My Best Friend is the sort of movie that should be flung in the face of every snot-nosed, self-important would-be (hyphen record!) cineaste. There's more wit, invention, and insight into human nature in one episode of Arrested Development... hell, in one episode of Scrubs... shoot, in one Alec Baldwin monologue for 30 Rock than in MBF's entire 94 minutes. Cheers had more funny before the first commercial break.
Now, not every example of foreign film has to be Manon of the Spring. Or The 400 Blows. Or even Pan's Labyrinth or Lives of Others. I dug District B-13, a French film which, in the words of Dan of the Moxie, "speaks the international language of blowing stuff up." Night Watch and Day Watch are just hysterical; if anyone can pack more energy into a foot of film than Timur Bekmambetov, please get them some Ritalin (maybe Adderol; Bekmambetov will make you crazy, baby).
No, my problem with MBF is not that it is insufficiently deep, or complex. It's just a dull, middle of the road comedy, with a stale premise and by-the-numbers execution. No, my problem is people like the guy in front of me who laughed uproariously at every here-it-comes punchline, then announced during the intermission that "Hollywood would never make a movie like this." Yeah, yeah they would. In fact, they have. Many times over. Usually starring some combination of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Jim Carrey and/or Matthew McConaughey. Subtitles don't redeem bad writing, and My Best Friend is nothing special.
Showing posts with label foreign film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign film. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Friday, August 3, 2007
Over The Top... Did You Say Over The Top?
Do not go see Day Watch if you are high. Let me repeat that.
DO NOT SEE DAY WATCH IF YOU ARE HIGH!!!!!
Don't smoke pot. Don't do mushrooms. Don't take Ecstasy.
Your head will explode and you will impair your appreciation of one of the most hallucinogenic visual experiences that the movies have offered in a long time. Timur Bekmambetov makes Guillermo del Toro look like Kevin Smith; he's never met a lighting set-up or camera move that he doesn't just love. You remember the good parts of What Dreams May Come? Not the part with the awful performances by Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr., but the parts that took place in the afterlife/otherworld, the gorgeous, trippy visions of color and light? Imagine over two hours of that in the service of a story that involves vampires, psychics, a war between Light and Dark, and a car pulling a bootlegger turn on the side of a building.
Forget any kind of plot summation. Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible. You need to remember three things:
1.) Dark Others
2.) Light Others
3.) The Chalk of Fate
Yeah, the Chalk of Fate. Day Watch is like Bubba Ho-Tep; watch it for five minutes and you're either in or you're out. If you're out, I don't think you can (or should) be convinced otherwise. If you're in, well, you're in, baby. For the record, I'm in. I'm waaaaaaaaaaay in.
Day Watch is 132 minutes of ocular excess. It's Matrix-by-way-of-Dostoevsky sensibility is a direct jolt to your monkey brain. For me, any attempt to engage in orthodox criticism of Bekmambetov's opus (the middle episode in a trilogy; the third volume will be called Twilight Watch) is short-circuited by the sheer head-rush of his palette. Did I like it? I was laughing like a fool as I left the theater. Will you love it? I don't know, but you should at least give it a try.
DO NOT SEE DAY WATCH IF YOU ARE HIGH!!!!!
Don't smoke pot. Don't do mushrooms. Don't take Ecstasy.
Your head will explode and you will impair your appreciation of one of the most hallucinogenic visual experiences that the movies have offered in a long time. Timur Bekmambetov makes Guillermo del Toro look like Kevin Smith; he's never met a lighting set-up or camera move that he doesn't just love. You remember the good parts of What Dreams May Come? Not the part with the awful performances by Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr., but the parts that took place in the afterlife/otherworld, the gorgeous, trippy visions of color and light? Imagine over two hours of that in the service of a story that involves vampires, psychics, a war between Light and Dark, and a car pulling a bootlegger turn on the side of a building.
Forget any kind of plot summation. Frankly, I'm not sure it's possible. You need to remember three things:
1.) Dark Others
2.) Light Others
3.) The Chalk of Fate
Yeah, the Chalk of Fate. Day Watch is like Bubba Ho-Tep; watch it for five minutes and you're either in or you're out. If you're out, I don't think you can (or should) be convinced otherwise. If you're in, well, you're in, baby. For the record, I'm in. I'm waaaaaaaaaaay in.
Day Watch is 132 minutes of ocular excess. It's Matrix-by-way-of-Dostoevsky sensibility is a direct jolt to your monkey brain. For me, any attempt to engage in orthodox criticism of Bekmambetov's opus (the middle episode in a trilogy; the third volume will be called Twilight Watch) is short-circuited by the sheer head-rush of his palette. Did I like it? I was laughing like a fool as I left the theater. Will you love it? I don't know, but you should at least give it a try.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Whiplash Cinema 1: When Irish Eyes Are Smilin'
I suffered from severe whiplash last week. I wasn't involved in a car accident or anything. No, I went to the movies. Twice. To see Shrek the Third and then The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Perhaps you now see why I'm dizzy and disoriented.
The original Shrek was a decent adaptation of a children's book by William Steig. Sure, the movie cleaned up Steigs's truly ugly ogre until he was just movie ugly, which is actually kinda cute. (It's the same standard that television uses when the terminally adorable Alyson Hannigan is given a bad haircut and we're supposed to believe that she's ugly, or that Sarah Michelle Gellar is an unattractive outcast ((sue me, I've been watching Buffy on DVD with my daughter))). The movie was a funny and mildly subversive take on fairy tales, almost like a family film for parents who loved The Princess Bride when they were dating or without child.
Shrek did very well at the box office, so it was written in the stars that Shrek II would come to be. Surprisingly, it did not come out as a crass grab for cash. It was a breezy, zippy trip that was elevated by the decision to treat the land of Far Far Away as an ur-Beverly Hills/Vegas. Antonio Banderas came aboard as Puss-n-Boots, a welcome counterweight to Eddie Murphy's braying ass... I mean, Donkey. The genuinely witty jokes blended rather well with the fart jokes and the whole enterprise was so well-cast and done with so much obvious affection that it was one of the better sequels in memory. It made piles of gelt. Would there be a third installment? Need you ask?
Shrek the Third does feel like a cash grab. It's not horrible. It doesn't blatantly insult the audience. It does lay there like a day-old fish, something once sleek and shiny, now cloudy and dull and starting to smell just a bit. The sense of enjoyable daftness that propelled the second movie is utterly absent. This is big-budget, lowest-common-denominator Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking at its most depressing--talented people doing a workmanlike job with zero inspiration or joy. C'mon, your movie involves a quest for the young King Arthur and you can't even making a frikkin' sword in the stone joke? The Third is a Shrek too far.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley on the other hand, is a movie that could never be a commercial hit. There are reasons for this. The theater where I saw it has an intermission in the middle of every film (it's a small indie theater and the owner has to change the reels by hand.). This is actually a nice chance to visit the snack bar and the bathroom and chat with other audience members. One fellow kept complaining that the film needed subtitles. He couldn't understand the Irish accents. So, the vast majority of the Deal or No Deal masses probably couldn't understand the actors. The film is also set in 1918 in Ireland. It doesn't explain what's going on; it assumes that you, by virture of your presence, either know something about "The Troubles" or that you'll be able to catch on. It's also unrelentingly intense and packed with passionate people taking opposing sides of a complex issue. Cillian Murphy, an actor both pretty and simian, and Padraic Delaney play the O'Donovan brothers and both actors are fantastic as they portray two characters who start out in very different places and travel the same path to arrive at two (tragically) altogether different endings.
The movie is directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. It is gorgeous; the beauty of the Irish countryside makes the violence and bitter anger that occurs even more heartbreaking. At the end of the day, The Wind That Shakes the Barley couldn't be a box-office smash because it has no hero and no real villain. It only has people; flawed, miserable, lovely people who want something noble and who do things both great and awful to achieve it.
The original Shrek was a decent adaptation of a children's book by William Steig. Sure, the movie cleaned up Steigs's truly ugly ogre until he was just movie ugly, which is actually kinda cute. (It's the same standard that television uses when the terminally adorable Alyson Hannigan is given a bad haircut and we're supposed to believe that she's ugly, or that Sarah Michelle Gellar is an unattractive outcast ((sue me, I've been watching Buffy on DVD with my daughter))). The movie was a funny and mildly subversive take on fairy tales, almost like a family film for parents who loved The Princess Bride when they were dating or without child.
Shrek did very well at the box office, so it was written in the stars that Shrek II would come to be. Surprisingly, it did not come out as a crass grab for cash. It was a breezy, zippy trip that was elevated by the decision to treat the land of Far Far Away as an ur-Beverly Hills/Vegas. Antonio Banderas came aboard as Puss-n-Boots, a welcome counterweight to Eddie Murphy's braying ass... I mean, Donkey. The genuinely witty jokes blended rather well with the fart jokes and the whole enterprise was so well-cast and done with so much obvious affection that it was one of the better sequels in memory. It made piles of gelt. Would there be a third installment? Need you ask?
Shrek the Third does feel like a cash grab. It's not horrible. It doesn't blatantly insult the audience. It does lay there like a day-old fish, something once sleek and shiny, now cloudy and dull and starting to smell just a bit. The sense of enjoyable daftness that propelled the second movie is utterly absent. This is big-budget, lowest-common-denominator Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking at its most depressing--talented people doing a workmanlike job with zero inspiration or joy. C'mon, your movie involves a quest for the young King Arthur and you can't even making a frikkin' sword in the stone joke? The Third is a Shrek too far.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley on the other hand, is a movie that could never be a commercial hit. There are reasons for this. The theater where I saw it has an intermission in the middle of every film (it's a small indie theater and the owner has to change the reels by hand.). This is actually a nice chance to visit the snack bar and the bathroom and chat with other audience members. One fellow kept complaining that the film needed subtitles. He couldn't understand the Irish accents. So, the vast majority of the Deal or No Deal masses probably couldn't understand the actors. The film is also set in 1918 in Ireland. It doesn't explain what's going on; it assumes that you, by virture of your presence, either know something about "The Troubles" or that you'll be able to catch on. It's also unrelentingly intense and packed with passionate people taking opposing sides of a complex issue. Cillian Murphy, an actor both pretty and simian, and Padraic Delaney play the O'Donovan brothers and both actors are fantastic as they portray two characters who start out in very different places and travel the same path to arrive at two (tragically) altogether different endings.
The movie is directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. It is gorgeous; the beauty of the Irish countryside makes the violence and bitter anger that occurs even more heartbreaking. At the end of the day, The Wind That Shakes the Barley couldn't be a box-office smash because it has no hero and no real villain. It only has people; flawed, miserable, lovely people who want something noble and who do things both great and awful to achieve it.
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