Having spent many hours travelling on Emirates, I enjoyed the Oscar contenders for 2011 from the enlarged, newly minted flightscreens of an A380, lofted above Dubai deserts, and floating in and out of sleep.
The Social Network
A docu-fictionalization of Zuckerburg's overgrown startup from the lens of a screenplay that essentializes and amplifies the overwhelming, yet emotionally hollow, intersection of parties, of entitlement, of authority, of impossible girls that characterizes the brew of college culture and beyond - this movie, like its subject matter, flips and darts across space, across individuals and times, as each progressively alienates and becomes alienating, each, accounted for, registered and then discarded, as quickly and surely as modern life itself, moored between the emptiness of an evening office space and the dreamlife of a keyboard that fails to play and to express adolescent truth any longer. It drives forward, still repressed, and finally hangs nowhere. No; craft is salvation. I slept till the motion sickness pills wore off.
The King's Speech
This movie is well made. Its crucial opposition, among many others, to the Social Network, lay in its created representation of the moment as an infinite carrier of emotional significance, thereby universalizing the particular in a manner reversed to the Social Network, which found its universal subject in an easily referenced contemporaneity and therefore particularized accordingly; which effect is to primarily engage us in different ways, and to arouse different sets of responses, namely, envy as against pity.
Here, one is enfurled into the arms of a more comforting tradition, and of real relationships, unconditional and genuine - clearly, it is institutions that corrupt human natures. Emotional turmoil is nested in the security of moral certainties: an affair is a great violation where responsibilities are largely ceremonial. This fantastically comforting portrayal is justified by the customary right of historical event-based movies to appeal to antiquarian romanticisms. We are never made uncomfortable throughout this slightly patronizing, and thoroughly bourgeosie entertainment: quiet satisfaction, supported by a beautiful consistency, reigns.
Never Let Me Go
The main complaint against The Social Network is its antipoetical substitution of images with scripted wit. The main complaint against Never Let Me Go is its sentimental insistence on the pain and suffering of life through distorted images and cardboard characters. The obvious intent of creating a mood piece that culminates in the twin ejaculations of simple anger and a wash of tears; that is, moods as intense yet trivial as the perpetual scowl of Ruth, unanchors the script from a believable potrayal of the interiority of its characters as the point of departure from which to create depth, or dilemma, or any serious invitation to the viewer to address himself to the themes which Ishiguro sought to uncover. This movie, like the sense of barren waste it often evokes, feels like a letdown. One was led to suspect that the original was written by Jodi Picoult.
Carey Mulligan played Kathy H wonderfully, given her unfortunate script. The brilliant yearning eyes projecting from a sensously melancholic face conveyed less of the agility of technique than of the naturalism of self-expression.
True Grit review here.
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Movie Impressions
A set of vague impressions on the movies I have remembered watching this year:
True Grit
The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.
Le Notti Bianche
After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.
The Silence
What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.
True Grit
The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.
Le Notti Bianche
After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.
The Silence
What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
A Movie Review: Apocalypse Now
The movie begins with the plainness of unhindered experience. The quiet calm that insures our experience from the undercurrents of our inherent power and our will to power, our unseeing possession and uncontrollable control. Impossible stillness in the mind generates its own desire, despite the intimidating immensity of life; we assert our dominance over nature- and in doing so, invite nature over ourselves.
Movies aspire to explore this dynamics for artistic gain. The aesthetic capacity aroused in the act of self-contemplation- it feeds on our godlike ability to be both ourselves, immeasurably bound to bounded experience; and the product of our thoughts- a reverie of contemplation that trivialises the great external themes. This division is no mere dualism; it contains irreconcilable modes of meaning that can only be bridged by man in his act of experience, in his reactions, made in rawness and detachment, one at the same time. Impact and insight, thus, become the methods of art; they draw you in to give detached insight meaning. No movie I have seen wields such force of psychological impact, yet the beauties of tempting passion and detachment. Like life itself, it transcends it boundedness; it injects all meaning into it.
The technical brilliancy of the movie has been avouched for. Coppola himself acknowledged the ambitions of the project: it does not aspire to represent, but to be life itself. Few movies achieve the immediacy and importance of life experience; that it substitutes it completely in my viewing, and resonates in the quiet moments thereafter, is proof of the success of Coppola's execution of his first intent.
Part of its success rests in the perfection in scene after scene. They are nuanced yet exhilarating; it neither simplifies nor censors itself. Through its fidelity, it invites viewers to a truer experience. The screenplay and thematic progression achieves pacing and balance; the trail upriver is arduous, boring, frustrating, terrifying. Politics, civilization give way to jungle, jungle gives way to man. Psyche resides at the end of experience.
Of course, the inevitable descent into nature culminates in the truest discovery man has capacity to experience: that of insanity. Nature returns man into his failed state, the price and reckoning of being the nothing out of which he was born.
Nevertheless, this is arguably not the final conclusion of the film, as some critics choose to believe. Its climax lies not in man's conscious discovery of himself in all his rawness and experiential instincts and horror, for these are all subconsciously known, but in the conduct of man's totality; the synthesis of his domesticity and animalism, in the French plantation outpost, of progress.
Internal dialectics rip apart the arguments of the film. The unbearable rawness of combat unhinges breaking points, and forces men to ironic detachment. In an incomparable movie scene, LTC Bill Kilgore orders a massacre of villages and the VC played to music of Wagner. It beautifies destruction in its recoil from the horror of it, and murder becomes a matter of an aesthetic means to overcome guilt and terror. The surfboard and the crew filming death on the beach; men have snapped into their broken detached states; yet the rawness of horror consumes them. Men have no control over their fates, and they submit to death and death-making.
We condemn them, but in retrospect, they are but victims of themselves and their powerlessness in the setting of war. The primacy and invariable truth of the immoral man, who "kills without passion", absolves them. The final effect of the later arguments Col Kurtz expounded in self defence is to negate our compassion and horror at the killing- the film refutes itself in a dialectic between the first and second parts. Civilized moral outrage is made irrelevant when confronted with the inherently nihilistic construct of man; moral judgements guided by an understanding of consequence is submerged by the liquid primacy of the present. Col Kurtz's arguments achieve validity because they are raw, and rawness is truthfulness when translated from experience.
The scenes of the French stronghold, then, form the centre and climax of the film that unites the didactic elements together. Detachment and rawness, love and violence, union and hatred, come together in fleeting, fragile and romantic vision of truth. This truth isn't complete- it must lie in the edge of the realms of experience and meaning, rawness and detachment. Lovers must be vicarious, a projection of ancient yet personal desires; it must lie beyond a unspeakable curtain. The greatest insight in the film, sublimed into the truest experience, is spoken in a moment both of passion and detachment; sex is an incomplete form both of love and violence. Yet it is sustainable, good, and true. The scene is the uniquely precious counterpoint to the horror of the plot, of life. It rejects the combination of love and violence to create death, to generate possession and betrayal, to blow up the helicopter in place of a lost daughter with a grenade. It becomes a means to create life, and to realize the tragedy of man's creation as a product of opposing, incommensurable forces, that can only be dealt with by passion and understanding that knows yet asserts itself. The French scene contains references to all the other main scenes in the movie, as it contains the solutions, in a metaphoric stronghold, the final centre (to shore up our remains).
The movie closes with a final didactic; the opposition of the necessity of noble lies to the dangerous gain wrought by understanding of man's truths. This is Col Kurtz legacy: two forever competing solutions, to reconcile man's need for truth and his idea of a good life.
Movies aspire to explore this dynamics for artistic gain. The aesthetic capacity aroused in the act of self-contemplation- it feeds on our godlike ability to be both ourselves, immeasurably bound to bounded experience; and the product of our thoughts- a reverie of contemplation that trivialises the great external themes. This division is no mere dualism; it contains irreconcilable modes of meaning that can only be bridged by man in his act of experience, in his reactions, made in rawness and detachment, one at the same time. Impact and insight, thus, become the methods of art; they draw you in to give detached insight meaning. No movie I have seen wields such force of psychological impact, yet the beauties of tempting passion and detachment. Like life itself, it transcends it boundedness; it injects all meaning into it.
The technical brilliancy of the movie has been avouched for. Coppola himself acknowledged the ambitions of the project: it does not aspire to represent, but to be life itself. Few movies achieve the immediacy and importance of life experience; that it substitutes it completely in my viewing, and resonates in the quiet moments thereafter, is proof of the success of Coppola's execution of his first intent.
Part of its success rests in the perfection in scene after scene. They are nuanced yet exhilarating; it neither simplifies nor censors itself. Through its fidelity, it invites viewers to a truer experience. The screenplay and thematic progression achieves pacing and balance; the trail upriver is arduous, boring, frustrating, terrifying. Politics, civilization give way to jungle, jungle gives way to man. Psyche resides at the end of experience.
Of course, the inevitable descent into nature culminates in the truest discovery man has capacity to experience: that of insanity. Nature returns man into his failed state, the price and reckoning of being the nothing out of which he was born.
Nevertheless, this is arguably not the final conclusion of the film, as some critics choose to believe. Its climax lies not in man's conscious discovery of himself in all his rawness and experiential instincts and horror, for these are all subconsciously known, but in the conduct of man's totality; the synthesis of his domesticity and animalism, in the French plantation outpost, of progress.
Internal dialectics rip apart the arguments of the film. The unbearable rawness of combat unhinges breaking points, and forces men to ironic detachment. In an incomparable movie scene, LTC Bill Kilgore orders a massacre of villages and the VC played to music of Wagner. It beautifies destruction in its recoil from the horror of it, and murder becomes a matter of an aesthetic means to overcome guilt and terror. The surfboard and the crew filming death on the beach; men have snapped into their broken detached states; yet the rawness of horror consumes them. Men have no control over their fates, and they submit to death and death-making.
We condemn them, but in retrospect, they are but victims of themselves and their powerlessness in the setting of war. The primacy and invariable truth of the immoral man, who "kills without passion", absolves them. The final effect of the later arguments Col Kurtz expounded in self defence is to negate our compassion and horror at the killing- the film refutes itself in a dialectic between the first and second parts. Civilized moral outrage is made irrelevant when confronted with the inherently nihilistic construct of man; moral judgements guided by an understanding of consequence is submerged by the liquid primacy of the present. Col Kurtz's arguments achieve validity because they are raw, and rawness is truthfulness when translated from experience.
The scenes of the French stronghold, then, form the centre and climax of the film that unites the didactic elements together. Detachment and rawness, love and violence, union and hatred, come together in fleeting, fragile and romantic vision of truth. This truth isn't complete- it must lie in the edge of the realms of experience and meaning, rawness and detachment. Lovers must be vicarious, a projection of ancient yet personal desires; it must lie beyond a unspeakable curtain. The greatest insight in the film, sublimed into the truest experience, is spoken in a moment both of passion and detachment; sex is an incomplete form both of love and violence. Yet it is sustainable, good, and true. The scene is the uniquely precious counterpoint to the horror of the plot, of life. It rejects the combination of love and violence to create death, to generate possession and betrayal, to blow up the helicopter in place of a lost daughter with a grenade. It becomes a means to create life, and to realize the tragedy of man's creation as a product of opposing, incommensurable forces, that can only be dealt with by passion and understanding that knows yet asserts itself. The French scene contains references to all the other main scenes in the movie, as it contains the solutions, in a metaphoric stronghold, the final centre (to shore up our remains).
The movie closes with a final didactic; the opposition of the necessity of noble lies to the dangerous gain wrought by understanding of man's truths. This is Col Kurtz legacy: two forever competing solutions, to reconcile man's need for truth and his idea of a good life.
Friday, July 25, 2008
BATMAN!
Since everyone, everyone, everyone is blogging about how adverb-defyingly GOOD Batman the movie is, I would have pressured myself to differ. But, but, my blogger's honesty will not give in. Batman is a very good show. (I mean the Dark Knight.) (Spoilers ahead).
Good. Nolan is smart and savvy. Not completely, consistently so. His relative inexperience shows, I suppose, in the unnecessary audio dramaticisms in certain scenes. But there is no doubt that for someone who popularizes the dilemmas of ethics by making them an integral part of the understanding and enjoyment of the movie- from its own characters, to its implications for the audience, to the taunting means of engaging the audience itself, thereby in effect casting a mirror in its closeup shots of characters- there is little doubt that Nolan has read his canonical texts.
The movie's ethical and narrative approach is straightforward enough- we unanimously support and approve of Batman- this often in opposition to the people of Gotham City Therefore, politically placed as one of the hapless in Gotham but situationally privileged to obtain Batman's view of events, the movie can assert its points to its audience; cram out its insights in a clockwork manner.
For instance, the death of the woman as a turning point. It signals the irremediable shift from the personal to the political for Batman- he becomes the perfect political creature that the attorney Dent could never become. Dent needed a personal reward for political virtue which Batman was adept to living without. Therefore, the change in Dent. And the last straw for Batman; his 9/11 moment. Obviously, this in turn signals the shift from the focus of this superhero movie, and such movies perhaps in general, away from the personal issues of the hero to the political, and the universal, which the movie did, through the introduction of ethics, and personal/social order vs disorder.
If Batman had achieved an insight of social relevance, it could only have done so in such a fictional setting; through the beauty of superhero cinema that dispensed with the realisms of human abilities, leaving the viewer with few demands of conventional norms of human differentiation such as class. The fluidity and fragility of the upper class of Gotham is felt throughout in a way that cannot mirror the real world; this is possible due to the distortions in human ability assumed in the show. Without these fictions, the moral situations would have been difficult to imagine. The movie lends them both the weight and realism of real situations; rarely have real-world issues been made more pressing by a movie's analogies.
So. Now I suppose I know why Batman is a greater superhero than superman or spiderman.
Good. Nolan is smart and savvy. Not completely, consistently so. His relative inexperience shows, I suppose, in the unnecessary audio dramaticisms in certain scenes. But there is no doubt that for someone who popularizes the dilemmas of ethics by making them an integral part of the understanding and enjoyment of the movie- from its own characters, to its implications for the audience, to the taunting means of engaging the audience itself, thereby in effect casting a mirror in its closeup shots of characters- there is little doubt that Nolan has read his canonical texts.
The movie's ethical and narrative approach is straightforward enough- we unanimously support and approve of Batman- this often in opposition to the people of Gotham City Therefore, politically placed as one of the hapless in Gotham but situationally privileged to obtain Batman's view of events, the movie can assert its points to its audience; cram out its insights in a clockwork manner.
For instance, the death of the woman as a turning point. It signals the irremediable shift from the personal to the political for Batman- he becomes the perfect political creature that the attorney Dent could never become. Dent needed a personal reward for political virtue which Batman was adept to living without. Therefore, the change in Dent. And the last straw for Batman; his 9/11 moment. Obviously, this in turn signals the shift from the focus of this superhero movie, and such movies perhaps in general, away from the personal issues of the hero to the political, and the universal, which the movie did, through the introduction of ethics, and personal/social order vs disorder.
If Batman had achieved an insight of social relevance, it could only have done so in such a fictional setting; through the beauty of superhero cinema that dispensed with the realisms of human abilities, leaving the viewer with few demands of conventional norms of human differentiation such as class. The fluidity and fragility of the upper class of Gotham is felt throughout in a way that cannot mirror the real world; this is possible due to the distortions in human ability assumed in the show. Without these fictions, the moral situations would have been difficult to imagine. The movie lends them both the weight and realism of real situations; rarely have real-world issues been made more pressing by a movie's analogies.
So. Now I suppose I know why Batman is a greater superhero than superman or spiderman.
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