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Reviews
La princesse de Montpensier (2010)
I basically just loved it
I don't think it's exactly a ten star picture, it's a modest film, despite the wide-screen, but I'm giving it ten because I think it is being undervalued here for failing to be what it's not trying to be. For example, the opening sequence is pretty strange action, I guess. No blood. A bit unrealistic in a way. But then suddenly, there it is. Real blood, real pain, real horror, out of nowhere. My feeling is that the "unreal" prior action exists to make the contrast hit home hard, creating a spiritual (to call it that) turning point out of butchery as usual. It's making a point.
But then I like Tavernier a lot, and I've learned to accept his way of coming at a story. Like his laid-back, almost lethargic version of Jim Thompson's brutal Pop. 1280, Coup de Torchon. The first time I saw it was frustrating; I thought he'd missed the book. Seeing it again, I just watched what was on the screen, and had a real good time.
Queen Margot, this film's more romantic twin, is one of my favourite movies because it pulses with so much colour and movement and life. The Princess of Montpensier is pulsing with something else. Pulsing with limitation? I don't know. The characters are all so trapped -- in the situation, in the era, in themselves. It's more sad than full blown tragic, and in that respect perhaps truer to life as it's lived and later understood, rather than dreamed. More like a Rossellini history film, say, than a contemporary, high production values epic.
Beautiful to look at and lovely to listen to though, no doubt about it. And yet, at the same time, dry (the way that wine can be) and philosophical, in the sense of resigned. A song of experience, and quietly sustained anger, that tugs at your mind rather than your heart strings. Which appealed to me. In the right mood, allowed to do it's own thing at it's own pace, it's really good. I didn't even want to return it to the library, I kept putting it off until I started getting emails.
Sola (2007)
Great Anime Series
AndTheRoo basically said what needed to be said back in their 2007 post. I'm just adding my voice to his/hers because Sola deserves way more than a single review, however positive.
This was a beautiful and unexpectedly imaginative little series. Thirteen episodes was just right. It begins slowly enough as a kind of domestic, slightly supernatural teen drama, but even then I was captivated. Towards the end it gets weirder, but in a real good way.
The art is solid, not outrageous, but the plot and characterisation are at a very high level. It's genuinely moving. And, yeah, the music's great. In Japan, Sola went on to win Best Anime Series of 2007. Deservedly so.
If you're wondering whether to bother watching it or not: watch it. Totally recommended.
Ivan Groznyy (1944)
An Historical Drama About, uh, History
It's a stupid propaganda flick. The characters are absurd and disappointingly cartoonish. They skulk, they glower, they orate, they stare off into the far distance with madly lit faces in heroic or sinister half-profile, they faint -- an amazing amount -- or just collapse in a heap, or fling themselves around the room, and generally overact in a forced and completely unbelievable way at all times. It doesn't help that the subtitles are continually drawing your eye down to the bottom of the screen (only to find yourself reading script lines even more retarded than the acting and the pacing and the bizarre settings). It is in fact a ridiculous, contemptible film & almost unbearable to watch, except in a so-bad-its-good kind of a way. You have to sneer, scoff, make up your own sappy dialogue, etc. But you keep watching.
By the end of part two (which is even stranger, what with Ivan's beard and the demented, totally gay colour sequence) it is clear that the only thing left to do is to watch the whole thing again from the beginning, which is a weird response. This time around though, everything has changed -- or else you have -- because it is now spellbinding, moving, way better than good. It is in fact one of the most remarkably satisfying movies ever made, even without Part III, and pretty much everything that was crap about it turns out to have been your fault, a result of your own blinkered inability to see what was in front of you all the time.
I don't get it, but wow . . . not half impressive. And as a bonus, the extras on the Criterion DVD (especially the second disc) will even help you start to understand what the hell just happened.
[Rec] (2007)
Fully Wrecked and Deeply Impressed
Earlier tonight I watched this on DVD with fairly low expectations, and soon went from gratefully surprised to completely involved to the edge of my seat. And the tension kept building. By the end I was pretty much in paranoid neutral, trying not to absorb the action and its implications too directly. Since it finished, I've been walking restlessly around the room, unable to sit still, suffering from exhilaration basically, and slightly shredded nerves.
I mean, wow, what a brilliant movie!
The shaky POV camera works really well here, I think, and although not as startling as it was in The Blair Witch Project, it's used more assuredly and to better effect. In fact the familiarity of the means and method only deepened my unease. Also, although some reviewers seemed disappointed by them, the low key special effects were fine by me, they added to the sense of dread and unfolding catastrophe, of a very ordinary night gone wrong in the worst possible way.
And when the shocks came they shocked, the gore disgusted, and the panic was contagious. Totally recommended.
Timeline (2003)
"Braveheart with a 21st Century Twist"
Full quote (reconstructed): An incredibly mediocre Braveheart with a 21st Century Twist so lame it begs the question: why bother? (Sigh.) What a steaming pile of nothing in particular.
Thankfully I haven't read the book, so at least I was spared the full horror of this tiresome made-for-TV style widescreen time waster. What I got from it was just boredom, a mild sense of betrayal (made easier to bear by low expectations), irritation at the careless plot holes and appallingly uninterested acting, and a growing hatred for the characters that had me rooting for . . . well, no one.
An exception to the otherwise universal pointlessness was Gerard Butler as Marek. He really stood out. In fact his brief verbal description of the siege of Castlegard early on was probably, in terms of action, the most exciting moment of the film. He almost made it seem as if something interesting might happen later.
But Anna Friel did have a cute smile, no doubt about it, and the wayward comings and goings of her medieval Frenchness were a highlight. The maniacal rugby playing English leader, Lord Whatever, was all right in small doses. The colours were nice enough, and the river was a believable river. Also the catapults were good.
The rest was dreadful, but not in a great way. David Thewlis, for example, seemed to be played by a stand-in, not that anyone else was fully present (again, except for Butler, perhaps he didn't get the memo). And between them Billy Connolly (stumble, whimper, whine), Paul Walker ("Be careful!") and Frances O'Connor (who am I in this scene?), along with whoever cobbled together and okayed the script, created the most lacklustre and unlikeable bunch of bewildered heroes I think I've ever seen outside of satire. But, and this must be stressed, they were not funny.
The villains were equally pathetic. The plot absurd. Events "back in the present" did not add drama to the medieval storyline, but just sort of interrupted it like commercial breaks. And so on, etc.
In all, reading the reviews at IMDb was more involving than the film.
I Am Legend (2007)
Feeling stupid and contagious
I Am Legend is basically Richard Matheson's unrelentingly bleak novel of loneliness moved to New York and turned into a Rastafarian propaganda vehicle, but still pretty watchable. I mean it definitely has its moments. It has its anti-moments too, though, and the ending sucks like the proverbial vacuum cleaner, but what can you do? Nihilism is dead, I guess, and we've just got to live with that.
The story of the plague is well told. In fact I liked the flashback scenes more than the main story, perhaps because the meta-narrative is so familiar from so many other movies, several of which also starred Will Smith. The daily life stuff is okay as well. The humdrum activities of a man and his dog with nothing much else to do except watch Shrek and find a cure for the cancer cure reminds me of my own life in many ways, although I'm a bit fatter and a lot less pro-active. And of course I don't own a dog. In fact I'd probably just sit around watching TV and eating biscuits until they came for me. In movie terms, I'd be dead or infected halfway through the opening credits, end of story, so it's good that Smith's nameless hero, Lt. Col. Robert Neville M.D., has a bit more get up and go. I thoroughly enjoyed watching him boodle around in the excellent deserted city (they used the set from 12 Monkeys) pursuing deer and other digital effects.
In dramatic terms, the trajectory of the film was the traditional post-Dawn of the Dead mixture of comfortably flat and sickeningly tense. Very up and down. Sort of like the readout on a vital functions monitor. I liked that. I was even getting ready to have watched a really good film by about the one hour mark. But then all indicators flatlined big time with Alice Braga's miraculous appearance, which was a shock I'm not sure I recovered from, and certainly the movie didn't.
That feeling that everyone lost interest half way through the initial story conference. That tacked on sense of pointless hope. The God stuff. Yikes! The kid was good though. Apart from the brilliant dog, he was the most convincingly human character in the movie and the only one who seemed authentically disoriented by the apocalypse, if only because he was so awed by being near Will Smith.
But I'm getting snide, and that's not fair. I mostly enjoyed I Am Legend. It's not perfect by any means, but it's an okay film, looked great, and the first half was really promising. If they'd trusted the novel more (and why on earth wouldn't you trust a story conceived by Richard Matheson?) it might have been wonderful.
Play It As It Lays (1972)
An American tragedy
I was 18 when I saw Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays during its brief opening run. It affected me powerfully. Blew me out like very few films ever have, actually. Completely intoxicating. I stumbled out into the afternoon sunlight afterwards rapt and bewildered, stunned and delighted, thoroughly alive. But in the years since I've never once met a single person who's even seen it, and the whole experience has become dreamlike and lost, a memory I'm no longer sure of.
However I did pounce on Joan Didion's blistering short novel when I found it. What a fine book! No wonder the effect of the film was so profound, telling that cruel, utterly remorseless story. (And of course I fell in love, fanboy-style, with Tuesday Weld, or perhaps more truly with Maria Wyeth, the doomed and heart-breakingly aware character she inhabited.)
But rather than attempt to analyse a film that plunged me in way out of my depth when I saw it 34 years ago, I simply want to add my voice to those of earlier and more capable reviewers calling for its release on DVD. It's exactly the sort of madly brilliant one-off that cries out for Criterion treatment. Well, mutters grumpily for it anyway.
And I'd most certainly like to recommend that if you ever do get the chance to see it, make sure you do. It might have vanished, but it always was an exceptionally interesting film, one of the very great "small" ones. Perhaps the best film Robert Altman never made.