Super pretentious and always amazing film website MUBI is currently a Directors' World Cup on its forums. 128 directors representing healthy variety of nations and cultures. And of course, with all those serious film buffs nominating and managing the directors and each of their films used in a round, I haven't seen the majority. I missed all of Round 1 due to all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being the hugely intimidating amount of films I'd need to see to keep up. Round 2 began late Saturday with Terrence Malick's mostly perfect (and future Criterion DVD) The Thin Red Line facing off against Šarūnas Bartas' quiet and frustrating Few of Us. Bartas displays clearly a talent for beautifully composed shots and landscapes. Both films feature mainly internal conflicts, but Malick's use of silence is much more effective. The voting has just a few hours left with the films running neck and neck.
Match #2 features another Criterion film against a frustrating and slow, personal epic. Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 vs. Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun. Varda's film is universally considered a groundbreaking classic, which is why I was so surprised when I found myself defending it against my friends whom found it boring, monotonous, and empty. Silly kids. I found parts purposefully empty, but always giving insight into "Cleo's" tortured mindset. The final twenty minutes work amazingly to provide the viewer with a whole new perspective on the seemingly self-obsessed protagonist. Varda's cinematography is stunning, moving through several different techniques successfully and organically, including handheld and long, smooth tracking shots. The Quince Tree Sun documents a painter working to finish his masterpiece. It's a long and detailed look into the creative process. It would most likely be a cinema formalist's wet dream with all of its long, static shots and apathy towards any sort of plot development. It never worked enough emotionally for me. It looks like Varda has a steady lead currently, but anything can happen in the day or so of voting it has left.
Today's Match #3 is Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law (CRITERION! WTF!) vs. Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Seriously, Criterion. This ends after this match). This is no contest, whatsoever. I love Jarmusch, I hate TAOSWOOE (as I like to call it).
MUBI.com is what's up. I guarantee that you'll at least find out about films and directors you've never heard of before. Outside of the forum's, great critics, such as Glenn Kenny, publish articles there; and I've had the chance to see several films through the site long before they were released in theaters (Revanche, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee).
I know that sounds a little too much like a paid endorsement, but I legitimately love the site. And I'll be writing up on a lot of movies that are competing in the Cup. I haven't the time for every film of every match of every round or anything, but I'm trying to get through a bunch.
I also watched two aggresively stupid films: Ken Russel's Tommy and John Stahl's Magnificent Obsession. Tommy was at least fun, and visually stimulating. I wouldn't even call it a bad movie; it's just a stupid one. Magnificent Obsession, on the other hand, was pretty terrible. I mean, if you're going to be the source material for a Douglas Sirk melodrama made 20 years later, couldn't you try a little bit harder to put one single iota of rational or credible emotion into your film? Geez.
It's too early for sinus buildups, but I got 'em anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll breath comfortably again? If not, it's another day of couching it up, this time with Ingmar Bergman's television cut of Fanny and Alexander. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Internet woes
My New Orleans apartment has been without internet for the past week. I hate when my movie build-ups are forced upon me. I am the only one who gets to purposefully neglect the promise I made to myself to write about films, gosh darnit!
I'll keep that promise in the most minimal way possible.
2010:
Piranha 3D was a surprising, trashy, gory blast. Adam Scott might be my hero. Seriously, what can't he do? I can, without any reservation, confirm that this is better than Mirrors.
Winter's Bone featured some fantastic performances, and a couple not great ones, along with some superb direction from Debra Granik. It's too bad the tension she builds magnificently mostly dissipates by the end.
Soul Kitchen is Fatih Akin's new comedy. It's broad and conventional, predictable and silly, but damn if it isn't sincere and heartwarming enough to forgive it everything. The joy of life conveyed in this film is pure cinema-magic at its best.
Japan:
Memories, from 1995, features three different stories from three different anime greats (supposedly). Like any omnibous film, the entries are of varying quality, but at least they're all good. The highlight is the first entry, The Magnetic Rose, from Koji Morimoto and a screenplay from the very recently departed Satoshi Kon (Millenium Actress, Paprika). It keeps with Kon's usual themes of memories and dreams to create a haunting story of eternal love, with the help of a beautiful, classical score that ties in wonderfully with the narrative.
Taboo, Nagisa Oshima's latest film (it's been 10 years), is elegant and visually stunning; but it may be a bit too ambiguous for it's own good. The narrative explores ambiguity in a black and white scenario, featuring a character of possibly ambiguous sex. The narrative itself at a certain point becomes quite ambiguous as Oshima really starts to force the viewer to work things out.
Criterion (and affiliates):
Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie is the final piece to Criterion's Bergman box-set which includes The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It's a TV documentary series following Bergman through the production process of 1961's Winter Light, beginning with the script stage and ending with viewer reactions following the film's premiere. I don't love Winter Light, and the 5 episodes each run a longer than they need to; but it is informative, at least.
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes is on the By Brakhage anthology. I hear the guy made all kinds of films, even pioneered styles. That's great. I don't like autopsies in their full, unblinking eye glory. It's totally silent, really forcing you to feel whatever it is an autopsy makes you feel. I couldn't take it.
Le Jour se Leve is available on Criterion's Essentials line, a cheap bare-bones brand they use to reprint some of their films and release other acclaimed classics they don't have time to release regularly. Marcel Carne's pre-noir, bleak love story is clunky and awkward, but features some fantastic shots and some palpable atmosphere to make it worth your time. I prefer his earlier Port of Shadows and i absolutely adore his post-war Children of Paradise.
Rivette:
Jacques Rivette has to be one of the most challenging directors whose work I've had the pleasure of viewing. In my limited experience, they are very wordy, very long, and extremely strange. The three I've seen have involved some sort of puzzle and each has treated it's own very differently. Hopefully more of his films become available in The U.S. soon. Come on, Criterion, how are you not all over Celine and Julie Go Boating?
The Story of Marie and Julien ( 2003) is by far the strangest of his films I've seen, but also the least successful. It doesn't quite earn its length, but it does maintain an effective eeriness and ambiance that I enjoyed.
Le Pont du Nord (1981) easily became my favorite of Rivette's films. It features a real life mother/daughter duo as a two mysterious characters with a mysterious relationship over the course of four days. It's something of a female Quixotic tale around the Paris underground. It becomes an engrossing urban fantasy. Rivette purposefully and brilliantly leaves elements of his puzzle hanging at the end of the film because he knows it might not really be important anyway. (This isn't on DVD, but it is on youtube. Search for PDN1 to find it.)
Misc. :
Election. 4th time seeing it. I had to for school. Maybe Alexander Payne's best? I struggle with that one.
Vera Cruz features Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster as the two different types of Western heroes (the classy, John Wayne archetype and the Wild Bunch anti-hero, respectively) forced together to transport a Mexican princess hiding gold in the middle of the Mexican Civil War. It's wonderfully violent and sexual for it's time (1954), as well as great vehicle for the aforementioned screen legends.
I'll keep that promise in the most minimal way possible.
2010:
Piranha 3D was a surprising, trashy, gory blast. Adam Scott might be my hero. Seriously, what can't he do? I can, without any reservation, confirm that this is better than Mirrors.
Winter's Bone featured some fantastic performances, and a couple not great ones, along with some superb direction from Debra Granik. It's too bad the tension she builds magnificently mostly dissipates by the end.
Soul Kitchen is Fatih Akin's new comedy. It's broad and conventional, predictable and silly, but damn if it isn't sincere and heartwarming enough to forgive it everything. The joy of life conveyed in this film is pure cinema-magic at its best.
Japan:
Memories, from 1995, features three different stories from three different anime greats (supposedly). Like any omnibous film, the entries are of varying quality, but at least they're all good. The highlight is the first entry, The Magnetic Rose, from Koji Morimoto and a screenplay from the very recently departed Satoshi Kon (Millenium Actress, Paprika). It keeps with Kon's usual themes of memories and dreams to create a haunting story of eternal love, with the help of a beautiful, classical score that ties in wonderfully with the narrative.
Taboo, Nagisa Oshima's latest film (it's been 10 years), is elegant and visually stunning; but it may be a bit too ambiguous for it's own good. The narrative explores ambiguity in a black and white scenario, featuring a character of possibly ambiguous sex. The narrative itself at a certain point becomes quite ambiguous as Oshima really starts to force the viewer to work things out.
Criterion (and affiliates):
Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie is the final piece to Criterion's Bergman box-set which includes The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It's a TV documentary series following Bergman through the production process of 1961's Winter Light, beginning with the script stage and ending with viewer reactions following the film's premiere. I don't love Winter Light, and the 5 episodes each run a longer than they need to; but it is informative, at least.
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes is on the By Brakhage anthology. I hear the guy made all kinds of films, even pioneered styles. That's great. I don't like autopsies in their full, unblinking eye glory. It's totally silent, really forcing you to feel whatever it is an autopsy makes you feel. I couldn't take it.
Le Jour se Leve is available on Criterion's Essentials line, a cheap bare-bones brand they use to reprint some of their films and release other acclaimed classics they don't have time to release regularly. Marcel Carne's pre-noir, bleak love story is clunky and awkward, but features some fantastic shots and some palpable atmosphere to make it worth your time. I prefer his earlier Port of Shadows and i absolutely adore his post-war Children of Paradise.
Rivette:
Jacques Rivette has to be one of the most challenging directors whose work I've had the pleasure of viewing. In my limited experience, they are very wordy, very long, and extremely strange. The three I've seen have involved some sort of puzzle and each has treated it's own very differently. Hopefully more of his films become available in The U.S. soon. Come on, Criterion, how are you not all over Celine and Julie Go Boating?
The Story of Marie and Julien ( 2003) is by far the strangest of his films I've seen, but also the least successful. It doesn't quite earn its length, but it does maintain an effective eeriness and ambiance that I enjoyed.
Le Pont du Nord (1981) easily became my favorite of Rivette's films. It features a real life mother/daughter duo as a two mysterious characters with a mysterious relationship over the course of four days. It's something of a female Quixotic tale around the Paris underground. It becomes an engrossing urban fantasy. Rivette purposefully and brilliantly leaves elements of his puzzle hanging at the end of the film because he knows it might not really be important anyway. (This isn't on DVD, but it is on youtube. Search for PDN1 to find it.)
Misc. :
Election. 4th time seeing it. I had to for school. Maybe Alexander Payne's best? I struggle with that one.
Vera Cruz features Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster as the two different types of Western heroes (the classy, John Wayne archetype and the Wild Bunch anti-hero, respectively) forced together to transport a Mexican princess hiding gold in the middle of the Mexican Civil War. It's wonderfully violent and sexual for it's time (1954), as well as great vehicle for the aforementioned screen legends.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Horror/Thriller Battle #1
Watching Scott Pilgrim and then going back into Starz's epic Pillars of the Earth miniseries is quite jarring. Alison Pill is frighteningly different in the two of them. Her delivery as the new queen, of "I would like a toy too. 100 pounds from the each of you" was chilling. The series itself is far from perfect, but it boasts several fantastic performances from the likes of Ian McShane and Hayley Atwell (future Captain America love interest). But Pill owns it in her small role that has brilliantly seen her from wronged royalty all the way to power-mad devil; and we still have three hours left.
Today gives us a much closer battle. I'm well aware that horror and thriller are two very different genres, but for the purpose of these battles they're similar enough that they'll have to compete together. The films are written in the order I watched them, not by my preferences or anything else.
Let's begin!
The first film is French skin master Jean-Jacques Beineix's 2001 thriller Mortal Transfer. A psychiatrist treating a sexy, mysterious thief falls asleep during their session and awakes to find her strangled to death. He spends the rest of the film trying to hide then dispose the body, as well as figure out who killed her. Beineix relies on melodramatic blues and dodged camera angles to evoke the sleek urban mood he seems to desperately want, but the narrative falls flat after the initial discovery of the body. The doctor spends 90 minutes running around pointlessly and without any dramatic impact. The last 30 minutes are meant to discount a very visual film as suddenly characters decide to sit down and tell us all the twists in the form of painfully long monologues. It's a terrible decision that finally sinks a mediocre thriller.
This next film made a very surprising showing in the battle. Joe Johnston's The Wolfman is supposed to be an awful film, at least according to the overwhelming majority of critics. The trailers didn't look great, but I didn't think they made the film look bad either. Turns out it's both good and bad. In Devin Faraci's review over at CHUD.com (he likes it a lot more than I do), he likens it to the classic B-movies where you'd have to sit through all the boring crap for those few minutes of great material. Unfortunately we don't live in that era anymore so Johnston's film will probably be remembered as just bad. But I agree more with Devin. Every sequence involving an actual werewolf is exhilarating and scary, and expertly executed. Every other scene in the film is clearly racing to the next werewolf attack, robbing these scenes of any actual worth and really fucking with the pace. Then there's the forced, chemistry-free romance between leads Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt. I know this film went through hell every step of its long road to the theater. It feels cut to hell. Maybe there's a lot of footage that makes these forced elements better? But as it stands, the long action sequences make the film worth a look.
Shutter Island, on the other hand, does not feature any bad anything. I've heard people calling Leonardo DiCaprio's performances here and in Inception very similar, but I'm surprised I haven't really heard anyone noting the similarities between the movies themselves. To go further would be to spoil, but trust me, they're similar. And I'll call Shutter Island the winner. It's a beautiful and frightening walking nightmare. Martin Scorcese has constructed a formalist, visual treat. People complain about the twists, but they seem almost irrelevant to me. Scorcese had no intention of hiding where the story was going. Instead it's a great character examination filled with great, creepy performances. One scene performances from Jackie Earle Hailey, Patricia Clarkson, and Elias Koteas are particularly memorable. We have our front runner, people.
Roman Polanski does his best to make a pretty standard thriller great with The Ghost Writer. He gets close. It often feels more like a drama than a suspense thriller, but it's an effectively cutting condemnation of Tony Blair, and I think to some extent, a man on the run from a shameful past. Shoe seems to fit. Polanski does successfully wring ropes of tension out of some conversations that feel about a few ticks to the left of normal. Ewan McGregor's interview with Tom Wilkinson is probably the example, but Olivia Williams gets the best material overall as Pierce Brosnan's former prime minister's suffering wife/femme fatale. I also enjoyed how not every aspect of this film is about its central mystery. The narrative flows in and out of it so efficiently that by the film's fantastic and subtly exhilarating climax, how the mystery wraps itself up isn't even the most interesting part.
The results:
Shutter Island claims 1st place with an 8.7/10
The Ghost Writer takes 2nd with a 7.9/10
The Wolfman is 3rd with a 6.5/10
Mortal Transfer comes in 4th place with a 5.2/10
Outside of the battle, IFC released a couple of VOD exclusive films in the past couple of weeks. Both were pretty good films from much better directors. Making Plans with Lena is far from Christophe Honore's best, but it is mostly successful as a darker, less sentimental imitation of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. One of my personal favorites Johnnie To made the decision to have most of his Vengeance dialogue spoken in English. Having everyone stuck in their second language sucks the air out of what would have been some fantastic exchanges. I think he picked the wrong film to scale back on his normally extravagant but mesmerizing action choreography. I know he's got more in him than action (someone please fucking release Sparrow, it's got to be one of the best films of the last decade!), but this film could have used more.
I think I'm about as close to caught up with2010 films as I possibly can be at this point. Hopefully I'll finally get around to Greenberg soon.
Today gives us a much closer battle. I'm well aware that horror and thriller are two very different genres, but for the purpose of these battles they're similar enough that they'll have to compete together. The films are written in the order I watched them, not by my preferences or anything else.
Mortal Transfer
vs.
The Wolfman
vs.
Shutter Island
vs.
The Ghost Writer
vs.
The Wolfman
vs.
Shutter Island
vs.
The Ghost Writer
Let's begin!
The first film is French skin master Jean-Jacques Beineix's 2001 thriller Mortal Transfer. A psychiatrist treating a sexy, mysterious thief falls asleep during their session and awakes to find her strangled to death. He spends the rest of the film trying to hide then dispose the body, as well as figure out who killed her. Beineix relies on melodramatic blues and dodged camera angles to evoke the sleek urban mood he seems to desperately want, but the narrative falls flat after the initial discovery of the body. The doctor spends 90 minutes running around pointlessly and without any dramatic impact. The last 30 minutes are meant to discount a very visual film as suddenly characters decide to sit down and tell us all the twists in the form of painfully long monologues. It's a terrible decision that finally sinks a mediocre thriller.
This next film made a very surprising showing in the battle. Joe Johnston's The Wolfman is supposed to be an awful film, at least according to the overwhelming majority of critics. The trailers didn't look great, but I didn't think they made the film look bad either. Turns out it's both good and bad. In Devin Faraci's review over at CHUD.com (he likes it a lot more than I do), he likens it to the classic B-movies where you'd have to sit through all the boring crap for those few minutes of great material. Unfortunately we don't live in that era anymore so Johnston's film will probably be remembered as just bad. But I agree more with Devin. Every sequence involving an actual werewolf is exhilarating and scary, and expertly executed. Every other scene in the film is clearly racing to the next werewolf attack, robbing these scenes of any actual worth and really fucking with the pace. Then there's the forced, chemistry-free romance between leads Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt. I know this film went through hell every step of its long road to the theater. It feels cut to hell. Maybe there's a lot of footage that makes these forced elements better? But as it stands, the long action sequences make the film worth a look.
Shutter Island, on the other hand, does not feature any bad anything. I've heard people calling Leonardo DiCaprio's performances here and in Inception very similar, but I'm surprised I haven't really heard anyone noting the similarities between the movies themselves. To go further would be to spoil, but trust me, they're similar. And I'll call Shutter Island the winner. It's a beautiful and frightening walking nightmare. Martin Scorcese has constructed a formalist, visual treat. People complain about the twists, but they seem almost irrelevant to me. Scorcese had no intention of hiding where the story was going. Instead it's a great character examination filled with great, creepy performances. One scene performances from Jackie Earle Hailey, Patricia Clarkson, and Elias Koteas are particularly memorable. We have our front runner, people.
Roman Polanski does his best to make a pretty standard thriller great with The Ghost Writer. He gets close. It often feels more like a drama than a suspense thriller, but it's an effectively cutting condemnation of Tony Blair, and I think to some extent, a man on the run from a shameful past. Shoe seems to fit. Polanski does successfully wring ropes of tension out of some conversations that feel about a few ticks to the left of normal. Ewan McGregor's interview with Tom Wilkinson is probably the example, but Olivia Williams gets the best material overall as Pierce Brosnan's former prime minister's suffering wife/femme fatale. I also enjoyed how not every aspect of this film is about its central mystery. The narrative flows in and out of it so efficiently that by the film's fantastic and subtly exhilarating climax, how the mystery wraps itself up isn't even the most interesting part.
The results:
Shutter Island claims 1st place with an 8.7/10
The Ghost Writer takes 2nd with a 7.9/10
The Wolfman is 3rd with a 6.5/10
Mortal Transfer comes in 4th place with a 5.2/10
Outside of the battle, IFC released a couple of VOD exclusive films in the past couple of weeks. Both were pretty good films from much better directors. Making Plans with Lena is far from Christophe Honore's best, but it is mostly successful as a darker, less sentimental imitation of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. One of my personal favorites Johnnie To made the decision to have most of his Vengeance dialogue spoken in English. Having everyone stuck in their second language sucks the air out of what would have been some fantastic exchanges. I think he picked the wrong film to scale back on his normally extravagant but mesmerizing action choreography. I know he's got more in him than action (someone please fucking release Sparrow, it's got to be one of the best films of the last decade!), but this film could have used more.
I think I'm about as close to caught up with2010 films as I possibly can be at this point. Hopefully I'll finally get around to Greenberg soon.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Criterion #309
Kenji Mizoguchi is a director whose movies you will always see on everybody's best of lists, but he has very few films available on DVD in North America. I'm sick of reading about how great The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums is, I wanna see it, goddamnit! When Criterion finally released one of his films, I immediately got excited and queued it up on Netflix. I soon put it on the backburner when a friend told me it was just "okay". This film was his 1953 ghost story Ugetsu, Criterion #309. I'm now going to call my friend an idiot. Another few months later, Criterion released his 1954 period masterpiece Sansho the Bailiff, which I immediately watched and loved. I was left seriously moved by its beautiful, and somehow realistic-seeming optimism. It's manufactured sentimentality at its greatest, its most sincere and affecting.
I mention Sansho only because the two films seem like they purposefully complement each other. Indeed, only one year separates them. Criterion should have looked into a nice box set release. Both films chronicle the struggles of the peasant class in 17th century Japan. Sansho sees some of the rich take a fall down the economic ladder. Ugetsu sees some of the poor briefly flirting with the top, and is definitely the more somber of the two.
Ugetsu follows two poor men and their families during a destructive civil war. One of the men is a potter who realizes he can make a minor fortune selling his pots in a nearby town because of the war economy. The other man decides to accompany him in the hope that he can become a samurai by apprenticing himself to one traveling through the town. Both men end up finding their selfish success both to different degrees, but both at a large cost to their wives and families.
This is where I would like to discuss how Mizoguchi's work tends to deal heavily with wronged women and how he masterfully aligns the audiences sympathy with them. Of course I know nothing of his large filmography, but this is what people tend to discuss in regards to Mizoguchi. Regardless of whatever he usually did, that is certainly what he ha done to great success here.
I can't give away much more plot without giving away major secrets, but I can repeat that it is a ghost story, however a non-traditional one. Mizoguchi proves to be a master at blending realities seamlessly. A ghost appearance in Ugetsu is not meant to spook or scare, but is such an organic part of the narrative that their presence could even be missed if you weren't paying enough attention.
The film quietly moves to its deeply affecting conclusion, even ending with a little bittersweet hope. But aside from the ending, the film is another near perfect entry into the two movie filmography I've had the pleasure of experiencing.
Ugetsu: 9.3/10
The film disc has a couple of interviews with frequent Mizoguchi crew members. I learned that the director was most definitely a perfectionist. I saw the run-time of the documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director on the second disc and got scared. The film itself looks and sounds beautiful, as most Criterion releases do.
I'll keep from giving the who release since I clearly skipped out on the majority of the special features.
I mention Sansho only because the two films seem like they purposefully complement each other. Indeed, only one year separates them. Criterion should have looked into a nice box set release. Both films chronicle the struggles of the peasant class in 17th century Japan. Sansho sees some of the rich take a fall down the economic ladder. Ugetsu sees some of the poor briefly flirting with the top, and is definitely the more somber of the two.
Ugetsu follows two poor men and their families during a destructive civil war. One of the men is a potter who realizes he can make a minor fortune selling his pots in a nearby town because of the war economy. The other man decides to accompany him in the hope that he can become a samurai by apprenticing himself to one traveling through the town. Both men end up finding their selfish success both to different degrees, but both at a large cost to their wives and families.
This is where I would like to discuss how Mizoguchi's work tends to deal heavily with wronged women and how he masterfully aligns the audiences sympathy with them. Of course I know nothing of his large filmography, but this is what people tend to discuss in regards to Mizoguchi. Regardless of whatever he usually did, that is certainly what he ha done to great success here.
I can't give away much more plot without giving away major secrets, but I can repeat that it is a ghost story, however a non-traditional one. Mizoguchi proves to be a master at blending realities seamlessly. A ghost appearance in Ugetsu is not meant to spook or scare, but is such an organic part of the narrative that their presence could even be missed if you weren't paying enough attention.
The film quietly moves to its deeply affecting conclusion, even ending with a little bittersweet hope. But aside from the ending, the film is another near perfect entry into the two movie filmography I've had the pleasure of experiencing.
Ugetsu: 9.3/10
The film disc has a couple of interviews with frequent Mizoguchi crew members. I learned that the director was most definitely a perfectionist. I saw the run-time of the documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director on the second disc and got scared. The film itself looks and sounds beautiful, as most Criterion releases do.
I'll keep from giving the who release since I clearly skipped out on the majority of the special features.
This week's Comedy Battle
No, I do not plan on hosting a weekly comedy battle, but I'm backed up on several and thought this would be a more interesting way to recap. All the movies will be unleashed into the pit for ultimate death match. Exciting!
This week's fighters:
This week's fighters:
The Extra Man (2010)
vs.
Colin Fitz Lives! (2010
vs.
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
vs.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
vs.
Colin Fitz Lives! (2010
vs.
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
vs.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
The Extra Man swings out the gate with the immediate advantage of one of Kevin Kline's best performances. Unfortunately, Kline doesn't provide the legs to keep the film at the forefront for long. And holy bajeezus, Paul Dano does everything he can to stop the movie dead. The guy's been great in a few good films, but between this and Gigantic, I'm really starting to not like him very much. From the directors of American Splendor, Dano plays a shy and quiet aspiring writer new to New York City. He finds an unlikely roommate in Kevin Kline's mysterious playboy. Kline takes Dano on as a protege. The film is fun and a touch moving when it keeps to this main plot. A side story of Dano's interactions with hot co-worker Katie Holmes feels like it's from a different, crappier movie, and it occupies too much time without really going anywhere. But Kevin Kline, I must say again, is at his manic, hilarious best. Will the competition be weak enough for Kline to sail this flawed ship all the way to the end?
Based on Colin Fitz Lives! alone, Kevin Kline won't break a sweat. Fitz supposedly made a pretty significant splash at Sundance in 1997. The director, Robert Bella, went into debt making the film, and no distribution company offered enough money for him to pay it off. 13 years later, he's paid off his debt and IFC has swooped in to finally release the film VOD, where it will at least get an eventual DVD release. Here's all you really need to know about the film. It's a Clerks knockoff. It's two mismatched buddies, working a nightmare shift at a shitty, dead end job. I don't really like Clerks... Fitz has a semi mockumentary angle that shows up periodically, and this part is actually pretty funny. William H. Macy shows up briefly for an enjoyable performance, and then is wasted. The rest is all very derivative, '90s indie comedy crap. Maybe 13 years ago this was a hilarious movie. It's a shame that there probably isn't much of an audience for this kind of humor anymore.
The Extra Man almost finds a competitor in Hot Tub Time Machine, a sad case of wasted title that still includes many hilarious bits, before its conclusion kills the whole thing. 3 best friends and one dude's nephew are transported back 20-something years to a weekend the 3 shared partying at a ski lodge. It's pretty typical second chance, wish fulfillment stuff. Rob Corddry steals the show as the asshole fuck-up. John Cusack gets to hog the screen time with an annoying kill-joy that gets to hang out with an epically wasted Lizzy Caplan. Craig Robinson continues to able to sell almost any line he delivers. Clark Duke doesn't get anything to do besides make witty comments in the background. I know this isn't much of an endorsement so far, but the film throws up a thousand jokes per minute, and a large enough percentage of them land for the film to be worth a watch.
Sorry Kevin, I'm sure you weren't counting on a ringer like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to show up today. Edgar Wright adapts Bryan Lee O'Malley's fantastic comic to great success. I feel like my writing from the past few weeks reads a bit hyperbolic, but I really have been watching things I've never experienced before, and Scott Pilgrim is another one. Wright uses so many visual techniques and ideas to create the video game obsessed and music-inspired world that these characters inhabit. He also crams six books into two hours in a mostly seamless way. The film never stops moving, or even slows down, but it also doesn't ever feel rushed. The large cast of supporting characters is uniformly fantastic, with Chris Evans and Kieran Culkin as a couple highlights. Unfortunately the two characters who lose the most in translation are Scott Pilgrim, himself, and love interest Ramona Flowers. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, respectively, are great, but we lose a lot of the time, and thus a lot of the nuance to their relationship. That's one of the only problems I had with this hilarious and heartfelt film. Definitely one of my favorites of the year.
And so Scott Pilgrim wins in a rude landslide. Here's the battle's final results:
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: 1st place with an 8.9/10
The Extra Man: 2nd place with a 6.6/10
Hot Tub Time Machine: 3rd place with a 6.1/10
Colin Fitz Lives!: 4th place with a 4.8/10
Honorary award:
Sadly, Road to Morocco was just too old to compete in today's Battle. Although a great, timeless comedy, it didn't really fit in with the competition. It's timeless, but definitely of a different time. It's sometimes hard to even create an evolutionary thread of comedy from the joyful bickering between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby to the gross out humor of something like Hot Tub Time Machine. If it were in it's prime though, it would have landed in a solid second place slot with a 7.8/10.
Tomorrow we have a horror/thriller battle planned with another set of widely varied films within the genres. Tentatively.
Based on Colin Fitz Lives! alone, Kevin Kline won't break a sweat. Fitz supposedly made a pretty significant splash at Sundance in 1997. The director, Robert Bella, went into debt making the film, and no distribution company offered enough money for him to pay it off. 13 years later, he's paid off his debt and IFC has swooped in to finally release the film VOD, where it will at least get an eventual DVD release. Here's all you really need to know about the film. It's a Clerks knockoff. It's two mismatched buddies, working a nightmare shift at a shitty, dead end job. I don't really like Clerks... Fitz has a semi mockumentary angle that shows up periodically, and this part is actually pretty funny. William H. Macy shows up briefly for an enjoyable performance, and then is wasted. The rest is all very derivative, '90s indie comedy crap. Maybe 13 years ago this was a hilarious movie. It's a shame that there probably isn't much of an audience for this kind of humor anymore.
The Extra Man almost finds a competitor in Hot Tub Time Machine, a sad case of wasted title that still includes many hilarious bits, before its conclusion kills the whole thing. 3 best friends and one dude's nephew are transported back 20-something years to a weekend the 3 shared partying at a ski lodge. It's pretty typical second chance, wish fulfillment stuff. Rob Corddry steals the show as the asshole fuck-up. John Cusack gets to hog the screen time with an annoying kill-joy that gets to hang out with an epically wasted Lizzy Caplan. Craig Robinson continues to able to sell almost any line he delivers. Clark Duke doesn't get anything to do besides make witty comments in the background. I know this isn't much of an endorsement so far, but the film throws up a thousand jokes per minute, and a large enough percentage of them land for the film to be worth a watch.
Sorry Kevin, I'm sure you weren't counting on a ringer like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to show up today. Edgar Wright adapts Bryan Lee O'Malley's fantastic comic to great success. I feel like my writing from the past few weeks reads a bit hyperbolic, but I really have been watching things I've never experienced before, and Scott Pilgrim is another one. Wright uses so many visual techniques and ideas to create the video game obsessed and music-inspired world that these characters inhabit. He also crams six books into two hours in a mostly seamless way. The film never stops moving, or even slows down, but it also doesn't ever feel rushed. The large cast of supporting characters is uniformly fantastic, with Chris Evans and Kieran Culkin as a couple highlights. Unfortunately the two characters who lose the most in translation are Scott Pilgrim, himself, and love interest Ramona Flowers. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, respectively, are great, but we lose a lot of the time, and thus a lot of the nuance to their relationship. That's one of the only problems I had with this hilarious and heartfelt film. Definitely one of my favorites of the year.
And so Scott Pilgrim wins in a rude landslide. Here's the battle's final results:
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: 1st place with an 8.9/10
The Extra Man: 2nd place with a 6.6/10
Hot Tub Time Machine: 3rd place with a 6.1/10
Colin Fitz Lives!: 4th place with a 4.8/10
Honorary award:
Sadly, Road to Morocco was just too old to compete in today's Battle. Although a great, timeless comedy, it didn't really fit in with the competition. It's timeless, but definitely of a different time. It's sometimes hard to even create an evolutionary thread of comedy from the joyful bickering between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby to the gross out humor of something like Hot Tub Time Machine. If it were in it's prime though, it would have landed in a solid second place slot with a 7.8/10.
Tomorrow we have a horror/thriller battle planned with another set of widely varied films within the genres. Tentatively.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Remember, kid, you're BFABB
I just typed a 1,250 word review of Step Up 3D. Then Blogger made it go away. Fuck that.
I liked it.
UPDATE: found it!
So today I present to you a couple of normal films; not the pretentious foreign, expensive-to-purchase, and/or IFC films available to a very small percentage of the population. This blog really does not represent my love for popular cinema and summer blockbusters, partially because it's been a dry year for that kind of film.
First up is William Friedkin's wilderness-survival heavy The Hunted. Benicio del Toro is a psychopathic, man hunter escaped from a military holding cell. Tommy Lee Jones does his best Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive impression, brought out of retirement to catch the psycho, but with an awesome beard and a stubborn unwillingness to untuck his shirt. The movie is slight, and often stupid, but Friedkin makes his action scenes big and exciting, and the fight scenes brutally ugly, raw, and personal. It's well worth the 94 minutes for those few great scenes. Tommy Lee Jones also kind of prances around while trying to track del Toro, whose frequent mini PETA rants really work to kill his already shaky performance.
The Hunted: 5.9/10
I now realize my next review will not make me seem normal.
Here's what's up: I loved Step Up 3D. I sat in the theater tapping my feet to the music and smiling through the whole thing. I loved it almost as much as I loved Step Up 2 the Streets. The third film doesn't have the amazing final dance sequence that Streets provided, but it has a plethora of varied styles of dance scenes, all brilliantly staged, filmed, and edited, and some truly amazing performers to execute them.
(This is almost wholly SPOILER-free. As though you'd care)
In the third film, returning character Moose (Adam G. Sevani) is starting college at NYU, having given up dancing to face the real world. He brings along his best friend Camille (Missy Elliot video vet, Alyson Stoner).
Moose literally follows a pair of shoes to a small dance battle down the sidewalk, and within 2 minutes of the film starting, is dancing again. Moose was the surprise character in the second film, but here he gets more chances to show off his considerable talent and Michael Jackson moves. Unfortunately, it seems that Disney didn't trust a scrawny 18-year-old to anchor their film. So in comes Luke (Rick Malambri), a dancer/filmmaker who owns an insanely expensive loft where his crew of eclectic dancers all live and rehearse. Luke notices Moose and takes him to the loft where he is quickly accepted as a new member. WHAT ABOUT SCHOOL? MOOSE, YOU GAVE UP DANCING! The problem, Luke and the crew can't afford the mortgage, and the club (WHAT!) isn't bringing in the bills anymore. When the crew goes downstairs to Luke's insanely expensive dance club (maybe if you got any of your fucking adult patrons to buy a goddamn beer...) they meet Natalie (Sharni Vinson), a mysterious dancer who looks and sounds exactly like the hotter Briana Evigan of Streets. With these new members, Luke and his crew set out to win the World Jam and it's prize money to save the loft.
Whoah, that's a lot of set up for 15 minutes. But with it finally out of the way,we can really start dancing.
Before I get to what I loved, I suppose I'll continue with what I didn't. I'm sure you could tell from my plot description that I care little for this story. I believe story in this franchise is an obstacle the films have to constantly wrestle with. Streets struggled and eventually crushed its poorly developed opponent. 3D eventually wins out, but it's got a nasty limb walking out of the ring.
The film really suffers from not having a well-defined lead. In Streets, we had Briana with the blond dude as an inspiring love interest, and Moose as the quirky side-kick. Here we have Luke and Moose. Luke gets the love interest. Moose gets the only attempts at conflict outside of dancing. Unfortunately both are underdeveloped and feel silly. Moose's plot seems weird because he's meant to be balancing his two mutually exclusive worlds of school and dance, but ends up not being seen enough in either for us to feel much for him. It seems more like he was just accidentally left out of scenes until one of the dancers is like "Where's Moose?". Then he shows up.
Luke's development is more than minorly annoying. In fact Luke, along with Natalie, threaten to kill the whole thing. They're both charisma vacuums who take up too much screen time. Luke is just so pretentious, and stupid. Traffic makes him feel like he's part of something bigger. He invented the phrase "Born From a Boom Box" (BFABB), and he never shuts up about it. Natalie is just nothing more than a stand-in for Briana Evigan. She even wears outfits that I swear remember Briana wearing also. These problems, though, are not the mortal sins. No. The problem is that we rarely even see these two robots dance. (The actual robot guy was great) These two seem like the least talented of the larger group. Is the crew just using Luke for his sweet crib? The movie says no, but it makes little sense if they're not. But really, this is a problem because our love interests/complications aren't directly related to the dancing and what's at stake. It feels more forced and tacked on than any other part of the ridiculously stupid story.
Okay. That's it for the bad. 700 words in, I'm ready to talk about the good stuff. Dancing. Camera work, editing. Even pacing, to a lesser extent. The film uses all these qualities in great ways. Director Jon Chu might be incapable of telling a decent story, I wouldn't care; but his staging and execution of the dance sequences is a marvel to watch. I can't begin to imagine how difficult these are to pull off, much less piece together coherently. Well, this ain't no Michael Bay film. These basically are just action scenes, and Chu must know his way around one. The spatial continuity and orientation remains intact throughout each sequence. The editing helps make each successive scene bigger more emotional than the last. And the choreography. Holy cow. Most of these dances display talent levels only hinted at in 2 the Streets. Another great thing is these dances never feel repetitive, and they occur at all the right places. I only got bogged down in stupid dialogue one time in the 2nd act.
This leads me to my next point. What am I supposed to actually think of a film like this, and how do I compare it to other films?
It's magnificently stupid, but also a pure joy to sit through. Do we forgive a weak story, and crummy acting when it has so much else to offer. Chu is well aware of the many genres that have influenced the dance film and the choreography that goes into it. One scene has the lead love birds (their only good scene) rehearsing a routine hinged on perfectly and interwoven spin kicks and martial arts-styled moves. Moose hears a Fred Astaire song blasting from an ice cream truck and commences to dance down the street with Camille in a funny, successful send up of the classic Astaire/Rogers musicals.
There are several more of these moments, making me feel good about thinking this might display an absolute love of cinema more than most films I've seen this year.
And here's where people kill me. I felt after this film similar to how I felt after leaving Inception for the second time. I haven't wrote about Christopher Nolan's dreamfest as I've felt unsure about my initial opinion that it was amazing. I enjoyed every minute, but could not help feeling that it lacked important elements, like a significant emotional core or developed supporting characters. I realized that Inception is the perfect summer spectacle. It's insanely entertaining, sparks conversation, and has people thinking even though most of the debates about plot and such feel absurdly pointless. (whether it was a dream the whole time or not feels wholly irrelevant today since it doesn't affect the stakes either way.) Nolan obviously tells a more compelling, intelligent and imaginative story than Step Up 3D, but at their core they are both huge spectacle, that assault the senses on all fronts, meant to entertain more than incite deep thoughts.
Inception is a much better film, but Step Up 3D is an 100% joyful cinematic experience worth your time (and the silly glasses).
I liked it.
UPDATE: found it!
So today I present to you a couple of normal films; not the pretentious foreign, expensive-to-purchase, and/or IFC films available to a very small percentage of the population. This blog really does not represent my love for popular cinema and summer blockbusters, partially because it's been a dry year for that kind of film.
First up is William Friedkin's wilderness-survival heavy The Hunted. Benicio del Toro is a psychopathic, man hunter escaped from a military holding cell. Tommy Lee Jones does his best Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive impression, brought out of retirement to catch the psycho, but with an awesome beard and a stubborn unwillingness to untuck his shirt. The movie is slight, and often stupid, but Friedkin makes his action scenes big and exciting, and the fight scenes brutally ugly, raw, and personal. It's well worth the 94 minutes for those few great scenes. Tommy Lee Jones also kind of prances around while trying to track del Toro, whose frequent mini PETA rants really work to kill his already shaky performance.
The Hunted: 5.9/10
I now realize my next review will not make me seem normal.
Here's what's up: I loved Step Up 3D. I sat in the theater tapping my feet to the music and smiling through the whole thing. I loved it almost as much as I loved Step Up 2 the Streets. The third film doesn't have the amazing final dance sequence that Streets provided, but it has a plethora of varied styles of dance scenes, all brilliantly staged, filmed, and edited, and some truly amazing performers to execute them.
(This is almost wholly SPOILER-free. As though you'd care)
In the third film, returning character Moose (Adam G. Sevani) is starting college at NYU, having given up dancing to face the real world. He brings along his best friend Camille (Missy Elliot video vet, Alyson Stoner).
Moose literally follows a pair of shoes to a small dance battle down the sidewalk, and within 2 minutes of the film starting, is dancing again. Moose was the surprise character in the second film, but here he gets more chances to show off his considerable talent and Michael Jackson moves. Unfortunately, it seems that Disney didn't trust a scrawny 18-year-old to anchor their film. So in comes Luke (Rick Malambri), a dancer/filmmaker who owns an insanely expensive loft where his crew of eclectic dancers all live and rehearse. Luke notices Moose and takes him to the loft where he is quickly accepted as a new member. WHAT ABOUT SCHOOL? MOOSE, YOU GAVE UP DANCING! The problem, Luke and the crew can't afford the mortgage, and the club (WHAT!) isn't bringing in the bills anymore. When the crew goes downstairs to Luke's insanely expensive dance club (maybe if you got any of your fucking adult patrons to buy a goddamn beer...) they meet Natalie (Sharni Vinson), a mysterious dancer who looks and sounds exactly like the hotter Briana Evigan of Streets. With these new members, Luke and his crew set out to win the World Jam and it's prize money to save the loft.
Whoah, that's a lot of set up for 15 minutes. But with it finally out of the way,we can really start dancing.
Before I get to what I loved, I suppose I'll continue with what I didn't. I'm sure you could tell from my plot description that I care little for this story. I believe story in this franchise is an obstacle the films have to constantly wrestle with. Streets struggled and eventually crushed its poorly developed opponent. 3D eventually wins out, but it's got a nasty limb walking out of the ring.
The film really suffers from not having a well-defined lead. In Streets, we had Briana with the blond dude as an inspiring love interest, and Moose as the quirky side-kick. Here we have Luke and Moose. Luke gets the love interest. Moose gets the only attempts at conflict outside of dancing. Unfortunately both are underdeveloped and feel silly. Moose's plot seems weird because he's meant to be balancing his two mutually exclusive worlds of school and dance, but ends up not being seen enough in either for us to feel much for him. It seems more like he was just accidentally left out of scenes until one of the dancers is like "Where's Moose?". Then he shows up.
Luke's development is more than minorly annoying. In fact Luke, along with Natalie, threaten to kill the whole thing. They're both charisma vacuums who take up too much screen time. Luke is just so pretentious, and stupid. Traffic makes him feel like he's part of something bigger. He invented the phrase "Born From a Boom Box" (BFABB), and he never shuts up about it. Natalie is just nothing more than a stand-in for Briana Evigan. She even wears outfits that I swear remember Briana wearing also. These problems, though, are not the mortal sins. No. The problem is that we rarely even see these two robots dance. (The actual robot guy was great) These two seem like the least talented of the larger group. Is the crew just using Luke for his sweet crib? The movie says no, but it makes little sense if they're not. But really, this is a problem because our love interests/complications aren't directly related to the dancing and what's at stake. It feels more forced and tacked on than any other part of the ridiculously stupid story.
Okay. That's it for the bad. 700 words in, I'm ready to talk about the good stuff. Dancing. Camera work, editing. Even pacing, to a lesser extent. The film uses all these qualities in great ways. Director Jon Chu might be incapable of telling a decent story, I wouldn't care; but his staging and execution of the dance sequences is a marvel to watch. I can't begin to imagine how difficult these are to pull off, much less piece together coherently. Well, this ain't no Michael Bay film. These basically are just action scenes, and Chu must know his way around one. The spatial continuity and orientation remains intact throughout each sequence. The editing helps make each successive scene bigger more emotional than the last. And the choreography. Holy cow. Most of these dances display talent levels only hinted at in 2 the Streets. Another great thing is these dances never feel repetitive, and they occur at all the right places. I only got bogged down in stupid dialogue one time in the 2nd act.
This leads me to my next point. What am I supposed to actually think of a film like this, and how do I compare it to other films?
It's magnificently stupid, but also a pure joy to sit through. Do we forgive a weak story, and crummy acting when it has so much else to offer. Chu is well aware of the many genres that have influenced the dance film and the choreography that goes into it. One scene has the lead love birds (their only good scene) rehearsing a routine hinged on perfectly and interwoven spin kicks and martial arts-styled moves. Moose hears a Fred Astaire song blasting from an ice cream truck and commences to dance down the street with Camille in a funny, successful send up of the classic Astaire/Rogers musicals.
There are several more of these moments, making me feel good about thinking this might display an absolute love of cinema more than most films I've seen this year.
And here's where people kill me. I felt after this film similar to how I felt after leaving Inception for the second time. I haven't wrote about Christopher Nolan's dreamfest as I've felt unsure about my initial opinion that it was amazing. I enjoyed every minute, but could not help feeling that it lacked important elements, like a significant emotional core or developed supporting characters. I realized that Inception is the perfect summer spectacle. It's insanely entertaining, sparks conversation, and has people thinking even though most of the debates about plot and such feel absurdly pointless. (whether it was a dream the whole time or not feels wholly irrelevant today since it doesn't affect the stakes either way.) Nolan obviously tells a more compelling, intelligent and imaginative story than Step Up 3D, but at their core they are both huge spectacle, that assault the senses on all fronts, meant to entertain more than incite deep thoughts.
Inception is a much better film, but Step Up 3D is an 100% joyful cinematic experience worth your time (and the silly glasses).
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Criterion #82
Shakespeare has always been a troubling author for me. In my more stupid youth, I would read, barely comprehend and then proclaim so that every person knew how dumb i was "Shakespeare's not even good!" Very silly, I know. I soon realized the error of my ways, and though I have not read nearly all, I have read and enjoyed many of his works. Unfortunately I still don't hold some of his plays as high as others do. I love King Lear, even as it descends into barely comprehensible madness at the end, but Julius Caesar kind of bores me. Much Ado About Nothing makes me down right giddy, but A Midsummer Night's Dream tends to annoy me. But most importantly, while I believe Macbeth is truly one of history's greatest tragedies, Hamlet has never done much for me. I should also be quick to add that I know how important an influence this has on a great many works of art that have come since. Akira Kurosawa's semi adaptation, The Bad Sleep Well, is definitely one of my favorite films from the master. And Jesus, The Lion King has 29 credited writers listed on its IMDB page. Apparently they each only read one scene of Hamlet and made each character a lion. I fucking love The Lion King.
Criterion #82 is, of course, Laurence Olivier's 1948 adaptation of Hamlet. I (like the rest of the planet) consider Laurence Olivier to be one of cinema's greatest actors, and his work as the titular Danish prince really is spectacular. His melancholy is palpable, and his possible madness much more subtle than, say, Mel Gibson's future take on the role in the 1990s.
But it's not Olivier the actor I really care about here; it's Olivier the director. Every visual aspect of this film is so meticulously calculated and aesthetically moving. From the Escher-like, gigantic sets to the extremely hard (and sometimes unnerving) lighting. The frames are filled with glorious details, and the command over the constantly changing depth of field could be orchestrated by no less than a master. Their are great slow pans, a great many beautiful scene transitions. His shot angles work in a wonderfully harmonious manner. I also love the decision to internalize some of the monologues, proving that this stage-born actor really knew what translated into a great film. I believe Olivier deserved the directing Oscar he lost to John Huston that year. (Really, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger earned it for the magical The Red Shoes, but were not even nominated.)
Of course, even with all these compliments, I still don't love this film. Olivier seems to do everything right. All the characters are perfectly cast and acted. I loved Jean SImmons as Ophelia. I just cannot get into this story. Why couldn't Shakespeare have actually written it with lions in mind? Adaptations can work, but Olivier uses only Shakespeare's dialogue, and that's apparently what doesn't do it for me. (Just writing this, I feel like I should be shot by every other intelligent or well-read individual on the planet.) What's wrong with me?
Hamlet (1948): 7.9/10
I watched this on Netflix Instant, so obviously I had no special features to watch. This disc doesn't have any anyway. The picture quality was excellent. The film was a joy to look at.
The Plan:
I have the Criterion films set up in my queue so that I receive one from the early releases in the catalog, and then one from the more recently released end. I have them ordered like that until they meet in the middle, with future releases being tacked on at the end. This order is not set in stone. If I suddenly want to watch one low in my queue, I'll move it to the top. I also have gotten back in the habit of checking out films from my local library which are often Criterion releases. I'm using a checklist website to chart how many Criterion films I've seen in my slow pursuit to finally have them all under my belt. (I've seen 62% already)
Disclaimer:
I don't just love every film Criterion release. There have been a great many I've not cared for, and a few I've flat out loathed. I seek out the Criterion label because they put so much care and time into putting together these discs, and the unequaled quality really shows it. They also do a great job introducing American audiences to directors and films that have never been released on home video here, sometimes films that have never been released theatrically (Pedro Costa's trilogy, for example). How else could I find Akira Kurowsawa's pre-WWII films? or John Lurie's surrealist television program Fishing With John? Criterion releases films from foreign masters from a vast array of countries, films from the Golden Age of American Cinema, more challenging or barely released recent films, cult and camp classics from all over the time line, and even a couple of Michael Bay films. They show a love for all films.
Criterion #82 is, of course, Laurence Olivier's 1948 adaptation of Hamlet. I (like the rest of the planet) consider Laurence Olivier to be one of cinema's greatest actors, and his work as the titular Danish prince really is spectacular. His melancholy is palpable, and his possible madness much more subtle than, say, Mel Gibson's future take on the role in the 1990s.
But it's not Olivier the actor I really care about here; it's Olivier the director. Every visual aspect of this film is so meticulously calculated and aesthetically moving. From the Escher-like, gigantic sets to the extremely hard (and sometimes unnerving) lighting. The frames are filled with glorious details, and the command over the constantly changing depth of field could be orchestrated by no less than a master. Their are great slow pans, a great many beautiful scene transitions. His shot angles work in a wonderfully harmonious manner. I also love the decision to internalize some of the monologues, proving that this stage-born actor really knew what translated into a great film. I believe Olivier deserved the directing Oscar he lost to John Huston that year. (Really, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger earned it for the magical The Red Shoes, but were not even nominated.)
Of course, even with all these compliments, I still don't love this film. Olivier seems to do everything right. All the characters are perfectly cast and acted. I loved Jean SImmons as Ophelia. I just cannot get into this story. Why couldn't Shakespeare have actually written it with lions in mind? Adaptations can work, but Olivier uses only Shakespeare's dialogue, and that's apparently what doesn't do it for me. (Just writing this, I feel like I should be shot by every other intelligent or well-read individual on the planet.) What's wrong with me?
Hamlet (1948): 7.9/10
I watched this on Netflix Instant, so obviously I had no special features to watch. This disc doesn't have any anyway. The picture quality was excellent. The film was a joy to look at.
The Plan:
I have the Criterion films set up in my queue so that I receive one from the early releases in the catalog, and then one from the more recently released end. I have them ordered like that until they meet in the middle, with future releases being tacked on at the end. This order is not set in stone. If I suddenly want to watch one low in my queue, I'll move it to the top. I also have gotten back in the habit of checking out films from my local library which are often Criterion releases. I'm using a checklist website to chart how many Criterion films I've seen in my slow pursuit to finally have them all under my belt. (I've seen 62% already)
Disclaimer:
I don't just love every film Criterion release. There have been a great many I've not cared for, and a few I've flat out loathed. I seek out the Criterion label because they put so much care and time into putting together these discs, and the unequaled quality really shows it. They also do a great job introducing American audiences to directors and films that have never been released on home video here, sometimes films that have never been released theatrically (Pedro Costa's trilogy, for example). How else could I find Akira Kurowsawa's pre-WWII films? or John Lurie's surrealist television program Fishing With John? Criterion releases films from foreign masters from a vast array of countries, films from the Golden Age of American Cinema, more challenging or barely released recent films, cult and camp classics from all over the time line, and even a couple of Michael Bay films. They show a love for all films.
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