As I have long studied the art and craft of cinema I figured I could offer the service of movie reviews for my audience. After all almost everyone watches movies and most people form some opinions of their quality or at the very least entertainment value. With all of the proliferation of film criticism on the web I hardly figure my readers will be in need of any kind of full bodied write-ups of the movies I've seen. If you want a recommendation on whether or not you should see a film I encourage you to please go read serious critics like A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Peter Travers, Stephen Hunter, or Roger Ebert whenever he gets well enough to review movies again. I think a forum like the bloggosphere is much better suited to present their audience with more subtle or specific insights. This can be accomplished through detailed analysis, humorous critiques, specialized reviews, insider information, or simply new and exciting perspectives.
Since I lack any of those things I have decided to limit my film reviews to only a few notes about each film that I think no one else has mentioned. I want to provide the little globules of my thoughts and reactions to the film that you can have fun with, take with you into your own conversations, and use at your convenience without having to wrestle with all those bulk paragraphs and multi-star ratings that make other movie reviews too cumbersome for the average film buff. It's all the thoughtful insight someone trained in film can bring to the conversation but in a condensed form. Consider them the bite sized version of a movie review. Much like the bite sized versions of candy bars they give you most of the pleasure of their full sized cousins with less of the empty calories/column inches.
(ed. I have been notified by the fine legal department at M&M Mars that they prefer I use the term fun sized when referring to their smaller candies. Also they would like it if I used the term "livin' large" in stead of obesity and "lazy liar's disease" instead of diabetes.)
I don't know if it's a great idea, but I do think it's something relatively new to the net. After all if I can't be the best film critic, I can at least try to be original.
My Film Reviews for 2006
Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan-
- First, how well can you remember the full title of this movie. It might be a fun game to break out at your Oscar parties to see if people can recite the complete title, and make them pay some kind of penalty for every word they screw up (in theory you could make some one do twelve shots on that challenge alone, so be reasonable when assessing penalties). I feel like Oscar parties need more crazy games.
- As part of Sacha Baron Cohen's method for portraying the character of Borat, he reportedly spent almost all of his waking hours acting like the character with the cameras rolling. As my younger brother rightly pointed out, this would mean there are hundreds of hours of footage of him doing tons of things as Borat which we never saw. This lead me to ask two questions. In all of that footage, how many times do you think he broke character because he just couldn't keep a straight face anymore? Then how many times do you think some American he was trying to befuddle recognized him? I'm setting the respective over/unders at 0.5 and 11.
- One of the major debates this film has sparked is where the infamous scene of Borat and his producer fight au naturale ranks on the list of Funniest Scenes of Full Frontal Male Nudity. I would rank it second after Paul Giamatti's harrowing escape near the end of Sideways and above Graham Chapman's unwitting public exposure in The Life of Brian. Harvey Keitel's infamous scene in Bad Lieutenant would rank somewhere around 212th; there wasn't anything funny about that scene. When you include Daniel Auteuil baring it all in Cache, we seem to have reached a golden age for hilarious male nudity.
- A long beloved, iconic character was in desperate need of a new direction. The stories had become lazy and the hero had started to verge into self-parody. He had become too tied to his trademarks by decades of overuse, so now they seemed cliché and goofy. By deconstructing the character to his fundamental elements, abandoning all of the retched excess of the past several stories, and resetting the story to a point in history where you could reestablish a more realistic backstory, and start building a new more plausible and understandable set of stories and motivations for the protagonist. A totally brilliant and original move back when it was called Batman: Year One. I just wish some critic had noticed that James Bond was just getting pretty much the same treatment that superheroes were getting in comic books back in the 1980's and '90's. I guess that would have been too hard as it would have required someone to acknowledge that comic books came up with a useful literary idea at some point. We couldn't let funny books get any respect though, could we?
- On the upside this (actually very well done) film gave us the hope that future installments might polish up other aspects of the bond franchise. I would love to see some of the underlying elements that suggest a larger, sinister organization at work to be expanded into a more feasible version of SPECTRE. A character of Jame Bond's caliber merits truly terrifying and fascinating nemeses not just cartoonish super-villains. I sincerely hope that this new and improved bond eventually meets his match in a new and improve Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Blofeld, for those who don't remember was a major recurring villain in the Bond franchise, whose appearance inspired Dr. Evil of the Austin Powers films. However no Bond film to portray him ever truly presents him as a serious or credible threat. Most of the actors to have played him went over the top and turned in hammy performances. Here's hoping we see a very real and very frightening version of Blofeld soon.
The Departed-
- There seems to be a new trend in Hollywood to use Boston as the go to city for any kind of gritty drama. This comes after decades of New York being the undisputed capital for gritty drama in America. In the last several years we've had The Practice, Crossing Jordan, Boston Public, Mystic River, Little Children, and now The Departed. Almost all of these movies could have been set in New York with minor rewrites, yet somehow the creators seem to find something more palatable or more compelling about Bean Town. I doubt it can all be attributed to America's brief love affair with the Red Sox, so I've been trying to determine what other reasons there could be. To some degree I think film makers like to play off the common perception of Boston having a more homogeneous Catholic culture for all the white characters and a richer history of racial tension. Largely though I attribute the recent migration of the grim and gritty to Boston to the long term effects of Giuliani's clean up of the city. New York just doesn't work as a dark and depressing city anymore, it's too tourist friendly, too commercial, too corporate. Now if you want to set a movie in an East Coast metropolis with lots of interesting ethnic neighborhoods, organized crime, funny accents and cold weather your pretty much stuck with Boston. What are your alternatives? There are too many fat people in Chicago to ever work as the setting of a Hollywood movie. Baltimore has been forever marked by John Waters (heck, The Wire is supposed to be the best cop drama ever, yet it's still struggling to stay afloat on HBO). The Sopranos only works in New Jersey because of all the tongue-in-cheek jokes they get away with at Jersey's expense. Philly might have worked if the word Philadelphia wasn't permanently tied to Tom Hanks dying of AIDS for two generations of movie-goers and if Rocky Balboa hadn't reminded everyone of how depressing the sports scene in the city has actually been. Really we're pretty much stuck with Boston being the peak of the cultural ziggurat and all the Bill Simmons smugness that entails until Providence can get its act together and start producing better dramas than Brotherhood.
- Martin Scorsese has reached an interesting point in his career. Now that he's made so many different movies of so many different genres and so many different settings and worked with so many different themes and styles and actors that now he seems to have mastered every possible storytelling technique and every possible movie making trick. The analogy I've been using is that Scorsese is now like a master chef who has incorporated all the different elements of world cuisine into his oeuvre. Anytime you eat a meal prepared by someone like that it can fill you with the hazy memories of all the most wonderful and most exotic food you've ever had. In the same way it seems like The Departed kept reminded me of other movies from other genres and other times. In the hands of moss directors this would be a confused and muddled mess. It speaks to the artistic brilliance of Scorsese that he not only makes them work together with incredible film craft but he makes all these diverse elements create a single flavor that's rich and satisfying like a well made meal.
The Illusionist-
- We all have had this cinematic experience at least once before in our film-going lives: sitting in the theater, seriously digging the movie playing on screen, making generally complimentary comments to those around us when suddenly the film does something strange to totally botch the viewing experience, in the end you're wandering out of the theater having truly enjoyed 80% of the movie and truly despised 20% and trying to decide what your final opinion of the film actually is. I call these "toss-up" movies because whether you ultimately like or dislike the picture is a toss-up on how well you can tolerate the bad 20% for the sake of the good 80%. I always feel like Jerry Seinfeld on a date with these kinds of movies. You know they're overall pretty good. You feel petty for letting something relatively minor bother you so much. Yet you just can't look over such a glaring flaw in forming your overall assessment. Needless to say, The Illusionist was one of those movies to me. I thought the actors, cinematographer, and art direction people all did great jobs. Then near the end the writer and director got too clever for their own good, and my opinion of the whole movie suffered as a result.
- Philip Glass contributed the score for this film. I have become much more familiar with his film work of late and I have to say I'm of two minds.I found his score for absolutely The Fog of War marvelous, and I think it may have been my favorite score since Thomas Newman's work on American Beauty. However I could immediately recognize the music in The Illusionist as Glass's work because it was so similar to his other scores. Individually any of his film scores works very well. Collectively they all seem to similar and derivative of each other. I still haven't settled how I feel about this.
1 comment:
so... it's been told you have multiple fan clubs on the website known as face book. can you elaborate?
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