Thursday, November 28, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Will the old Oldboy be surpassed?
No, that's impossible (besides, Spike Lee calls his version a "reinterpretation")
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Monday, November 18, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Revisiting Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
When I first saw Harold and Maude - somewhere during the middle of college - I was struck by the bittersweet sexual shock of it all. Harold’s morbid play at suicide at the opening of the film (with many more to follow), and the sour look on his face when his mother, indifferent as stone, shrugs it off and then reminds him of another dinner and another dinner guest that night; then, of course, the ensuing highly unorthodox relationship which Harold becomes uncharacteristically passionate about. Passion is something that has been unknown to him until now. Living in sprawling opulence with cars given to him like candy to a baby, if Harold must bear his mother’s constant demeaning flabbergasting, why not embark on the ultimate reign of terror on her - a girlfriend 6 decades his senior.
Our two main characters' common link and first intersection is at a funeral because, oddly enough, they both happen to be funeral crashers. This is a dark yet quaint coincidence, given Harold's fascination with death and Maude's indiscriminate embrace of all natural things and occurrences. But Maude is especially full of life, and that's how their relationship flowers.
Bud Cort’s Harold does an effective near-depressive fatherless 20 year old (the lacking father is not explained), lurking and brooding in some scenes but captivatingly alive in others. But Maude, played by Ruth Gordon (Rosemary’s Baby), is a breath of fresh air in every scene, especially considering the post-countercultural climate of the film’s 1971 release, while predecessors like Medium Cool and Easy Rider more overtly resembled societal and political change. Maude’s character generates a very non-conformist and free-spirited way of life here, liberating the movie beyond the idea of a platform or a method of finger-pointing, and elevates it into something altogether unseen and refreshingly non-hippiedelic. Harold and Maude make Harold and Maude a flower of another color.
Maude is a fearless pip, emboldened by what seems to be an infinite love of life and the living. At times she brings the movie even more off it's rocker, to a near absurdist level of comedy, such as in the great chase scene with a much younger Tom Skerritt as a flummoxed motorcycle cop. She also owns a comically large sculpture of a vagina, which in one scene makes for an apt bit of foreshadowing in this transcendent fable-like story.
I can’t say for sure what I noticed about the film 11 years ago, but now so much more is clear. The film deals with self identity and acceptance in the face of social norms. Harold is at one end of the spectrum while his mother (played by Vivian Pickles) - who at that same dinner speaks of his absent father in a story about about the French river “Sane”, as she pronounces it - is at the other, and farther still is Maude. Harold’s mother thinks like many conservative and practical mothers of the time and her idea is to sack him with the military uncle (a one-armed caricature straight out of Clockwork Orange, although both films were released the same year), whom Harold scares the hell out of in perhaps the film's most brilliant scene, in which Harold runs off Maude's pretend peace-loving solo picketer into a hole that goes into the ocean below.
Harold and Maude ambles along to the wistful strains of Cat Stevens’ jangles, which collectively amount to a great score. The standout track however, “If you want to be free, be free, if you want to sing out sing out”, has a humorous and motherly matter-of-factness that is nearly over the top, but it tenderizes the emotional gravity and delicacy of the bond formed between these two oddballs.
Ashby handles this movie and the characters generously - much as he did with The Landlord, another film tackling misfit-vs-the-world ideas, letting his actors inhabit their characters in a way that only a person as in touch with their milieu as this director could. There is a comfortable looseness in the way the characters meet and then daringly take on adventures and get to know each other in all ways.
Maude shows Harold the world. She shows him how to live, which he admits he hasn’t done ("I've died a few times") and in the tragic end, who would know that Maude would set Harold up for the biggest, most ironic disappointment of his life. And by his first love, no less. Harold and Maude is a love story about finding one’s sense of self. It’s a story about the soul, and furthermore a story with a soul. I’d like to call it a spirit film, because it has to be seen to be believed.
Monday, November 11, 2013
From newish movie The Iceman
Even though he is unintended comic relief, neither Schwimmer nor his ridic wardrobe cut it. 
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
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Monday, November 4, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
film review - The Son (Dardenne Brothers, 2002)
At the beginning of The Son - which played the 2002 New York Film Fest - the viewer helplessly collides into the life of Olivier, via the Dardennes' oft used over the shoulder point of view shot which weaves through emotionally airtight situations as he relentlessly plods forth as a proponent of the progress of troubled male youths.
Olivier is a divorced carpenter who teaches his trade to young boys without homes, an occupation he finds more satisfying than working in his brother's sawmill. One day he comes across an application for another boy, Francis. He tells the secretary he has no room for this boy, but we soon find out through interactions with his melodramatic ex-wife, that there's more to it than that.
Soon after, while home and listening to voicemails of older boys who were once under his wing, Olivier is paid a visit by his ex-wife who tells him she's getting remarried and is pregnant, a bit of info which can be confusing when one doesn't know how long they've been apart, but which also may reveal Olivier’s real motive in looking out for these boys.
Olivier decides to take on Francis and later will be asked for much more from the boy himself. Olivier seems to take a special interest in Francis, keeping a close eye on his progress through the rudimentary stages of carpentry, a trade more biblical than Francis’ past trespass, which looms in the near future as the topic of conversation between the two.
One touching scene near the middle of the film shows Olivier on his way out of a deli running into Francis. Olivier waits a bit near his car eating, as if to see if the boy needs a ride. Francis comes over and remarks on how earlier that day Olivier knew exactly Francis’ height when prepping him for his work ahead. Francis is amazed at this uncanny talent and challenges his teacher with further spatial queries. Olivier, proceeding with his usual wooden and stern demeanor, guesstimates with x-acto precision the distance of Francis’ foot from his own. It’s a bit of touching male bonding. However, his ability to measure quantifiable things seems useless in this world fraught with the emotionally fragile and unpredictable.
Olivier's concern for the boy is baffling but, over time, one can make the observation that Olivier is simply a moral man, giving care as he believes people should, if not a father with some guilt from his past, and wanting to resume where he once left off.
The Dardenne brothers bother not with lavish production design, ceremonial camera moves or even the requisite device of music, but are interested only in what makes the story function most effectively. Their use of cinéma vérité is perhaps the method’s most profound, yet most fearlessly tortuous. Being throttled behind Olivier’s shoulder for the duration of The Son is like riding a hurtling rollercoaster through most fathers’ worst fears. One could call it the ascetic aesthetic. It’s a style that doesn’t come across as style, but instead as a lack of pleasantries with which much of the Dardennes’ contemporaries adorn their own films. There are abrupt moments when the camera, shakily suspended over Olivier's shoulder, bolts into another direction to capture an incoming dramatic element.
This in your face mise-en-scene can be ominous, heady and at times unsettling, but the conclusion of this story - which is the showdown we could see coming but didn’t want to actually witness - is disarming and revelatory.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Friday, November 1, 2013
film review - Gravity: A Space Movie That's Down to Earth
Gravity opens in space, the greatest of yonders, the unmoored camera's gaze on earth's big blue sea, hovering about in liquid infinity. Slowly, the astronauts come into view. Kowalski is George Clooney's seasoned veteran of the stars, and the soothing voice of reason to Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), the medical engineer who's just been contracted to install an important device thing on the Hubble telescope’s important device thing so that man can continue to make giant leaps for mankind.
While spacewalking and telling a story about one of his exes, charming Kowalski and Stone get news that, due to a Russian vessel’s collision with a satellite somewhere else in earth’s orbit, shards of debris now hurdle toward them at the velocity of a “speeding bullet” (and are circling the earth at the rate of one orbit per this film’s running time). The mood turns on a dime from leisurely work to utter urgency. The action in the coming scenes is flawlessly executed and the filmmakers utilize the actors, camera and the synthesized setting to maximum effect.
At the crux of Alfonso Cuaron’s new movie - a slim 91 minutes and the most worthwhile time I’ve spent in a cinema this year - there’s a particularly arresting image during a zero-G tussle between the astronauts and their attempt to stabilize themselves amidst the speeding debris’ unmitigated havoc. In a heartbreaking exchange between Stone and Kowalski, the camera captures a wide shot of the two astronauts and a tangle of slight nylon ribbons barely touched by the sun, holding Ryan and Kowalski together. It's a beautiful, fleeting moment. The ribbons and bodies are outstretched for just a moment, showing the complete desperation their situation foretells.
Newton's laws of motion were never made so abundantly clear, especially in a story where the burden of gravity is non-existent. For instance, the tethers attaching the astronauts to their vessels are never at rest, continually in captivating, sinuous motion like sea snakes. When we see Stone and Kowalski moving through space seeking refuge in one of their stations or pods, we have no idea of their rate of speed until they get closer and need to latch onto something - which will keep them from being in perpetual orbit themselves, until another object comes along and causes an equal and opposite reaction.
Aesthetically speaking, the zero gravity world of space allows for endless aesthetic choices. Since space is a vacuum, we hear none of the space cadets’ exo-shuttle actions, except their dialogue. This allows for not only the imagery to take center stage - as opposed to films dominated by dialogue - but it makes what they DO say to be ever more significant, like those last few molecules of breathable oxygen in their suits. It also renders all of the debris’ destruction a silent matter, begging the presence of music, here composed by Steven Price (a relatively unknown musician/composer until now). Price’s score is a form of controlled chaos - a powerful analog, living and breathing structure with steep, raw and ominous synth crescendos and manic strings - almost a character itself within the larger purpose it serves.
Visually, there are countless opportunities for a filmmaker to use the blackness of space, and the fluid movement that zero-G allows, to filmic advantage. When Stone initially gets flung from her safety line, she flies into the depths of dark space in the center of the screen, getting smaller and smaller, and then when the screen is blackest we then see her careening back towards the camera, her peril none the lesser. Yet Cuaron, to his credit, doesn't necessarily need to take advantage of this. In other scenes he lets the camera drift about, sometimes slowly panning or floating between characters and within their cavernous structures, and then sometimes witnessing the chaos of the orbiting debris, all seemingly without many cuts at all. This greatly aids the story into a very cohesive, seamless whole, going from whistle-while-you-work to dire fight for survival. Cuaron is no stranger to this mellifluous style. In his previous feature Children of God, he does much the same thing, gliding a camera following Clive Owen through 9 minutes worth of bob-and-weave, bullet-and-bomb traffic. Emanuelle Lubeszki is the cinematographer in both films (in addition to Malick's Tree of Life) and may very well be nominated for his work here this Oscar season.
Of course none of this technique and style hold much weight without the stellar performances of the leads making it a story worth a damn. Clooney is an apt, semi-optimistic romantic and attractive enough to make Stone wonder about a lost loved one, but Bullock becomes the emotional reserve into which Gravity invests it’s lasting power. She is the emotional element, the fourth dimension space cannot occupy.
There are the expected homages to cinema's forbears - numerous shots of floating pens and a womb-like Sandra Bullock a la Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some of the more tragic scenes of falling bodies recall DePalma’s underrated Mission to Mars, a criminally underseen contender to the space canon. Ultimately, though, Gravity holds it's own. Cuaron conjures images of floating fire in once scene and a remarkable close-up of one of Stone’s tears in a later scene. Just as he's aware of how tall an order a space movie is, he is ecstatic yet tactful about showing the genre's possibilities. After all, in so many ways, filmmaking is about quality control.
Although some of the music choices near the end suggest happy ending resolve, and the end is a bit over-the-top down to earth, Gravity is an astronomical achievement. Ultimately, it's a movie that is less about everything than past cinematic odysseys, so there are no unanswered questions, which is perhaps the reason for its digestibility among the common viewership. It does pose some important questions about ourselves and our unfathomable universe. It will move you and it will make you glad you’re on solid ground.
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