Change Your Image
randolphtaco
Reviews
Melancholia (2011)
Yeah no, whatever you've imbibed
It's hard to explain how awful this is without a raft of plot points, which would defeat the purpose of watching it anyway. It is cinematically often gorgeous and is fortunate to enjoy decent (or in the case of its main character, very good) acting, and together they get the extra star, but this is a weak, often unendurable because what?? movie. The slowness (though sometimes yeah too much) has nothing to do with it. The most plausible plot point does not in fact involve a person, and there are many, many plot points involving people. Also, the most plausible plot point isn't plausible either.
Suffice to say: it checks the disparate boxes of epic wedding story, mental illness story, and disaster story, and if any/all of those are your bag, enjoy suffering through it. They are separate stories for, this film proposes, very good reasons.
Dude needs to hire a writer and maybe an artistic-reality checker or two, and so do all his backers.
Bella (2006)
Danger danger
It's not about whether you can have the time back, it's about whether it can be unseen. It cannot.
A bathetic feast, featuring characters who aren't, story points that couldn't start a connect-the-dots, and a very healthy dose of Jesus. Deeply offensive to just a whole range of people connected to children, parents, abortion, adoption, and all the other things that sailed ahead of this writing/directing powerhouse in the name of Message.
If you stumble on this, run away. My one regret is that I have to give it an extra star.
Gregory's Girl (1980)
Huh
The soundtrack, the 80s-ness, the odd pacing are a total put-off out of the gate. At first it looks like it might be like 100s of movies since--stupid vehicles of storylessness built to sell tickets, or at least rentals, or at least late-night premium cable channel time slots.
Don't be misled--this just might be the most charming ugly-styled, lumpy-paced, horribly-scored movie you've ever seen. Tremendous frank, simple work from the cast. With a rare and extraordinary attention to the goofy, pointless detail, a.k.a., y'know, "life". There is plenty to overlook, I suppose, but it didn't demand a great effort to do so. Hats off to all involved.
Closer (2004)
Reversal!
I don't think it's a spoiler to say that you should expect every kind of reversal you can possibly expect out of a love story from this movie. After all, as playwright/screenwriter Patrick Marber "reveals" about 3 minutes into his 105-minute tale, there are only 2 options: s/he loves me, s/he loves me not. He then spends the next 102 minutes playing air hockey against himself, and our tolerance.
The problem here isn't a lack of feeling--oh no, no no. The sets, the acting, the camera-work, are slathered in, dripping with, feeling. Emotion! Drama! Problem is, the feeling is slapped on two-dimensional, implausible characters in situations having no *weight*: realer people make trickier decisions than these day in and year out, and without the arbitrary conveniences of writing. Closer tries to boil all that messy "life" stuff off, and winds up substituting three sudden! reversals for every possible, plausible one it might have turned into a story.
So, grating. By the end, very, very grating. But, but, but: a reason to see this movie *maybe*, especially if you're appropriately foregrated--and I don't wanna overhype this, but it's just true, far more true than anything Marber wrote here--Clive Owen, about 75% of the time the guy's on screen, just *destroys* it. As in, "acts". As in, yeah, THAT is real love.
L'esquive (2003)
Trapped
This movie is getting fresh exposure in France thanks to its win at Les Césars, or the "French Oscars" as other countries like to call them. Its success will probably mean that it now gets exposure outside the country, too, and I wonder how successfully.
Though an accurate and contemporary examination of France, the film's world is a foreign one, even to many people living here--the specificity of the setting (the projects, in a "suburb" of Paris), the language (rapid-fire, slangy, "vulgar", and peppered with "verlan", a street language of inverted syllables--the word itself could translate as "wardsback", and how anyone will translate this dialogue I have no idea), and the behavior (mostly arguing--strident, pushy, beautifully repetitive) may not play clearly outside of France. I'm not sure how clearly it plays here, or how willing people are to watch it, especially as it turns the idea of the scary bad French projects somewhat on its ear.
This isn't a criticism of the movie; on the contrary. Kechiche has shot a riveting cross-section of teenagers growing up in social housing, in broken homes and poverty, who lack the tools of expression, and who have adopted the posturing of the wounded (and, in the story, almost entirely absent) adults who raise them, attacking (the movie unfolds at a near-constant level of verbal aggression) and dodging ("esquiver" means "to dodge" or "to evade") one another's attacks with all they can muster.
The film's intensely political side feels almost accidental; in its unfolding, it has great heart, and its actors, who are apparently mostly amateurs from around the shooting location, are outstanding. On the whole, it reminded me a great deal of David Gordon Green's George Washington: a simple love story set against a landscape of poverty, played out frankly and honestly, allowed to unfold at a distinctly un-Hollywoodian rhythm. If Green's film is more beautiful cinematic ally, L'Esquive is more concentrated, more unflinching in its examination of the deep repercussions and violence of economic, social, and familial hardship. Its statement that France is no longer a country of the French-of-French-ancestry, and that its refusal to accept its own transformation does not mean its lost generation accepts its loss, could not be more clearly nor more poignantly made.
Without spoiling or going into detail, there are things about the plot that are implausible, things that probably hurt the film overall, but watching this movie for plot is like watching Ocean's Eleven for social insight. This is a positive study of character in a bad situation, of a stratum of society rarely filmed and still more rarely treated as fairly as it is offered up here, beautifully and eloquently.
Training Day (2001)
If only H-wood would have one...
Finally, a movie on par with Ethan Haawwkee's acting: abysmal. Not that the actors are necessarily to blame; sure, they're not really acting, but hey, no one bothered to write in the first place, and the lack of direction is dead on.
You wanna talk about what needs to come off the streets? Appallingly cliched garbage like this. Oscar time!
Negative three stars.
Elephant (2003)
The elephant in the living room
Once again I am drawn into commenting by some of the comments written below... First of all, the movie isn't a documentary, nor does it have documentary pretensions. Second, if its subject were not so widely publicized, and based on an event so widely publicized, many of the comments made here would have no basis. Of course, Van Sant is drawing on the same widespread familiarity, but that doesn't mean he's not working to tell his own story. Perhaps it is the Colorado school shooting's horror that keeps people from suspending their memory, or from separating fact from fiction, as the opening credits roll. It is not the film that is tipping its own hand; it is the press about the events or about the film itself (including the cursed hype-marker of the Palme d'Or) that people are carrying into the cinema.
For those of you willing to play along with the idea that an audience should let the film do the telling, rather than the press, there's a beautiful film to see here. It features the most sensitive camera work since George Washington, and is graced with enough quiet understatement to make the moral and psychological pressures on high school students leap out in all their maddening contradictions: the end of the world, within the corridors of high school itself, and just not that big a deal, if you can get outside of them (inside/outside the school is used very carefully in the film). The film's biggest motif is a kind of idle boredom--very much like the high school I remember anyway--and as boring as boredom is to watch, Van Sant makes no effort to dress it up; instead, he lets the pace of the film soak in slowly and simply.
I certainly cannot explain why Columbine happened; neither (and amidst the browbeating he admitted as much) could Michael Moore in his recent documentary--he kept asking what could explain the fact the U.S. is such a disproportionately violent country. Elephant offers no concrete answers, either, and indeed offers very little commentary, moral or psychological or intellectual or otherwise, on the unfolding event. But if the film is essentially an observer, it is a wishful, caring one, wanting the end we all know is coming not to come.
Before Sunrise (1995)
nothing to spoil
Pure, unadulterated spectating hell: plotless, over-sentimentalized, and one-dimensional, a tour de force of boredom, obviously deeply convinced of its own "insight", so let's throw pretentious in there for good measure.
I suspect that those responsible for this film's outsized rating on this site may also be held responsible for Ethan Hawwkee's status as a bestselling "writer".