Reviews

Adapting famous and well-respected classic literature can't be easy. The film industry's track record attests to this: for every Ran, there are five misfires that people quickly forget. The filmmakers behind this year's adaptation of The Great Gatsby make the task seem impossible. This movie is a disaster.

Much has been made of director Baz Luhrmann's overblown style in The Great Gatsby, but that is just one of the movie's many issues. Actually, let's start with the production design. This movie is super polished and glamorous, but everything looks so blatantly fake. CGI stands in for actual set design and shooting locations. One of the movie's few redeeming features is the scope of the production, but even that is unimpressive when considering most of the movie was made on a computer. Admittetly, the costumes and makeup/hair look nice, and the movie will surely receive some award attention in that department.

The script and the acting are where The Great Gatsby really falls apart. There is no depth of character for anybody involved. The central three characters don't come across as real people. Nick Carraway has nothing to do but stand around and watch Gatsby and Daisy court each other. His frequent narration is baffling pointless, often describing the events exactly as they happen or directly telling the audience the movie's themes, as if we are too stupid to notice them. Carraway frequently stands in the corner watching the action unfold, instead of driving the plot forward with any interaction with other characters. This is a huge problem because Carraway serves as the main protagonist (Gatsby isn't introduced for over 20 minutes). Gatsby and Daisy don't fair any better. Their romance takes up the majority of the screen time in acts two and three, but there is no chemistry, nor do they display any emotional connection with each other. Instead, Gatsby and Daisy just tell each other how they feel with laughably clunky dialogue. There are no scenes showing the intense feelings they supposedly have for each other. They speak at each other instead of having actual conversations.

The actors cannot handle the script's horrible dialogue. The central three actors (Maguire, DiCaprio, and Mulligan) deliver the cornball dialogue with misplaced self- serious melodrama, making many of the conversations draw laughter from the audience. Several members of the supporting cast take the material and ham it up, causing a jarring inconsistency in tone. Lurhmann shows no motivation to rein in his actors.

Speaking of the supporting cast, some of the prominent characters from the first act completely disappear for most of the movie. The only person who shows some level of depth and complexity is Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker, but she vanishes for over an hour, before coming back to do absolutely nothing. Isla Fisher's Myrtle Wilson suffers a similar fate.

The use of music should be mentioned, if only because it is drawing some criticism. Using modern music in this movie wasn't a bad idea, but the execution is nothing remarkable. Instead of using contemporary pop for any dramatic or stylistic purpose, it just seems like Lurhmann picked some songs off his ipod and threw them into the movie.

The Great Gatsby is a failure on nearly all levels. It's individual flaws could be overlooked if the movie came together to form something cohesive and meaningful, but the whole affair feels hollow. Any symbolism or larger thematic goals get lost in the glossy extravagance. The filmmakers seem to be aware of this, so they pound the themes into the viewers with nothing resembling subtlety or grace. It's truly baffling how anybody in Hollywood could green-light a script this poor, and then throw millions of dollars at the production. The Great Gatsby is a soulless movie that covers up its lack of passion and heart with computer generated spectacle. All signifying nothing.

I'm not sure why Beasts of the Southern wild has connected with critics so much. This is a low-budget film directed by Benh Zeitlin in his debut feature. Movies like this typically find a strong critical reception, but are forgotten come award season in favor of bigger movies from more accomplished people -- this happened to Duncan Jones' excellent Moon in 2009. Sure, Beasts is visually creative, original, and a prime example of how ambition and imagination can overcome a small budget, but movie has some serious problems that can't be ignored. I don't blame the filmmakers intents, clearly a lot of work and heart went in the making of this movie; however, the characterization and storytelling are amateurish.

Beasts has three good things going for it: the score, performances, and the setting. The musical score is truly exceptional, and it might be my favorite of the year. A lot of the film's beauty and style comes from the excellent sound design and music. Much has been made of young Quvenzhané Wallis' performance and rightfully so. This is an incredibly strong performance for somebody so young. The rest of the actors are solid as well. The performances aren't showy but incredibly naturalist and convincing. The setting of the movie, a forgotten area of the southern bayou territory, is wonderfully realized and provides dozens of incredible shots.

Before I get into the problems with narrative, I have to mention the poor use of hand-held photography. I really do not understand where independent filmmakers got the idea that having shaky cam automatically makes their movie somehow more artsy, but Beasts is yet another movie that poorly utilizes the technique, though nothing here is as bad as in Melancholia. Handeld camera-work can work well in the hands of somebody who knows what they are doing -- check out Breaking Bad to see this style perfected. The setting of the film provides many awe-inspiring vistas and landscapes, but the camera can't stop moving long enough for the viewer to fully digest and admire the image, which is truly a shame.

The characterization in Beasts is the weakest area of the film. Though Hushpuppy is a wonderful character and perfectly portrayed by Wallis, the supporting cast isn't up to the same standard. First, I have to question the purpose of writing somebody so young as the main character. I suppose the goal was to see a harsh reality through the eyes of somebody young and innocent, but it is at odds with the movies message: one's culture and family are all important (I'm simplifying the main theme, but I don't want to get into a discussion of the movie's misguided attempt to criticize modern society and civilization, which is embarrassingly handled and even includes stock footage of glaciers breaking apart. Global warming!). However, Hushpuppy is too young to comprehend her own situation. She lives in crushing poverty, her father is an abusive drunk, and her friends and family put her own wellness at risk for the sake of preserving their cancerous lifestyle. The filmmakers want us to stand up and cheer at these people's will to fight the influence of modern society, but I can't help to look in horror as this child is abused and put in constant danger for no real reason. For this reason, any moral ambiguity is left out. Hushpuppy isn't old enough to question her situation. If she was capable to debating about whether to stay in her manner of living or move to a more modern culture and ultimately chose to stay, then the film would have supplied its character with a strong arc. However, Hushpuppy stays because she simply doesn't know any better. This is a problem because our main character is not capable to supplying any dramatic tension or conflict.

Every person in the community, aside from Hushpuppy, is one-dimensional and often an empty husk brought to life simply with southern stereotypes. I don't care about any of them, and I was hoping Hushpuppy could escape this life and find a place where her thoughtfulness and intelligence could be fostered. However, the filmmakers don't see how incredibly contradictory their own film is. Perhaps if this society's way of living was properly explored and the audience given a reason to understand why these people love their way of living so much, then we could sympathize with their plight.

Beasts of the Southern Wild feels like a mishmash of ideas handled better in other films. A young girl dealing with hardship through imagination was better realized in Pan's Labyrinth. A forgotten area of America where young people are trapped is a concept explored in the superior Winter's Bone, partly because that movie doesn't romanticize suffering and poverty, but portrays it in a honest and real way. As a celebration of the United States' unique Southern culture, Treme makes Beasts look like a high school research paper. I'm not saying that Beasts of the Southern Wild has to be the best at what it does, expectations that unreasonable will only lead to disappointment, but I do expect the filmmakers to delivery a story that is consistent with its thematic goals. Beasts fails in this, and the movie is hard to care about and the characters impossible to empathize with.

Life of Pi will undoubtedly receive much attention this award season, and it will appear on many top 10 lists. Some aspects of the movie are deserving of praise, other are not. The visuals in Life of Pi are consistently astounding, both from a technical and artistic level. Ang Lee and his crew do wonders with color, getting a lot of mileage out of the contrast between the white lifeboat against a crystalline blue ocean and the bright orange Bengal tiger. Whether viewed in 2D or 3D, Life of Pi absolutely pops off the screen. There are several scenes that show a level of majestic beauty that most that have to be seen to be believed. The cinematography is also creative, and it has to be. Much of the film takes place on a small lifeboat and Pi's makeshift raft, but this section rarely drags thanks to creative camera-work. The CGI is equally impressive. The shipwreck sequence may be the most stunning scene in any movie from 2012, and the computer generated animals are very convincing.

Unfortunately, the movie falters in its storytelling. The first problem is in the employment of a frame narrative, which is truly bizarre and unnecessary. The story is told in flashbacks as an adult Pi tells a writer his story, from his childhood to his experience stranded in the ocean. The way the story is told removes any tension from the plot, for the viewer already knows Pi survives and ends up living a normal life. More importantly, the scenes with Pi and the writer are incredibly dull and feel removed from the proper narrative thrust. Life of Pi would work much better as a straight narrative. It would be tighter -- about fifteen minutes could be removed, and the movie would lose nothing -- and Pi's story would feel more immediate and suspenseful.

This film also suffers from some pacing issues. The first act details Pi's childhood, and I did find this segment quite enjoyable. It served as a fine introduction to the main character and the film's visual style. Then we get to the incredible shipwreck segment and the story truly gets underway. All of the advertising will lead you to believe that Pi's time on the lifeboat is shared solely with the tiger, but before that Pi contends with a zebra, hyena, and an orangutan. This portion is rushed and we do not get to spend enough time with these animals before the tiger comes in. This is particularly problematic when the ending unfolds, for these animals serve an important purpose, but they feel ancillary instead of essential.

Speaking of the ending, Life of Pi's biggest issue lies in the final ten minutes, which are so catastrophically bad that the movie is rendered almost completely redundant. I did check that this review contains spoilers, but I won't go into details about the ending, so nobody accidentally stumbles upon them. I understand the movie is based on a book and the filmmakers wanted to follow the events therein. I have not read the novel, and I don't know how the author handled the "twist," but the film completely botches it. Almost everything that precedes the ending is retroactively ruined and made less significant, all in the favor of serving some thematic purpose. Life of Pi is not nearly as profound as it thinks it is. The message is poorly handled; for a movie that is so visually stunning, the storytelling is obsessed with telling the audience the message, symbolism, allegory, and themes. I left the movie insulted by the filmmakers, who think their audience would be too daft to understand their movie, so in the last ten minutes they drive home their point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.