J. Strauss co-wrote The Trouble With Mary, or that they collaborated again on The Santa Clause 2: The Mrs. Clause. If you EVER allow them to come within an elf's eyebrow of you again, you deserve everything you get. There are incidents with no story, a plot too shallow even to let the film bury itself, and all the pizzazz of dried moss.
Lesson number two: If you want to reach out in a sharing, caring holiday way to kids and families and such, you gotta focus. Exactly at whom was this Christmas turkey aimed? Little tots just don't get all those two-shots of grown-ups yakkety-yakking about stuff that's not only waaaaaay over their mop-tops, but so boring and unfunny even the parents would rather take their darlings to the loo again than have to sit through this dreck.
Lesson number three: If you absolutely must put tinsel-town on your tinsle-y annual itinerary you've got to inspire the actors with characters that either warm your heart or are funny enough to ruin the audience's underwear. To waste talent on the order of Alan Arkin, Martin Short, Judge Reinhold, and even [bless 'er]Ann-Margaret puts you top of the Naughty List. And what kind of back-up did you settle for? The you-should-excuse-the-expression action and effects are totally devoid of festive magic. The music would be better off in an elevator.
Lesson number four: If the funniest things about your comedy are the end-credit out-takes, you're in the wrong film, Santa. The Wrong Film.
No, I'm not giving you another chance. I know, I know that end shot of your chubby baby has oh-my-god-there's-another-sequel-in-the-pipeline written all over it, but you and I are through, Santa. It's over, dude. I just don't believe in you anymore!
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/28/2006 : 17:16:50
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A Mind of Her Own
Admit it, now ... aren't you glad people like me get to view inanity like this so you won't have to?!
Whenever I see that a film's been based on "true story" I can feel muscles tightening in dread. I've learned to call these my shit-detector muscles and wow! did they cramp up as every moment passed. I don't care how moving someone's life story is, if the film it depicts is as amateurish as Owen Carey Jones's effort, that life has been diminished.
And, honestly, in this case it shouldn't have been. In essence it's a moving tale of a young woman fighting against soap-opera proportioned odds in her determined fight to become a medical doctor. But lives doggedly reproduced over decades have no inherent shape; drama needs shape if it is to engage, to make sense.
Jones would have been better off writing an essay. Or, if he were so keen on making a movie, what's wrong with a documentary? Or, if he were so keen on believing he's a feature film-maker how's about going to film school or some equally demanding preparation. Huh?!!!
Writer/director Jones offers a work that would shame most film school grads I know. He has some groping instinct for subject matter; then proceeds to divest it of all poignancy, all emotional identification, and sin of all cine-sins, to render it boring. Apart from perky Amanda Rawnsley who at least understands the word energy, the actors would have been more at home in a zombie flick. Not that they're helped by the script.
And speaking of the script, it's a how-to NOT write dialogue, how-to NOT juxtapose scenes, how-to NOT keep focus on a through story line, how-to NOT develop characters. Jones is equally adept at how-to NOT place the camera to supplement the story, how-to NOT edit scenes to we should be so lucky bring a bit of zip into this dried up puddle of sentimental poo.
Oh, yeah -- in case you didn't get the message ... If you ever get the chance, do NOT go see this film.     
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 11/29/2006 : 20:57:10
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Originally posted by BaftaBabe
...all the pizzazz of dried moss.
I think that says it all. Great line! You should write comedy, you should.
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/29/2006 : 20:59:04
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Babel SLIGHT PLOT SPOILERS
As he did in his previous films 21 Grams and Amores Perros director Alejandro Gonz�lez I��rritu pays homage to the non-linear story-telling of the French Nouvelle Vague, most particularly Godard. Like him, too, I��rritu chooses contemporary popular culture to reveal classic complex socio-political themes. I don't in any way want to imply that his work is derivative because he's one of the most original film-making talents around. And Babel, painted as it is on his widest canvas so far, contrives in unexpected ways to express the commonality of The Human Condition.
His leitmotif, as indicated by the title, is how communication and its absence inadvertantly or deliberately becomes in turn ultra clear, disturbingly fuzzy, alientating, brutalizing, pathetic, heroic as we travel the globe zooming into the highly intimate and out to international consequence. That I��rritu and his long-time scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga have accepted the challenge of such momentous, potent, and complex strands and have so convincingly, so stylishly, so assuredly fashioned their own way of connecting them is testament to their growing skill as caring and above all careful cinematic story-tellers.
Four seemingly disparate stories are tied by events whose unintended consequences couldn't possibly have been guessed by their perpetrators. Long before the film begins a Japanese tourist [K�ji Yakusho]in North Africa presents a rifle to his Morrocan guide in thanks for a successful shooting trip. The film starts when this rifle is passed on to the guide's friend, a shepherd, so that his two pre-teen sons can kill the jackals threatening the flock. But the boys become diverted and recklessly aim at a passing tourist bus far below their mountain territory. The youngest boy fires, unintentionally hitting a Californian woman in the shoulder. She [Cate Blanchett] and her husband [Brad Pitt] have left their two young children in the care of their illegal Mexican nanny [Adriana Barraza] and joined the tour to help them with the grieving process after the recent death of their baby. With the very reluctant agreement of the other passengers Brad diverts the bus to a near-by village where he's frustrated in contacting the US embassy who, when they finally do decide to act have misconstrued the circumstances of the shooting, allowing the global news media to portray it as a terrorist incident.
With Cate injured the couple won't be able to make it home as promised, so the nanny must find a substitute to care for the children while she attends her son's wedding in Mexico. But she can't find anyone and is forced to take the kids with her, trusting their journey to her young nephew [Gael Garc�a Bernal] whose main preoccupation is having a good time.
His natural attraction to the good life is paralleled by a young deaf-mute Japanese teenager [Rinko Kikuchi] who happens to be the daughter of the Japanese tourist hunter, both trying to cope with the recent suicide of her mother/his wife. His path has been to construct an impenetrable wall around his heart, cutting his daughter from her one remaining emotional support. She, meanwhile, the one who found her mother's body, has taken to blatantly and inappropriately trying to seduce every man she finds attractive, the dentist, some young men who feed her pills and booze, and finally the policeman who wants to question her father about the rifle. And so all the strands are connected and their several stories play out to form the film's mise-en-scene.
By manipulating the time-frames and locations, I��rritu builds layers of consequence that keep bringing us up short to question the ways we choose to express what we really mean, the ways we inadvertantly instigate lies and conflicts, and the ways we hide and finally share our feelings, our secrets. It's no accident that though we're left either with concrete resolutions or strong hints about nearly every detail of each story, there is something written in a note by the Japanese girl to the policeman which we never get to know.
Technically the film is superb, some of the shots reminiscent of David Lean at his most poetic, others using sound and light as unique story-telling elements. The acting in every story is amazingly powerful yet convincingly understated. Babel is a magnificent cinema experience and an important one. You won't love it or enjoy it, but it will stay with you for a very long time.
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Whippersnapper.
"A fourword thinking guy."
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Posted - 11/29/2006 : 21:07:28
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
Babel SLIGHT PLOT SPOILERS
You won't love it or enjoy it, but it will stay with you for a very long time.
Sounds like malaria. 
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 11/29/2006 : 22:24:47
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quote:
Originally posted by ChocolateLady
quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
...all the pizzazz of dried moss.
I think that says it all. Great line! You should write comedy, you should.
Thank you, ma'am.
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/01/2006 : 23:55:35
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Deck the Halls
Back in December 2004 Granada Television aired Christmas Lights, a very amusing teleplay about two brothers-in-law [Robson Green and Mark Benton] who go the wire in an electric pissing contest about who can out-decorate whose home for the Christmas holiday. It was so successful that it spawned a 6-part mini-series called Northern Lights, in which the neighbours' competitive relationships with each other and within each family wittily, often hilariously, sometimes poignantly, explored modern surburban behaviour. Writing team Jeff Pope and Bob Mills penned both one-off and the series.
SCROOGE ALERT SCROOGE ALERT
John Whitesall's Deck the Halls boasts three writers, none of whom is Pope or Mills - which is a big shame, because at least if they'd ripped off their own work we might have been presented with something perky and fresh instead of this piss in the snow. I dunno what it is about Hollywood at Christmas time that produces this kind of sugar rush only ingested from too much BAD candy. Bland, tasteless, with a slightly gritty consistency.
You get some terrific talent, all of whom you've seen mostly on US television shows including The West Wing, Sex in the City, Lost, SNL ... plus stars Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick, both of whom have been truly inspired in their time... and you end up wanting to pitch each and every one of them hellbound, hurtling to their doom never to rise again. If I tell you that DeVito plays Buddy Hall you'll see the lame pun of the title, leaving aside that adult male characters called Buddy [for crying out loud] should send you screaming in the opposite direction.
If you absolutely must discover the plot please do an imdb search because I just cannot bear to contaminate my keyboard with it. There are only two words for Dreck the Halls: Bah and Humbug!
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Stranger Than Fiction
Ah, from the ridiculous to ... well, if not quite the sublime, at least to the adult, the interesting, the occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the nearly-always satisfying, and certainly the very-glad-to-have-seen-it. Hotsy new screenwriter Zach Helm and director Marc Foster haven't collaborated on the perfect film, and it does have one fundamental story-telling boo-boo about which more later ... but they have at least come up with a mainstream film, delightfully acted, and one full of ideas.
OK, it's another staging post on a road trod by Aristophanes, Pirandello, and Groundhog Day among many others over the centuries. Which is to say it's in part about the nature of reality and art and the relationship between them; partly about the frustrating lack of control we have over our own lives [and by implication our deaths]; partly about the world of the mundane co-existing with the world of imagination.
Personalizing these themes are best-selling author Kay Eiffel [a restrained and beautifully timed performance by Emma Thompson] whose writer's block is getting in the way of the right ending for her first novel in ten years; Will Ferrell as taxman Harold Crick who finds himself the reluctant main character in Kay's book; and independent baker Ana Pascal - the inventive Maggie Gyllenhaal being audited by Crick and his unlikely love interest. To cope with Eiffel's late delivery her publishers have sent Penny Escher - the glorious Queen Latifah - to be her minder.
There are character clues in all the names: both Escher and Pascal evoke free-thinking, quirky creatives. Eiffel towers in her field. Crick ... as in stiff neck, a muscle spasm, something that needs relaxing, reforming.
The film's gimmick is that Harold [and we] can hear Eiffel's narrative voice commenting on the mundane incidents of his predictable daily life: how many times he brushes up and down, sideways; the amount of time it takes to tie his single Windsor knot. When such inanity is quantified it takes on an undeserved aura of importance, and as Harold fills his head with this minutiae he leaves little room for any level of emotion and humanity. He rebels against the voice, suddenly triggered off by some re-setting of his hitherto reliable wristwatch. He consults occupational counsellor Tom Hulce, a psychiatrist [Linda Hunt], and an English professor [Dustin Hoffman, investing a small but pivotal role with more subtlety than he's shown in years] - all of whom indicate he may be going crazy. Well, you would, wouldn't you? I mean who hears voices? Joan of Arc? George Bush? I rest my case.
But Harold knows he's not mad, the voice is real, and he will find whoever it is and confront her. Which he does. Along the way he learns to let go enough to fall in love and to value other people in other ways than financially.
The big script mistake is that the real story isn't Harold's. It's Kay's. Hers is the far more arresting tale. It could have been, should have been the comic obverse of the coin that Kubrick told so chillingly in The Shining. Crick [in storytelling terms] is merely the device of her own conflict; meeting him in reality actually implies far more questions of moral responsibility for her than him. By reversing the focus the script begs several questions, the most important of which is what the hell was this guy doing before he started hearing Kay's narrative voice? Whose story was he supposedly in then?
When a writer invents someone, no matter at what point that person appears in the story, there's always an implied prior life over which the writer has control. In the film the choice of when the real Crick comes into Kay's focus is too arbitrary, it forces us into a not-quite-suspension of disbelief which is never quite forgotten throughout the film's events. And sadly that alienates us from ever truly identifying with anyone or being moved by their plights. I kept wondering as I watched what a more interesting treatment of the themes could have been achieved by upping the ante on Kay's character and leaving us puzzling whether Crick was ever, in fact, real.
Finally a word about Ferrell: I must admit though in the past I've seen he does have talent he's never really grabbed me as a screen presence. But here maybe because he's in such challenging company, Ferrell shines. He's believeable in an unfussy yet unpredictible way and his timing, as you'd expect, is spot on.
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Let the [BAFTA] viewings begin!
