Me and You and Everyone We Know

None of the things that happen in this movie are strange, but the *strangeness* that glows out of every bit of this movie is entrancing. A patchwork of barely connected moments wouldn't seem able to develop this much potency in the range of characters, this much depth of feeling and dramatic stakes that rise so high, but the ways that the script and the director and the DP and the actors manage it -- is beautiful.

++++ 1/2

The Royal Tenenbaums

I find this to be Wes Anderson's most accomplished movie: the fractured clan of an fractious, ne'er-do-well-scoundrel tries to escape their childhood demons, and live up to their mother's best hopes and their own best dreams at the same time their dead-beat-patriarch tries to make good with them too (his motives are less then sterling). Such a roster of quirky, troubled geniuses (!) such a richly conceived mise en scene (!) such elaborate webs of relationships (!), such a compassionate, eccentric diction (!) -- I couldn't imagine enjoying a movie more than I did (and do) this one.


+++++

an old scrap i wrote a long time ago...

Dead Again

Lynn and I loved this in the golden days of Kenneth and Emma, it played well to our we-love-Hitchcock,-noir-and-all-things-from-the-twenties-to-the-fortie-sensibility (to say nothing about the homage to Spellbound, another of our favorites), but it was also maintained a snappy contemporary romantic comedy chemistry. Watching it again this weekend with the larger family, I still thought it well-told suspense film, plotted and executed with good rhythm; in the end it's told a bit more than felt and there've been enough past-lives-twists in the movies since this one, that it feels a little less fresh to watch now.

+++

Blow-Up

I once tried to write a thriller and hated myself for always reinforcing such conventional ideologies with the ending -- I blamed it on the genre -- I was sure that inherent in the quest to stop X (before society was ruined by X's actions -- the quest to stop X always provides the maincourse of the thriller plot...) was an ode to the status quo. Blow-Up, delightfully, undercuts the genre, while fulfilling it; an anti-hero in a counter-cultural movement wrestles with a big question -- with several subquestions -- its a philosophical maze, masterfully accomplished with almost entirely VISUAL storytelling.

++++

Everything is Illuminated

If you want to make MY KIND OF MOVIE - you should definitely include -- memory, grandparents, travel, quirky music, beautiful locations just past their prime, character-driven plots, magical realism and several levels of stories. This adaptation was, as Alex from the book would have put it, "Faithful" to these elements and to a larger kind of truth; few movies could state their theme as explicitly as this one did and have me still love and embrace them, but it did and I do.

++++

The Gods Must Be Crazy

I first watched this film when a senior in high school --it had become a cult hit amongst the cool kids, so by the time I saw it there was some pressure involved -- I thought it was funny but not amazing, and in retrospect, I'm not sure that I was laughing *with* the "bushmen."

The gloss of the film is a plot that romanticizes the simple, naieve-pure-goodness of the bushfolk in contrast with the absurd pace of civilized folk (the gloss achieved through a clever bunch of documentary voice overs that "distance" us from both the delightful bushmen and the ridiculously over-civilized); in the end though, our conventional wisdom is confirmed -- Love and Romance completes us and heals us of all our foils -- and the Bushmen end up as a delightful exotic other, better treated as a consumable treat than engaged in real sustainable dialogue.

++ 1/2

p.s. thanks to the faith and film class for shaping my thinking (above) and to Marla for helping me understand the role of African Theatrical tradition in shaping the Keystone-Kops-like-cinematography throughout the film. It helped.

Bride & Prejudice

Like she did in Bend it Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha does a magnificent job articulating many of the most difficult problematics which frame post-colonial feminism, and yet manages to do so in a way that conforms to a popular formula and can be "read" at many levels of pleasure and/or analysis.

In many ways this Bollywood meets Jane Austen serves Austen as well as it serves Bali; the context of the developing world is a perfect host for a story about the movement of class and the reconfiguration of gender -- and a global economy ends up raising the theoretical stakes for the story as a whole.

+++ 1/2



a special thanks to my Faith and Film Class who contributed significantly to the coagulation of the above review...

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Every minute of this movie, I was wholly engaged by the dramatic question and by the filmmaking -- the art direction (particularly the city scapes, the university & the farm....the attorney's apartment & the bar lacked the je ne se quois of the rest of the film) and cinematography were beautiful.

What's best about the film is ultimatetly what serves it ill, though: it combines the Law and Order storytelling conventions with the visual conventions of horror film in order to ask and answer a much bigger and better question than either of those genres ever attempt to answer (do we have to trust science more than God?)....in the end though, the element of film that makes films resonate with us most -- character -- collapses under the relief of the answer to the Big Question.

+++

Emma

It's unfortunate for Andy Tennant and Gwyneth Paltrow and all the other collaborators on this adaptation that we watched it alongside of good Jane Austen adaptations -- Mansfield Park, Pride & Prejudice -- but even when we watched it the first time our response was only tepid. I still remember loathing the marketing gush: "If you liked Clueless, you'll love Emma."; I had liked Clueless and even after the carefully constructed splendour of Emma, I still thought that Clueless was a far more Faithful interpretation of Emma (the book) than Emma (the movie).

++

Pride & Prejudice

This, more than any other Jane Austen novel I've *seen* actually translates the feeling of the book into a cinematic experience. The only complaints I have against the movie are limitations imposed by the story (and those limitations wouldn't be read as "limiting" if read in the repressive cultural context that surrounded Austen when she wrote it).

++++

The 40 Year Old Virgin

This is a movie that celebrates the crass nirvana of male buddy-dom as the apotheosis of liberty and gendered triumph --

or --

this is a formulatic romantic comedy following an offbeat guy and a deserving girl through a minefield of obstacles until the final 10 minutes of the film allows them to be reunited --

either of these statements could be the primary descriptors for this alternately sweet & crass buddy movie/romantic comedy(conveniently a double-demographic homerun for distributors).

My first impulse was to congratulate the film, because the resolution so clearly establishes the geekdom of the 40 year old virgin to have actually paid off and been worthwhile; my later impulse was to say -- hold on -- what does ANYBODY like about this film? -- the humour -- which means that not only does the film court a double demographic, but it also juggles a polyvalent moral code: faithful, genuiness is better / raunchy and rude is more fun.

+ +

(later I return with a +++1/2; it stuck with me well.)

Movies About Families Changed by the Loss of a Child:

This is one of those roiling boiling posts which is intended to grow over time. Blogettiquete, at least what I know of it, thus far, doesn't have a clear convention for editing, revising and reinvention. There's this, but that only works when you change your mind, what if you want to make it clear that you're developing some ideas over time.

Here's my inventive bid for a routenized way of handling such things: I'll add a little date at the bottom of the post in type, then I'll use this convention to update it each time I add new movies to the list, eh?

1. Ordinary People

2. In America

3. In the Bedroom

4. Minority Report (I know, it almost seems silly to list it with the other three, but...)

5. ??? I'll be back ???

November 30, 2005