bodnotbod Reviews

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

A feel rough movie

[6/10 · 3 May 2005]

Nicolas Cage plays a medic who tours, in his ambulance, the same mean streets that Robert De Niro did in his cab in Taxi Driver. The landscape is similarly peopled with whores, pimps, drug pushers and down and outs.

The feel of the film is similar too: bleak, bleak, BLEAK I TELL YOU! With Nicolas Cage in the lead role I was expecting a lot more light relief to be coming my way, but no - it really is a dark and doomy piece of work. It is hard to know what to latch onto about it to give you a reason to watch. I can only really recommend this to someone who is the opposite of depressed (ie, uncontrollably ecstatic) and needs something to give them a bit of a day trip to a different reality. If you need a holiday from your relentless happiness than you should definitely consider renting this.

But as you see, I'm not giving it a low star count. That's because I was at no stage tempted to turn the film off. Cage keeps your interest as a battered and increasingly desperate man, the plot is episodic rather than rounded but the incidents are compelling and brutally grim, they keep you watching.

So: no fun, but a watchable portrait nonetheless.

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

Is it a veneer?

[7/10 · 27 April 2005]

Ticks all the European Film boxes: Death? Mourning? Intense love? Long lingering shots of faces? Moody lighting? Yes, yes, yes and yes.

I was very engaged throughout, but writing this two days later I can't help but feel a bit unfulfilled about it all.

I'm going to sound really up my own backside here but I think Martin Amis said something about stories having to be secondary to style now. His point, if I remember rightly (and maybe you shouldn't trust me on this) is that we've heard most stories before, so all we can do now is just try to tell them in ever more interesting ways. I think that's what he said, but try as I might to be an intellectual the brain isn't up to it frankly.

This film has little in terms of twists and turns and plot points. But the simple tale is shown to you in such a way as to please you immensely. There are moments of two people talking that are lit so beautifully you want to grab other directors and say "why can't you make people look as absorbing as that? You haven't been *trying* have you? Stay behind after class." On the other side of the equation the DVD extras have a bit of the director telling you what he was trying to achieve with the close-up shots he was using and Binoche goes on about her painful dedication to her art and you sort of want to say "yeah, OK, chill out" and you feel like after they gave the interviews they might giggle behind our backs and laugh at how they made us all think it was all dreadfully clever.

So, I would rate it above average, but I'm suspicious of it all and I'm not convinced this film is going to stay with me for long. However, I will see the rest of the trilogy and I wouldn't want this review to put anyone off renting it. Your eyes will come out of the experience feeling fulfilled.

The Legend of 1900 (1998)

Tedious Ivory Tinkling

[2/10 · 22 April 2005]

Looking past all the things I dislike about this film I find there's an original plot, and one I could take to at that.

However, the film is filled with a number of musical performances that hit all the wrong notes with me. Unless you are heavily into piano music, particularly early jazz, you may find the set musical pieces as tiresome as I did, to the extent that it spoils the entire film for you.

A further problem of the music is that throughout you are to view the central character as some kind of uber-genius of the ivories. If you fail to enjoy the music to the extent that you nod and go "yes, he is a piano God" then much of the fuss and story surrounding him falls apart.

I'm also not sure about Tim Roth. For some reason I like him a great deal in Reservoir Dogs even though a part of me feels his performance is flawed. In this his performance seems pretty woeful. He has a tick where he squeals a bit as he speaks when he's in a bit of emotional turmoil and I find that puts me off him. In this film he is also expected to do a bit of genius-fuelled wistfulness, but - I'm afraid - when he does this, I just find he looks a bit of a fool.

It's got a nice feel of the period, but every time I tried to relax into the film and enjoy it, there was always something irking me.

A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

Appeals to the brain more than the gut

[8/10 · 22 April 2005]

Peter Greenaway is arty. Painfully so. However he readily admits that this film is "self-conscious", "manufactured" and he says that all cinema is probably as "artificial" a form as you can get.

This film is beautiful to look at. Greenaway was inspired, visually, by paintings of the mid 17th century, particularly those of Vermeer. Almost every shot is composed like a painting. Many of the shots are symmetrical, walls are filmed flat so that the horizontal lines are parallel with the top and bottom of the frame. Objects are placed on tables as if subjects for a still life. Lighting is used in an alternation of light, shade,light,shade receding to the back of the picture, which is a signature of the type of 17th century, Western art that Greenaway is paying homage to.

The substance of the film follows weighty themes, all of which are explained in great detail through the director's commentary: evolution, light and twin-ship.

What is lacking is emotion. This is a cerebral film. Your emotional reaction to it will be through the imagery, be it beautiful or repulsive. You will not engage with the characters on an emotional level. You'll find them hard to relate to. The performances are stilted and amateur theatrical. It is fortunate, then, that Michael Nyman provides a fantastic score (present on almost every scene and almost outstaying its welcome) which prevents the dialogue (the script leaves a lot to be desired too) rendering everything flat.

Rent this if you enjoy visuals for their own sake, if you wear spectacles and if you like holding your chin in your hand and frowning. I qualify on all those points, so I enjoyed it a great deal.

Extra points for an extraordinarily thorough director's commentary on the DVD which serves to pull out all the hidden depths. Though one could make the point that an explanation that adds so much extra understanding leaves you feeling that the film failed adequately to convey much of what was intended.

DVD easter eggs (worth seeing): http://www.dvd.net.au/hidden.cgi?movie_id=10484

Sophie's Choice (1982)

Powerful, moving and extraordinary performances

[9/10 · 22 April 2005]

A deeply affecting drama that conveys, very powerfully, the experience of meeting new people, getting to know them better, and how this leads to a constantly shifting perception of those around us.

The three central performances are amazing. Streep (about whom I know little) shows here why she is so highly respected as an actress, there are moments here where she manages to show - through her expression - every nuance of feeling contained within individual lines of a tale recounted but without going anywhere near over-egging it. You truly believe she is recalling her experience and conveying it, there appears to be no artifice at all - though, rationally, we know that it is all it is.

Kevin Klein is great as an energised, spontaneous man - playing his role in such a way that we learn more about him we are as surprised as we should be, but immediately can see the truth of the revelation as to his behaviour.

It took me far too long to place the man in the lead role, until I suddenly realised I was looking at the "Perkipsy"(sp?) lawyer from Ally Macbeale. Again, a great performance of a young man having some kind of rite of passage or formative experience.

These three performances make the tragedy of the tale all the more powerful, and when we finally discover what Sophie's "choice" was it does as much as a film can do to move us and think about those who were forced to make such decisions in reality.

It only misses out on having 10 stars because I am a tight git, and will only award ten to those special films I know I will watch again and again, which tend to be more idiosyncratic than this.

Gosford Park (2001)

At first, hard to follow. Later, you wonder why you bothered.

[3/10 · 22 April 2005]

I struggled with this film despite being a fan of Robert Altman, particularly his film Short Cuts. Like Short Cuts this film has a large cast of central characters who speak in a very naturalistic low-key way, often talking over the babble of characters in the background.

I don't know whether to blame it on my cheap home set-up but, unlike Short Cuts, I found the dialogue hard to follow - particularly during the first half of the film. Naturally this hampers your enjoyment, especially in a film such as this which is very focused on speech.

Without wanting to give anything away, following the first half of the film there is an event which gives you cause to reflect on the motivations of all the characters. This was clearly a problem for me, having been unable to make out a good deal of the early dialogue.

However, I did feel at the end - and I'm sure this would be true even with the benefit of a full appreciation of the early story - that the film was rather flat. It's beautifully shot with a wonderful period feel. Another Altman trademark is the shot that makes you a voyeur or stalker witnessing people going about their business blissfully unaware that you're looking on. But these perhaps add to a sense that things are simply too played down and uninvolving. It's all very quiet.

In Shortcuts the action is much more engaging and the characters more fiery, so the devices that play it down give you a feeling that you are witnessing real people in real drama. With Gosford Park you feel you are witnessing real people who are not doing a great deal It's almost like a 1930s Big Brother in that regard.

bodnotbod

Kundun (1997)

Disappointing entry into a master's canon

[2/10 · 21 April 2005]

In an early episode of The Sopranos two of the younger gangsters are forced to wait for entry into a nightclub when Scorcese pulls up and is ushered into the club as a VIP.

"*I* liked Kundun!" shouts one of the gangsters, irony oozing out of the screenplay.

I had received that episode of The Sopranos through my rental queue and Kundun was due to arrive as the next disc. Spooky. That comment made me think it was not going to be a good film. And it isn't a good film The first 30 minutes are greatly hampered by some very stilted performances from a cast clearly struggling in an English language project. They manage to convey less emotion and commitment than the puppets in Parker & Stone's Team America.

As the film goes on the central performances improve but the pace of the thing never really picks up. The plot manages to be both epic (nations collide) and small (boy grows up) at the same time, but it is ultimately the smallness that you are left with : the story simply never takes off.

The Dalai Lama is, rightly, played with a stillness and spirituality but there are not enough moments where this stillness is played off against more fiery elements or where any wit shines through - we're simply expected to look at the unblinking face and think "aaaah. Such wisdom!" Well, sorry, I need a bit more than that.

Finally, there are some arty shots that look reasonably attractive but are not made transcendental as they seem not to add anything to the surrounding (in)action. They appear to be put in just for their own pretty sake.

A very disappointing film from the man who directed Goodfellas (one of my top 5 favourite films in history).