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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 12/28/2006 : 15:01:36
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Flags of Our Fathers
It's platatudinous to note that war is complex - in its causes, execution, its aftermath; and that the majority of war movies are based on a reductionist premise which may either glorify or castigate military action.
The best war films, though, allow you to draw your own conclusions in the face of an honest portrayal. Michael Cacoyannis - in his film of Euripides play Iphigenia - shares one of the most powerful evocations of what it means to be a soldier, Olivier explores Shakespeare's universal truths about military sacrifice in Henry V, and, in Ran, Kurosawa is fascinated by the brutal and dangerous beauty of battle as armies represent the egos of individual men. More modern films have recognized the unique power in the story of the two world wars of the last century as a basis to explore the issue in a variety of forms, from the starkness of Abel Gance's silent triumph J'Accuse to Renoir's masterly La Grande Illusion to Lewis Milestone's moving version of the Remarque novel All Quiet on the Western Front, from Dalton Trumbo's depiction of his award-winning novel Johnny Got His Gun about the madness caused by war to Godard's satirical Les Carabiniers, Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, or Mike Nichol's Catch-22. Films like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now reached out to the Vietnam war in similar ways.
These stories do far more than document this battle or that, far more than serve as a vehicle for amazing special effects. They help us understand the realpolitik of the decisions by an elite and their lasting effects on individuals and nations.
Clint Eastwood's beautifully realized Flags of Our Fathers, is sure to join those lauded ranks. The first part of his war analysis deals with the meaning beneath the symbolic gesture of the raising of a US flag atop a mountain outpost in an obscure Pacific island, a meaning which spread from its almost insignificant location outward to the allied war-weary world, and how that meaning was ultimately a manufactured thing. We're promised the second part of the story from the Japanese perspective later in the new year.
Eastwood's film examines the concept of heroism in minute detail: the various guises it takes, who is deemed worthy, how it's manipulated to other ends. This chapter, reflecting in its filmic form the complexities of war itself, isn't portrayed in a linear narrative. First we're a bit overwhelmed by the intense busy-ness of how to finally bring about an end to an interminable conflict, already declared over in Europe, having strayed to the East, to places as alien to most Americans called up to fight as another planet. What Eastwood does in this meticulous opening section is to introduce us to war as a character; we hardly get to meet the men who will be the focus of the more personal story, the men who were immortalized in the iconic image of raising the American flag on foreign soil, a symbol if not of victory than one of hope. And only then, when we've been immersed in the filth of war, the exhaustion of fighting, the barely bearable enforced commaraderie, only then does Eastwood allow us to see beneath the symbols to the realpolitik, the masterminding of strategy ... not military strategy but the tactics of raising money to keep the obscene war machine ticking over. Along the way Eastwood shines an incisive light on the effects of these grand schemes on individual men, and it's a light that illuminates every sad crevice, not one that blinds with false power or sentiment.
Considering recent revelations about real costings in Iraq, Eastwood's film is certainly timely. He tells the story through three strands simultaneously, and it's a tribute to the skill of his former Million Dollar Baby collaborator, screenwriter Paul Haggis as well as his own evolved directorial control that we're able to stay with this layered tale, affording it the gravitas it deserves and the rich vein of humanity it demands.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/28/2006 15:07:25 |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/29/2006 : 11:33:37
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Apocalypto
As I watched this film - superbly photographed by the great Dean Semler - I kept thinking about those epics detailing the decline of the Roman Empire, a victim of its own greed and decadence. But the Mayan Empire which flourished long before, whose civilization pioneered scientific concepts we still use today, which literally carved beauty from the most inhospitable settings - that was not essentially an imperialistic society during its thousands of years as a great nation. Scholars of every discipline are still unsure exactly what combination of events caused the Mayans' gradual decline from its origins about 8000 BC to the straggling pockets of survival by about 1000 AD.
Gibson's film, though, isn't really concerned with the why, and has attracted much criticism for its inaccuracies. There are primarily two ways to 'read' Gibson's latest epic: either as an anachronistic glimpse into the final decline of a great people, or as a jolly good adventure romp that just happens to be set in Central America during the early 16th century. Let's try for a moment to set aside what we know of Gibson's private life and concentrate on his work as a director.
Whichever version of the film you choose to examine, there is no doubt that he has a sophisticated control of producing big-screen images. Though there's no one shot here as effective as the mist-covered forest in The Passion of the Christ, Gibson truly brings to life the jungle settings contrasted so brutally with the Mayan cityscape. He creates such a believable atmosphere and fills it with such exciting action sequences that we hardly have time to question what the film is really about nor why he might have been drawn to the material in the first place. As with his previous films, the setting is distanced from contemporary life, and like the Passion film provides only sub-titled dialogue. The effect is one of double alienation, particularly with this story, which is hardly told in any modern genre: we're in the strangest of worlds, unable to speak the language, unfamiliar with the details of the culture. So it is up to the filmmakers to throw us every lifeline they can to find the commonality between our society and theirs. Gibson's choice is a reducto ad absurdum, a dismissal of all cultural nuance, resorting to only the most basic human behaviour. This is a choice which frees him from the confines of a real story. What we get is an opening of tribal harmony, a survival hunt dependent on teamwork and allowing the men to tease each other, glimpses into a simple family life of marital tenderness. All fine as far as it goes, but we don't really learn enough about anyone to sustain us through the rest of the action. It's all broad brushstroke stuff. Gibson gives us a hint of trouble to come with the arrival of a sorry-looking neighbouring tribe seeking permission to cross the territory; this is soon followed by an unprovoked attack by a vicious group of men who storm through the village, killing, burning, looting, raping, and capturing prisoners to take to the city. Our focus is on one of the villagers called Jaguar Paw [played - as are most of the speaking cast by North American native tribespeople - by Rudy Youngblood]. He's left his pregnant wife and young son down a dried-up well and promised to return for them. The rest of the film follows his enforced transport to the city as a slave and potential sacrifice, his perilous escape, nearly farcical in the amount of obstacles before his return to fulfil his promise to rescue his plucky wife, who's managed to give birth and save her children from drowning in the deluge that's filled the well.
It's spectacular, all right, but none of it is particularly moving. It's like one of those natural history museum dioramas - we're interested while we're in front of it but it's so far removed that we take nothing with us when we leave.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/29/2006 11:36:32 |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/30/2006 : 12:12:00
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer [very slight spoilers]
Whether this film will continue to divide people in the cinematic future as it does in its first release only time will tell. It does seem to be a love it or hate it experience - though I must admit the audience during my screening was universally and in vain suppressing giggles throughout. Even the critics who've praised this overblown pretentious adaptation of Patrick S�skind's 20-year-old best selling novel comment on its risible ending. Others note that over the years the likes of Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, and Scorsese decided the book was unfilmable. I'm with them; in a novel the writer can create both character and atmosphere by exploring thoughts and emotions which either support or contrast with the action. Filmic equivalents are limited to voice over or sub-titles. In his beautifully shot film Tom Tykwer relies heavily on voice-over [provided in the English-language version by velvet-voice himself John Hurt], but instead of revealing anything about the bizarre motivations of the protagonist, it acts as the kind of patronizing narrative that only reports what we can see for ourselves onscreen. Thanks to some remarkable production design Tykwer certainly does present one of the most cogent depcitions of the ambience of 18th century France.
The title informs us this is the story of a murderer, but the title lies. For we get no closer to his story than might be contained in a newspaper article: he was born in hideously poor circumstances in Paris, was sent to an orphanage then sold into a kind of slave labour. Along the way he discovers an extraordinary ability to detect smells. In fact, he's a kind of idiot savant, defective as a sociopath or an autistic in terms of human empathy, but with a remarkable physical ability. Just to put things in perspective, a human's 40 million olfactory receptor neurons are replaced about every 40 days by the activity of neural stem cells along the nasal lining. Depending on the breed, a dog's sense of smell is hundreds of thousands, even millions of times stronger. We're asked to believe that Jean Baptiste Grenouille has the nasal prowess of a dog - his name, by the way, actually means frog in French, and some frogs indeed have a highly developed sense of smell considering their primitive brain structure.
So we have an emotionally retarded obsessed waif, played in relentless monochromatic tones by Ben Whishaw. His portrayal must have been a directorial choice, since the actor's stage Hamlet won great praise. Here he presents a confused portrait, and instead of engendering either our sympathy for his brutal life or our vitriol at his coldly brutal actions, he's just a figure walking through the landscape as we hop from one scene to another.
What do we expect from a murder story? Well, they're either in the whodunit genre, which this clearly isn't since we're told from the outset that Grenouille is guilty. Alternatively we might get a whydunit ... which this could easily have been, but isn't. Or, as in the Hannibal Lector films, we follow with fascination mixed with revulsion the cunning of the murderer, and sometimes are allowed a peek into his mind; it's a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-go-I approach. If that's the track that Tykwer was hoping for his film's fallen over the cliff, and that's down to structure and rhythm. We get a film where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing and another thing. But there's no real logical progression, though plenty of plot holes. Actors of the stature of Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman fight vainly to supply some degree of the characterization lacking in the script. As to involving us in any relationship Grenouille might have had either with his abusers, his friends, or his victims, we're never given a chance to engage with any of them. Instead, we're told things, and have to take them on faith.
The sad result is that we feel nothing, either for the victims of the murders who've never become real people for us, nor for Grenouille himself. We don't care that he's caught, and in the absurd resolution of what are meant to be his last moments, we cannot possibly accept the premise either of his effect on people or his own demise. Apparently this ending has been described as magical realism. In the words of some very amusing British holiday pantomime characters: Oh no it isn't! Go see this if you really must, but I advise holding your nose.
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 01/01/2007 : 13:30:26
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Night at the Museum
Ever since Paul Wegener directed and starred as The Golem, his 1915 masterpiece based on a Hebrew legend of an evil clay statue coming to life, the cinema has been fascinated with animated inanimate objects. And some of the results through the decades have been remarkable, not merely for their increasingly astounding special effects, but because they've incorporated the central idea into stories which help us better understand the world and our own imaginations, and because they've done so with the blueprint of screenplays which are profound, witty or both.
Night at the Museum uses the basic concept, here set in NYC's Museum of Natural History [whose interior was actually recreated in a studio], where the exhibits come to life at night, which certainly complicates life for Larry, the new night guard. His life's already pretty tangled, being a divorced father of a kid whose respect he craves even as he dances from one loser survival scheme to another. How this basically decent guy manages to gain control of a totally mad situation and become a hero in more than his son's eyes is pretty much the plot.
If the filmmakers hoped the movie might join its seminal predecessors of the genre it's disappointed not only the public, but the quite considerable talent involved from Chris Columbus as one of the [many] producers, Ben Stiller in the lead, supported by a wonderfully feisty Mickey Rooney, a scheming Dick Van Dyke, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, and Ricky Gervais among others, and, yes, some amazing special effects. But the script, while not entirely horrible, is pretty blah and predictable as daybreak, the dialogue is plodding, and the characters are all missing the charm gene. The big Mcguffin comes way out of left field and never really earns its keep.
But most of all the brick of blame has to crash through the picture window of Shawn Levy [he who ruined the remakes of both The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen.] He doesn't so much direct scenes as cover them, muddying chaotic incidents without either clarifying them or maximizing them. And to waste opportunities to provide much-needed comedy with actors so ready to deliver is really movie-crime. The best you can say for it is that - after an over-long set-up - the exhibits are lively enough to provide some action scenes that hold your interest.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 01/01/2007 13:31:00 |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 01/01/2007 : 13:34:20
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It's a Boy Girl Thing
Not exactly bad enough to be expirational - as in I'd rather die than see yet another body-swap flick - it's not exactly the inspirational message movie I suspect lurks beneath the suspension of disbelief, i.e. learning life lessons about being in touch with our masculine or feminine sides.
I can't tell you if that was the hook for the glitzy couple of Elton John and David Furnish to get involved as Executive Producer and Producer of this ordinary little teen rom-com, or at what stage they were brought in to the picture. But whatever their contribution - which may or may not have involved convincing rock woman Sharon Osbourne to play, unconvincingly, the mother of the lead boy - they haven't managed to elevate this derivative cream-puff of a film. There are many intriguing things the film might have explored about gender identity, and it might have had a very different appeal. But the filmmakers have gone for a teen-ticket, and apparently teens aren't able to appreciate more complex arguments than male=football, female=poetry.
To be fair the film does have some decent elements, not least the two leads, both from television, though he scored as Felicity Huffman's son in Transamerica, and she runs her own fashion label. Samaire Armstrong and Kevin Zegers play next-door chalk-and-cheese neighbours who swap bodies when an Aztec statue overhears them arguing and casts a spell. Now you know try as I might I just cannot find any Aztec legend which involves that kind of magic. But I'd have been willing to go along with the conceit, even though it actually disrespects a once-great South American culture ... if only the script had been more original and had the body-swapping resulted in some greater consequence than these characters offer.
So here are some questions at random among many, and you can make your own mind up how the film deals with them:
Do opposites attract?
Can a wannabe Yale lit major learn how to score a touchdown in a matter of days?
Conversely can a hot rap-loving jock learn to ace the college interview in the same amount of time?
Why would a social climbing, high-culture family live next door to Mr and Mrs Waynetta Slob and their Slob teen progeny?
Did you answer: Yes, Yes, Yes, and The film doesn't deal with it at all?
Congratulations! Clearly that Aztec statue likes you.
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 01/02/2007 : 07:46:07
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Hold on, hold on, HOLD ON!!! This is a REMAKE of the Australian movie, Dating the Enemy!
It was cute, that movie - but nothing special, really.
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Edited by - ChocolateLady on 01/02/2007 08:03:42 |
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Airbolt 
"teil mann, teil maschine"
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Posted - 01/06/2007 : 01:13:22
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
Flags of Our Fathers
It's platatudinous to note that war is complex - in its causes, execution, its aftermath; and that the majority of war movies are based on a reductionist premise which may either glorify or castigate military action.
The best war films, though, allow you to draw your own conclusions in the face of an honest portrayal. Michael Cacoyannis - in his film of Euripides play Iphigenia - shares one of the most powerful evocations of what it means to be a soldier, Olivier explores Shakespeare's universal truths about military sacrifice in Henry V, and, in Ran, Kurosawa is fascinated by the brutal and dangerous beauty of battle as armies represent the egos of individual men. More modern films have recognized the unique power in the story of the two world wars of the last century as a basis to explore the issue in a variety of forms, from the starkness of Abel Gance's silent triumph J'Accuse to Renoir's masterly La Grande Illusion to Lewis Milestone's moving version of the Remarque novel All Quiet on the Western Front, from Dalton Trumbo's depiction of his award-winning novel Johnny Got His Gun about the madness caused by war to Godard's satirical Les Carabiniers, Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, or Mike Nichol's Catch-22. Films like Coming Home and Apocalypse Now reached out to the Vietnam war in similar ways.
These stories do far more than document this battle or that, far more than serve as a vehicle for amazing special effects. They help us understand the realpolitik of the decisions by an elite and their lasting effects on individuals and nations.
Clint Eastwood's beautifully realized Flags of Our Fathers, is sure to join those lauded ranks. The first part of his war analysis deals with the meaning beneath the symbolic gesture of the raising of a US flag atop a mountain outpost in an obscure Pacific island, a meaning which spread from its almost insignificant location outward to the allied war-weary world, and how that meaning was ultimately a manufactured thing. We're promised the second part of the story from the Japanese perspective later in the new year.
Eastwood's film examines the concept of heroism in minute detail: the various guises it takes, who is deemed worthy, how it's manipulated to other ends. This chapter, reflecting in its filmic form the complexities of war itself, isn't portrayed in a linear narrative. First we're a bit overwhelmed by the intense busy-ness of how to finally bring about an end to an interminable conflict, already declared over in Europe, having strayed to the East, to places as alien to most Americans called up to fight as another planet. What Eastwood does in this meticulous opening section is to introduce us to war as a character; we hardly get to meet the men who will be the focus of the more personal story, the men who were immortalized in the iconic image of raising the American flag on foreign soil, a symbol if not of victory than one of hope. And only then, when we've been immersed in the filth of war, the exhaustion of fighting, the barely bearable enforced commaraderie, only then does Eastwood allow us to see beneath the symbols to the realpolitik, the masterminding of strategy ... not military strategy but the tactics of raising money to keep the obscene war machine ticking over. Along the way Eastwood shines an incisive light on the effects of these grand schemes on individual men, and it's a light that illuminates every sad crevice, not one that blinds with false power or sentiment.
Considering recent revelations about real costings in Iraq, Eastwood's film is certainly timely. He tells the story through three strands simultaneously, and it's a tribute to the skill of his former Million Dollar Baby collaborator, screenwriter Paul Haggis as well as his own evolved directorial control that we're able to stay with this layered tale, affording it the gravitas it deserves and the rich vein of humanity it demands.
It is amazing how visceral an experience cinema can now deliver. The Landing at Iwo Jima was realistic enough to be almost a historical document. Constantly switching points of view from the Japanese Defenders to a Corsair Pilot to a Battleship then to the Marines. The almost monochrome colours perfectly fitted the moonscape of the Battlefeld. Never comfortable , the Viewer never knows what will happen next.
Then we are whisked away to the Bond Rallies at which the Fusillades are fireworks and the heroes are expected to repeat their actions on a papier-mache hill in a football stadium. That Clint Eastwood can point our the sour taste that it leaves in the mouth without negating the very real heroism is a sign of his touch.
The men who raised the flag are acutely embarrased to be told they are heroes but ( at least initially ) are honest enough to be relieved that they are not on the front line. However , as we see in yet another time shift ( to the present ) the front line never leaves them.
Somehow the film mananges to affirm the courage of men forced to go beyond what the viewer can imagine , while at the same time exposes the cynical compromises made on the Home Front.
I look forward to the companion piece on the Japanese part of the Battle. |
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Let the [BAFTA] viewings begin!
