tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9658828206055084562024-03-04T22:06:57.674-06:00Screen VistasLoren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.comBlogger151125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-47745969906984066142015-05-21T19:43:00.000-05:002015-05-22T09:31:43.326-05:00MAD MAX: FURY ROAD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i> is one bold film. It's directed, like all <i>Max</i> films, by George Miller, who starts with a simple, audacious hook — the entire film is one extended chase sequence — then somehow manages to build it up into a surprisingly complex piece of storytelling and comes out with a masterpiece of boom. A mad, surrealist cavalcade of rock and roll carnage aiming a fat middle finger at every big budget faux-action epic of the last decade.<br />
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That hook would kill many other directors who don't know how to handle the pacing, but Miller knows how to rev-up and downshift carefully, mostly moving too fast to get bogged down in the kind of extended exposition dumps that often kill intricate fantasy worlds before they get out of the gate. Instead Miller, who radically reinvents the <i>Mad Max</i> universe with every new installment, has the confidence to throw us into the deep end after a <i>brief</i> grounding voice over reminding us that the Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic world and Max (Tom Hardy) is its Man With No Name, before we're off and running, watching Max get chased down and imprisoned by a band of mutant freaks called the War Boys.<br />
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But despite being the title character, Max has always been more of an inciting incident than a full-tilt protagonist. The film's real hero is the awesomely named Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a worn-out one armed courier for irradiated despot Immortan Joe. Furiosa quickly goes rogue, speeding away from the citadel in a Hail Mary caper to smuggle Joe's five sex slaves to safety in her War Rig. Joe gets wind of this and goes after her with his entire of war boys, among whom is a joyously enthusiastic soldier named Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who brings Max along for horrifying reasons I'll leave you to discover.<br />
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A few bits of business and some shifting alliances aside, that's really about it in terms of plot. The film is focuses on pure kinetic action. Miller throws us into the middle of lightning tornado, BMX bombers, buzzsaw trucks saboteurs and chainsaw jugglers. The hyper-fast quick rhythm borders on abstraction at times, but never loses an ounce of cohesion or clarity. Miller and Cinematographer John Seale (<i>The English Patient</i>) often frame multiple things at once. Consider the moment where Furiosa is firing a gun off camera when behind her, a motorcycle jumps into frame and she turns and shoots the driver in mid-air. The film has a dynamic sense of balletic movement and timing that at once feels grounded and also recalls the kinetic motion of a Chuck Jones short. It's an understatement to just say that the action is clear, it has style, showmanship and a lot of daring in its superb stunt work. It's not just that the film has explosions – many films have explosions – it's that this film has some of the greatest explosions ever detonated, and it has a lot of them.<br />
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While all the booming unfolds, the world is being impressively built up the background. Miller has long had a talent for comic-book sensationalism that is also telling detail work. With the aid of an unlimited budget, and comic artist Brendan McCarthy as a "co-writer," the world of the Wasteland has never felt more fleshed out. The film rarely pauses for exposition, or dialogue of any kind, but it tells us a lot to see how Joe brainwashes people while controlling access to vehicles by distributing steering wheels at a religious alter. It tells us something about Furiosa when we notice the brand on her neck and the wrench on her robot arm. When Joe calls for reinforcements from neighboring fiefdoms, we get a sense at the power structure of the world. Joe himself is played with epic relish by Hugh Keays-Byrne cutting an imposing figure with a mask made from a human jawbone and if there was any doubt that Miller means to depict him as a symbol for corrupt patriarchy, showing us his pale, tumorous torso being clad in translucent vacuform muscles should settle it. <br />
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The film's handling of its sexual politics are quite refreshing. Furiosa is a kick ass character who more than steals the show, and alows the film to avoid the tired 'damsel' trope. It's a minor disappointment that the wives (Rose Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton) aren't fleshed out just a bit more as individuals, but as a group, they're quite compelling as a group of emotionally damaged abuse survivors, trying to work together to escape, while having doubts about the agency they've just claimed for themselves. Too many action films deal with sexual violence as something that happens to women's bodies to motivate a man to fight back. But in the midst of all its mayhem, Miller actually engages with this issue in a genuine way.<br />
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This progressiveness isn't new for the series: <i>Road Warrior</i> used mankind's dependence on oil as pointed subtext. <i>Fury </i>goes further, not just substituting oil for sex-slavery and human trafficking but also water and all the things that come with it. Miller's Wasteland has expanded to show us a world where everything we take for granted is commodified by dictators to make people into slaves. The film isn't subtle about this (Joe refers to his water as Aqua-Cola) but Miller and his writers do all this in passing, and are thankfully never interested in preaching. It allows us to keep our attention on what we came to see – the 10,000 righteous, brain scrambling explosions the film delivers. <br />
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<i>Fury Road </i>is a blast, the kind of masterclass of visceral filmmaking that doesn't come along very often. Elements of this film will be imitated for years, and I suspect that its iconography will seep into the public consciousness much in the same way that <i>Road Warrior </i>did. Miller has said that he would like to make more films in the series but I wonder if the very things that made this film work so well may also make it unique. Miller is a master, but a series of delays going back 15 years allowed him and his collaborators to carefully craft every small element of the films world. At any rate, it's certainly one Hell of springboard.<br />
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Grade: A<br />
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<i>Note: The film is availible in post-converted 3D.</i> <i>The quality of the conversion is adequate but the effect is minimal. See it in bright, clear 2D.</i></div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-51884720823567630882014-08-26T19:58:00.000-05:002014-08-26T19:58:49.804-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at <a href="http://thefilmtemple.blogspot.com/">The Film Temple</a> to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Loren Greenblatt: </b>At the time,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Life Aquatic </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Darjeeling Limited</i> left some people feeling that Wes Anderson was getting too caught up in his style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He did little to assuage those anxieties with his follow up:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a stop-motion film, a form that, quite literally, gives him control over every hair of his mise-en sene.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max O’Connell</b>: Some already thought his films were cartoons – A.O. Scott seemed to dance around that idea in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums </i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9504E5DD163CF936A35753C1A9679C8B63">review</a>, whereas those arguments become more common around <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Darjeeling Limited. </i>So, he did what anyone might do to counteract those arguments: he made a literal cartoon! And yet it’s become one of his most embraced films, well reviewed even if it didn’t do well at the box office, and a lot of people saw it as a return to form after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Darjeeling </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Aquatic </i>split a lot of people. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>What else is interesting about the film is that Anderson doubles down on the storybook aspect. Like many Anderson films, it starts out with a book (the original Roald Dahl book), with an illustration of Mr. Fox, or “Foxy,” (Clooney) only to cut into a glorious sunset as Foxy listens to “Davey Crockett,” a spectacular myth-making song. Yeah, we’re in a fable all right!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And part of what makes it such a wonderful fable is that it’s dealing with an antiquated style. 2D animation is becoming less popular as 3D animation boomed, and stop-motion has been almost completely phased out. Not too many people other than Laika and Tim Burton still do it. Which is a shame because it fits people like Wes perfectly, because while it’s not as fluid as, say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Up,</i> that’s kind of the point. It has this wonderful warmth, this handmade quality. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">looks</i> like something out of a storybook.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>They animated the frames a little slower than they normally would have so we see the seams, too. There’s a sense of the thingness of things: you can clearly see that all of the smoke, for example, is made of little cotton balls and it’s adorable! And he’s adapting his overtly whimsical style that he used for adult stories to carry over to children’s films, which he’ll do again in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moonrise Kingdom.</i></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I think while there’s still some darkness and edge to both films, but it’s no secret that he’s let up on tone a lot here, this is by far his lightest film. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Part of why it’s so wonderful is that it does maintain a bit of an edge, which is important. It’s something both Anderson and Dahl understood: children’s movies without any real conflict or sense of danger are really dull. Here, we get some of the Dahl macabre jokes. Fox gets his tail shot off, and it’s worn as a necktie by the main villain, Bean (Michael Gambon).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And the hero actually kills someone, a rat played by Willem Dafoe. There’s not a lot of modern kids movies that have a death scene at this point, the kind of old-fashioned fairytale thing that a lot of recent kids movies have moved away from.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Anderson also lifts from film history. One of the big influences that struck me on this viewing is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raising Arizona. </i>H.I. McDonagh and Foxy are both characters who give up a life of crime so they can raise a family, only to regress for their own reasons. Their animal instincts or criminal natures are still there, and both films are about putting those impulses behind you for the sake of growing up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I can see it. I’d also connect the film to traditions by Dahl, though, where family life is never ideal. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</i>, they’re all good people, but they struggle in poverty. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Matilda, </i>it’s an unloving home. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fox, </i>the father’s kind of a cad (as George Clooney characters tend to be), and he’s a classic Wes Anderson bad dad. He’s not Royal Tenenbaum, but he’s not always the best father to Ash (Jason Schwartzman).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He likes to give people false options to validate himself. From the first scene, he’s constantly intimidating people into going his way as a way to make them like him. It doesn’t always work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>In Wes Anderson’s films, characters try to have an impossible level of control over their lives. Fox does that in an interesting way by trying to inject more spontaneity in his life rather than letting himself be controlled. He’s a wild animal, and he doesn’t want to give up that. He doesn’t want to be stuck in the doldrums, he wants to “steal squabs on the side.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He positions himself in ways where he’s almost <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trying </i>to get into trouble, trying to inject spontaneity into his life where it might mess him up, and that kind of fits with what Wes is trying to do with animation and with his own style. There’s a sense of spontaneity here that’s rare in animation and I think it has a lot to do with the way the dialogue was recorded. In most animated films, actors record their dialogue separately in closed off sound booths, which is no way to act. Anderson was novel, recording his actors together, in physical locations mirroring those in the film. There’s a trade off sometimes in the technical quality of the recordings, but at the same time the technique adds life to the performances that might not be there otherwise. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah, the cast is wonderful. I’ve been on the record as being a semi-contrarian on Streep, in the sense that I think she’s frequently praised for performances that are well below par for her (*cough*<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doubt</i>*cough cough*<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i>). Here’s a performance that’s actually underrated: she’s as warm and empathetic here in a way that she doesn’t always get to be, a companion character to Anjelica Huston’s mother figure in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It helps that she’s picking better material and working with a great director for a change, instead of the auteur of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mamma Mia!</i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>But while we’re talking about that new spontaneity, we shouldn’t undervalue how his films always the offbeat little character bits that stand out amidst the tight control over everything. What’s one of your favorite bits of side-whimsy here? Mine’s “Petey’s Song,” that wonderful Jarvis Cocker, playing the villain’s assistant, Petey, makes up a song that brings us up to speed but uses made-up words that displease the villain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> “You can’t just make up words! That’s bad songwriting! Bad job, Petey!” The look on Petey’s face makes me feel that that this putdown is almost as big an act of villainy as Bean shooting off Foxy’s tail.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Him making up a song on the fly infuriates a villain who’s one of Wes’s classic control freaks. Or maybe I’d go with the choice to have the characters say “cuss” instead of cursing, which hits its peak in that great little scene where Foxy and Badger (Bill Murray), his accountant, getting into a loud, wild animal argument.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Yeah, there’s an interesting tension there, where they’re both anthropomorphized and animalistic at the same time. For me, I love Whack-Bat, with the ridiculously complex rules that remind me of Fizzbin from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek.</i> There’s this whole thing where Ash really wants to be the best Whack-Bat player like his dad, but he’s not an athlete. He’s trying to be his dad in a lot of ways, the mischief side especially, but he can’t really live up to it, so he’s inevitably going to go through sulky teenager phases. That’s only made worse by the arrival by his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, Wes’s brother), who’s very athletic and gains Foxy’s approval over his own son.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>This movie, like no Wes Anderson movie since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore </i>recognizes that kids can be cruel, too. It’s telling that Ash is played by Max Fischer himself. He doesn’t treat his cousin very well. Kristofferson is almost impossibly unassuming, even with all of his talent. He’s just a nice, calm kid trying to make the best of a situation where his father is deathly ill and he has to live with a bunch of relatives that he’s never met. Foxy takes to him right away, but Ash is needlessly cruel to him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> We understand where that frustration comes: he’s jealous because of how his father takes to Kristofferson. But he can be cruel, yes. There’s a nice moment where Kristofferson wants to sleep in a less cramped position than under Ash’s bed, and Ash refuses. Kristofferson starts to cry, and Ash reluctantly realizes he’s being a dick and turns on his train set. There’s a moment of brief connection before more rivalry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: “</b>More rivalry” emphasized. He’s still awful to Kristofferson, even after he stands up for Ash when he’s being bullied.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Every kid goes through a period where they’re dicks. It doesn’t help that he’s seen as “different.” It’s never mentioned that he’s dressed as a superhero with a little white cape and bandit hat. He’s that kid who’s a super-nerd and doesn’t understand why people don’t like him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He’s a strange little guy who’s trying to blend in and be something he’s not, much like Max Fischer. He wants to be an athlete and push down everything that’s unique about him, just like Max wanted to hide his working class roots.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Though I’d stress that the pain isn’t as deeply felt here as it is in Anderson’s previous films, or even in another great children’s film from that year, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Where the Wild Things Are</i>, which has a similar theme running through it (and which we both love far more than the rest of the world). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It makes sense that it is lighter, because he is making a children’s film. My minor complaints on this front is less that he’s treading lightly and more that there are times where I feel he spells something out a bit too much for kids or parents, as if he’s trusting them less. There’s a moment where Foxy says aloud to Felicity, “I need everyone to feel I’m the greatest.” We know his problems. We don’t need it restated. More notably is right after the rat, in his dying breath, gives them some information to help find Kristofferson, they say aloud something to the effect of, “He redeemed himself.” It’s already demonstrated beautifully in the scene before, so we don’t really need to be told, and I don’t think the kids need to be told either. Kids are smart. They’ll get it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Yeah, though I do love the line about him being “just another rat found in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.” It was a problem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Darjeeling Limited</i> too, what with the “you’ve still got some healing left” moment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah, clonk. These aren’t as bad as that, they’re minor things. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I can see Anderson and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach feeling out to what degree they can be themselves in this film in certain scenes, but at its best it’s wonderfully idiosyncratic in the best Wes Anderson-y way. In the opening scene, Felicity and Foxy break the chicken roost in a large simulated tracking shot set to “Heroes and Villains.” That’s just such a joyful moment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It is. We talk about Anderson’s great use of music in all of his films, and this is no exception. You mentioned “Heroes and Villains,” I’ll mention the other Beach Boys song used, their version of “Old Man River,” which is so gentle compared to the more raucous song they use earlier. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The only bit of music that doesn’t quite work for me is the use of “Street Fighting Man.” It’s in a great sequence, but I don’t think the song quite fits.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I’m on the edge for that one as well, maybe just because I want him to use another left-of-center choice like “I Am Waiting” or “She Smiled Sweetly” or “Play With Fire” instead of a big hit. But I agree, thematically it doesn’t fit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Then again, I don’t know how “Heroes and Villains” fits thematically, but it’s perfect for the feeling. It’s his first film with Alexandre Desplat doing the score, as well, which gives it a wonderful rustic feel that separates it from his Mark Mothersbaugh collaborations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Desplat does his best work with Anderson. It’s not just a wonderful, whimsical nursery rhyme thing to it, but it also reminds me of the kind of stuff that Georges Delarue would have done for Truffaut in the 60s and 70s (Wes does use a Delarue song at a key point in the film), a bit like the jaunty score for “A Gorgeous Kid Like Me,” which Baumbach later used himself in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frances Ha.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>They both have this warm, loving, inviting style, which is something I love about what Anderson takes from Truffaut. They both love playing with film history in a warm, affectionate way, rather than the playful but cold way Godard does.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Some of the references are a real delight. There’s a scene where Boggis, Bunch and Bean meet up and Bean is framed in the dark almost like Vito Corleone, plotting the death of another man (er, animal). And Bean’s freak out tearing apart a room is a nice, funny reference to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen Kane</i>, where he’s reimaging a life-crushing moment from that film as a petty moment in Bean’s life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That scene in the dark reminded me of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Once Upon a Time in the West </i>where Harmonica’s waiting out in the dark, being shot at.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>That’s an interesting comparison, too, because there are more overt Leone throwbacks, as in some of the eye-framing standoff moments. It’s a much smaller scaled film, but he’s trying to give it that same kind of epic conflict. There’s also the bit of the score where Foxy confronts a wolf and the score plays like Ennio Morricone. Though, honestly, I never really got why that scene was there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG</b>: Well, it’s his pure animal nature physically embodied. It’s completely without borders. It’s dangerous. It goes back to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raising Arizona </i>comparison I made, with the wolf in the place of the biker. It’s also a bit of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jeremiah Johnson</i> reference, where Redford sees his opposite in the distance and they acknowledge the power they have over each other before passing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>That makes a bit more sense, though I still wish they played with it a bit more. Then again, I complained about him being too on-the-nose earlier, so maybe I just don’t know what the hell I’m looking for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I really love the ending of the film. You complained that the action sequences in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou </i>were clumsy, but he does a pretty wonderful job here. It helps that he can control everything in the frame. The go-for-broke rescue scene is wonderful. They have to race through town, hiding behind crates as they’re being shot at, and Anderson really uses the stillness of stop-motion to his advantage to emphasize motion. The ending, though, after they’ve lost everything, they find a way to live outside of their nature and find a way to survive by taking from this supermarket. They’ve found a civilized world to be a part of, even if the lighting is fluorescent and awful and the linoleum floor doesn’t feel great on their feet, but they have each other to get through it. Of all the Wes Anderson films, this film more than any other stresses community. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I wouldn’t say more than any other, since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moonrise Kingdom</i> expands upon that, but it does more than any other Anderson film before it. We have all of these wonderful side characters (Murray’s Badger, Wally Wolodarsky’s spiral-eyed opossum Kylie) that Fox constantly talks over. There are two important toasts in the film: in the first, Fox interrupts Badger’s toast and makes it about himself. In the second, it’s more about everyone. It’s about sticking together and surviving, about creating a giant family and being about more than just yourself. It’s another cautiously optimistic ending, as it was in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>, because it’s not going to be easy for them, but they can get through it together. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Everything that happens is Fox’s fault, and it’s about him learning to get over his own selfishness. We love Clooney, as he’s a wonderful rascal, but watching him grow is all the more satisfying. And then we get that last song, Bobby Fuller Four’s “Let Her Dance.” It’s a song about infidelity and breakup, but it’s such an upbeat song. It’s like “Ooh La La” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>. There’s a sly attention to a mix between happiness and sadness that makes the ending work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max’s Grade: </b>A-</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That
concludes our discussion of Fantastic Mr. Fox if you agreed or disagreed,
feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas
on Facebook by clicking <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GBlattsDreams/">here</a><b>.</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/02/wes-anderson-roundtable-bottle-rocket.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-rushmore.html">Rushmore</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-royal-tenenbaums.html">The Royal Tenenbaums </a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/04/wes-anderson-roundtable-life-aquatic.html">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html">
Hotel </a></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chevalier</span> / Darjeeling Limited</a><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> <br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-13939488381113751752014-07-21T21:41:00.001-05:002014-07-21T21:50:20.379-05:00SNOWPIERCER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Bong Joon-Ho is proving to be a director of considerable range. Since his breakthrough film <i>Memories of Murder</i>, he's ping ponged between somber procedurals and inspired popcorn fair. This apparent bipolar mindset is evident in the films themselves, all featuring broad slapstick humor, political undercurrents of varying subtlety and dark brutality, often in rapid succession. His latest film, <i>Snowpiercer</i>, loosely adapted from the French comic of the same name, aims itself squarely towards blockbuster crowds, skillfully combining the relentless action of George Miller's <i>Road Warrior</i> and the broad societal statements we might expect in a Fritz Lang film.<br />
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It's 2031 and mankind has inadvertently frozen the planet trying to solve global warming. The last remnants of humanity survive in the massive, titular train which endlessly circles the globe once per year. In such post-apocalyptic worlds, repressive social orders often assert themselves. Here the rich live luxuriously at the front while the poor live in horrific squalor at the back. The film follows Curtis (Chris Evans) as he tries to engineer a car by car takeover with his fellow caboose dwellers.<br />
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On the surface that hook might appear cloyingly simplistic, and would be in the wrong hands. It's easy to watch the trailer and recall last years insultingly dumb sci-fi allegory <a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/09/elysium.html"><i>Elysium</i></a>. But Bong and screenwriter Kelly Masterson (<i>Before The Devil Knows You're Dead</i>) make the goofiness work by rendering the world with countless bold, imaginative strokes that are often as mysterious as they are revealing. Take the strange, black cubes our heroes are forced to eat, or how the guards take people away based on maddeningly bizarre criteria, sometimes asking for trained violinists but more often for children of very specific heights.<br />
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Then there are the characters. it's a large ensemble, so some sadly remain generic archetypes (albeit all gamely played), but many are made memorable with wonderful little quirks. There's the kindly mentor Gilliam (John Hurt) who for reasons revealed late in the film is a limbless torso making due with improvised hooks and canes. An artist who draws propaganda for the poor and Bong regular Song Kang-Ho awesomes things up as a security expert addicted to a drug made from industrial waste. The film's greatest performance though undoubtedly belongs to Tilda Swinton as Mason, a blood thirsty Thatcher surrogate who has a heated, possibly religious fervor for the train and its 'sacred engine' and is taken gleeful condemnations of Curtis's incursion: "Precisely 74% of you will die!" she cries while watching a fight through opera glasses.<br />
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Indeed, while the rebellion initially proceeds with the clean precision of a heist, it soon becomes a battle of blunt force and attrition. Bong has always had a dexterous sense of blocking which he puts to good use on the film's inventive action beats. The best of which takes place entirely in a single car but but goes through six distinct phases including near derailment of the train, tunnels and even finds time for Bong to homage the famous hallway fight from <i>Oldboy</i>. So much action gets tiring because it only attempts one note. Bong's action succeeds by never doing the same thing twice, unafraid to suddenly upend things, furiously determined to milk every possible train related gag.<br />
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But the train isn't merely a place for cool fights, Bong's attempts at political subtext may end up being a bit literal, but it spawns some jaw dropping production design in the train. Each car serving a different purpose and is its own self contained world able to ignore those around it. Indeed one of the most unnerving details of the film is how the aristos eerily seem not to notice our ever dwindling group of increasingly blood-stained rebels. The film occasionally suffers from a few dully conceived character arcs (Curtis's sadly among them) that feel like they were pruned back from a longer script, and maybe having the villains state their philosophy a few too many times without enough progression. But it hardly matters, <i>Snowpiercer </i>is a film of such propulsive gonzo imagination that it can spare to have a few details fall off the track, so to speak.<br />
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Grade: B+ <br />
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<b>Note:</b> <i>Snowpiercer </i>is currently playing in very limited release and will hit VOD very soon. It was
intended for wider release before Bong got into a notorious battle with
U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein who wanted to cut 20 minutes of the
film's completely reasonable 125 minute run time. Weinstein agreed to
leave the film alone but in return will only show it on art house
screens (where it plays to sold out crowds). It's a shame not just
because it limits how many people will be able to see the film, but
because this film is clearly meant for the full multiplex experience (a
good 3D conversion would be fantastic). It's possible that Weinstein felt the film too dark and somber for the popcorn populace, or it could be just another example of Weinstein's apparent disrespect for Asian movies despite the money they've made him.</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-1115588368433393762014-07-19T12:53:00.000-05:002014-07-22T11:27:14.781-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE DARJEELING LIMITED<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at <a href="http://thefilmtemple.blogspot.com/">The Film Temple</a> to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Loren Greenblatt:</b> Wes Anderson’s fifth film is a bit of an odd duck. It’s actually two films, a short film and then a full feature which he made later. The short, Hotel Chevalier finds Jason Schwartzman, for the first time in an Anderson film since Rushmore, pulling a geographic. He’s a perturbed man who’s run away from his problems in a French hotel. He learns that an old flame played by Natalie Portman has tracked him down and is coming to see him. There’s a nice little stretch where he sets about making the room up, sprucing himself up, finding exactly which song he’s going to play (“Where to You Go To My Lovely by Peter Sarstedt) in anticipation of what he hopes will be a romantic event. </span><br />
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</span></b> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Max O'Connell: </b>Yeah. It’s pretty extraordinary that we don’t know the full details of their relationship, but we can tell by the intonation in Schwartzman’s voice and in his body language that this is someone very important to him who’s hurt him. He’s trying to do whatever he can to get things in order and keep his life together, but when we see him for the first time, he’s retreated from the world. He’s in this nice warm place where everything is bright yellow, and he’s wearing a bright yellow robe. He’s watching Stalag 17 on TV. And when she calls, that shield from the rest of the world comes tumbling down. It becomes the kind of melancholy we’ve seen from Anderson before, but much older and deeper.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> There’s this really nice moment where they open the door, and they come into an embrace. Schwartzman goes in for the kiss, but Portman goes for his shoulder, immediately drawing of the lines of how they feel. They don’t really dwell on this moment, so it’s one of those quick little things. It is an older melancholy, and less whimsical film than we’ve seen from Anderson. The film is sort of about that song. A lot of the film takes place with the song playing seemingly in its entirety under the dialogue. The song is about this man who’s pining for a lost woman, and he knows all these great details about her but can’t quite get inside her head. The film is almost a music video, or as close as Wes Anderson has ever gotten.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> In part because it is so much shorter, and it does feature the song very heavily. So much of it is so wonderfully choreographed to that song, particularly near the end after they’ve decided to have sex, and you can tell they have a lot of feelings for each other, but it’s leftover affection for something that’s clearly not working and has not worked out. We don’t know the full details of her character – she has bruises, but he’s surprised to see them, and they haven’t been together for a while – so it’s a kind of thing that she’s equally damaged if more enigmatic. The way Anderson frames them, for the most part, it’s in a long shot to imply the emotional distance between the two or a tight close up. I love the intimacy when they finally embrace, start kissing, and he starts undressing her. They’re so close together, but so far apart because they know this is the end of it, because he doesn’t want to see her again after this.</span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></b> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> Yeah, and he’ll double back on this in the feature film, but it’s not looking great. She tries to repair their friendship, but he’s not going for it. He flat-out says that he doesn’t care she didn’t mean to hurt him, that he never wants to be her friend, and that he’s OK with her feeling like shit if they fuck. There’s a sense of finality at this point.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>And of bitterness. It’s not self-pity, necessarily, but it’s something we could understand. It’s a wallop of a short, and it ends beautifully. It’s so confident that a lot of people felt that the feature paled a bit in comparison.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> To some degree, I think that. We should talk about how this connects to The Darjeeling Limited. Wes Anderson at the time was wishy-washy on whether or not he wanted this to be a part of the film or not. He shot it earlier, didn’t have a script for Darjeeling so much as an outline. Initially it was not attached to the film theatrically. On limited release, it was left out and released on iTunes. On wide release, it was attached.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Which is how I saw it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> So there’s a question of whether or not it’s part of the film. It’s billed as “Part I of The Darjeeling Limited” in the credits, but how should it be consumed? It’s still not definitively answered. For this rewatch, I saw Darjeeling first to try to take them as separate films. I could definitely understand seeing them together, but they’re also separated by style. Hotel is very much a summation of the Wes Anderson style to this point, where Darjeeling departs from it in very important ways. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Yes it does!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> The opening of Darjeeling is done in media res, which is unusual for Anderson, who’s given to gentler, storybook introductions. We open on an unnamed businessman played by Bill Murray trying to make a train in India. The cab is rushing, there a lot of chaotic whip pans and handheld shots. Murray makes it to the station as the train is pulling out, and he chases after it. We get this gorgeous slow motion tracking shot set to The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow.” And there’s a much younger man, Peter (Adrien Brody), who overtakes him and makes the train as he’s left behind. I don’t see the film as one of his best, but the opening is so masterful and full of subtext and symbolism that I wonder why the rest falls so short for me and a lot of people. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> It’s an interesting question, though I’d like to double back a bit. You said it’s not totally resolved on how that short connects to the film. We’re split on this. You’re torn, I think as soon as he did end up continuing the story (the short’s events are mentioned in the film, and Schwartzman’s character is one of the film’s protagonists alongside Brody and Owen Wilson). For me it’s a definitive part of the film. The difference in style is important because Darjeeling was at a point where people started knocking Anderson not stepping outside of his aesthetic (which is a stupid criticism, but whatever). Hotel Chevalier sees him doubling down on that style for a character who’s receding into it. The feature is still recognizably Anderson, but it is a bit of a departure (ironically, people still complained that it was too Wes-y), because it’s about trying to get into something new. The in media res opening, which I see as a whimsical homage to The French Connection, is about trying to break away from that. It’s very purposeful.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> It’s not that Anderson has completely left whimsy and storybook trappings aside. That opening is very storybook but in a different way, but it’s not as booklike. This is the first film he’s done since Bottle Rocket without some sort of chapter heading or curtain raise at the start of every new section. His bright color pallet is still there, but he utilizes shallow focus and long lenses to much greater extent and he moves the camera in new ways. He’s very much taking for a new set of influences. He acknowledges Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir’s film The River. There is a sense of stylistic exploration. I just wish it happened to more interesting characters.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqzNMEDEmg6Acf5msSuMs4inp7xIcfdzsNiKLP1lH5QrRFO4oFMRmA1OvWE8PH-wxKzkZTnj7sMXzufWVsr523xMPEHZQjMfKvwQ0aSHICNRlG_eKPdq_on46dvEl5ZqN30v_tuS6DcWU/s1600/dj1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqzNMEDEmg6Acf5msSuMs4inp7xIcfdzsNiKLP1lH5QrRFO4oFMRmA1OvWE8PH-wxKzkZTnj7sMXzufWVsr523xMPEHZQjMfKvwQ0aSHICNRlG_eKPdq_on46dvEl5ZqN30v_tuS6DcWU/s1600/dj1.jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>We’re going to disagree about how interesting they are, but let’s get into the style. It’s interesting how he’s sort of trying to have a lighter touch and mix the poetic realism of Renoir and Ray with his usual aesthetic. It’s still very colorful, and he does something with music that he had only hinted at before. Michael Powell had a theory of the “composed film,” where every element, from the designs to the actors to the music moving together and going together in a sort of synchronicity. Anderson played with that in the past, but it’s a lot more obvious here, particularly whenever he choreographs characters to music in slow motion to the Kinks with “Strangers” or “This Time Tomorrow” or “Powerman,” and I also think of the use of an underrated Stones song, “Play with Fire.” He’s choreographing to music pretty much the entire time, even if it’s just background music of Satyajit Ray’s films.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> His use of music has always been strong, but he does use it a little differently here. He let’s a lot of the pieces, particularly the non-English ones, play more atmospherically than in the past.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Like the use of the Debussy piece when they’re around the fire.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> Or the stuff on the trains. It’s a huge stylistic choice, but it’s allowed to be more in the background than in the past. There’s a confidence to that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Something else that’s interesting: on the train, he’s using anamorphic framing for much tighter spaces. No matter how they try, these characters can’t really get away from each other. It’s a nice metaphor for how the family binds them together.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNbOmQR1lGPdzH_GUitV1eG90TK8Aiqr-58ZzCjEfsP8Q3kevxVhdZdT-IE_lrHH6AWmhDE7cZyXpkW467bxTmpOMwMkkczqkyCfW5CYubiLwVIi1X5CQWVXMnFQySbFMytK_1Ycy8rFI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-12+at+8.43.43+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNbOmQR1lGPdzH_GUitV1eG90TK8Aiqr-58ZzCjEfsP8Q3kevxVhdZdT-IE_lrHH6AWmhDE7cZyXpkW467bxTmpOMwMkkczqkyCfW5CYubiLwVIi1X5CQWVXMnFQySbFMytK_1Ycy8rFI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-07-12+at+8.43.43+PM.png" height="133" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> We should actually talk about the plot. Jack (Schwartzman), Peter (Brody), and Francis (Wilson) are brothers, with Francis as a bit of an older, more damaged version of Wilson’s Bottle Rocket character, Dignan. These guys have been estranged for some time, and Francis has made a plan to get them back together in India, and they’re going on a spiritual journey because that’s what White people think you do in India. Francis has this very planned out with lists and itineraries, which are all laminated, and has a secret plan to bring his brothers to this place where their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) is working as a missionary. But I don’t think these characters are as interesting. They have nice moments: I like that immediately as they arrive on the train, they bond by comparing the various illegal painkillers they’re on. But I thought a lot about The Royal Tenenbaums, which also has an estranged family trying to figure out if they want to be a family again. That film showed us what forced this fissure. Here, Anderson and his co-screenwriters Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola skip over that for the sake of narrative efficiency, but they end up doubling back, and a lot of the first half of the film feels like exposition to me in a very irritating way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>You’re going to have to elaborate on that, because I don’t understand that criticism at all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> There are all these running gags that inform us how they related to each other over the years. There’s a scene where one brother confesses a secret to a brother and asks for secrecy, and he’s immediately ratted out to the third brother. They do this seemingly endlessly and it got old for me pretty quick. Their bickering becomes more trying than interesting. These characters become more poignant by the end with the help of some really good filmmaking, but I think it’s the thinnest script he’s ever done and don’t find any of them compelling in the first half.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> They are to me. Part of it is me seeing them as all being connected to previous Wes Anderson characters with the wind knocked out of them by life: you mentioned Francis as being connected to Dignan, I see Jack as a sadder, more mature Max Fischer who’s retreated from the world –</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>But Max Fischer has passions and interests. I don’t think Jack is that into being a writer. I think Owen Wilson has some sort of an education job, but it’s not explicitly mentioned…I don’t know who these people are outside of bickering.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Huh. You don’t think Schwartzman is into writing? I don’t get that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> He’s a writer who’s fallen back to just transcribing his life. That’s actually one of the gags I like. Every time he shares a story with his brothers, they’ll comment on how they like how they like that their characters did this or that, and Schwartzman will insist that the characters are all fictional. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> It’s not about falling back. It’s about how our art, however much we insist it doesn’t, reflects what we’re going through and who we are. Wes Anderson is a very private person, so we don’t know all the details, but so much of it is his addressing that his work reflects the struggles he’s gone through. And I do see him as being his into his writing. It’s his way of processing his grief, his melancholy, his problems, which is how many of us channel and understand our problems. He’s not admitting what he’s doing, though, so it doesn’t allow him to heal until later in the film.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>Part of it is that he’s such a depressed character in the short. The first image we get of him is him sitting in a bed, not moving much. All of these guys are on intense sedatives, so maybe that’s where I got that he isn’t into his work as much. And there’s also a sense in all of Anderson’s films after Rushmore that these characters wonder if they’re past their prime.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Yeah. And I do see a bit of that in here, but that still connects him to Max Fischer to me in a really interesting way. Brody, meanwhile, hadn’t worked with Anderson before, but I see a lot of Margot and Chas Tenenbaum here, both in his secrecy and his prickliness. Where Schwartzman is mopey and Wilson’s trying to force the whimsy and spirituality (I love his insisting that everything around him is beautiful or incredible as a way to convince everyone, which will never work), Brody is the one who will lash out.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> But the thing is that you can describe the interplay between his characters in other films, but it also feels like a new thing. In Life Aquatic, the character relationships are among the most well thought out in the Anderson canon. I’ve always kind of felt that this was written more on the fly, a bit scrappier and ramshackle. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he wanted it in India, on a train and with these people. I think these are his flattest set of characters since Bottle Rocket.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Hmm. I’d agree that they’re a bit more sketched out, and that is why this is probably his weakest film, but I view them more collectively than individually. Their relationship is the main character. It’s less about one of them and more about how they’re essentially symbiotic, whether they want to be or not. I also find the bickering funnier, and admittedly connect more to the characters than you do.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>You actually have siblings, I don’t.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> That could be part of it. And because it’s about a real family, it’s going to be at least partially in Tenenbaums’s shadow, and I think that’s why so many people are down on Darjeeling. I appreciate that we don’t get the full backstory, we just have to pick up from the way they act around each other what happened to them in the past. We get a bit about their mother’s distance, or about their father possibly having a favorite, without seeing it in a flashback or something. They’re so affected by how their parents have raised them, as with his previous film, but I appreciate that this film trusts us to pick up the cues.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>In theory, I agree with you. On paper, I understand that in terms of efficiency. But I don’t think it works with these particular characters, Though there are more moments of life as the film goes on like a wonderful reminder for how Anderson works with dialogue where Francis describes their mother: “She’s been disappearing all our lives.” That’s a wonderful line. When we meet her at the end of the film, that’s a fantastic moment. But there’s this shift midway after they leave the train and we’re meant to empathize with them more and it doesn't work 100% for me. They try to save three kids who fall into a river, and one of them dies. It becomes this sort of literary metaphor where the funeral for the Indian boy stands in for their father’s funeral, which they missed, and there's a greater metaphor where this exotic new land stands in for the alienation they feel living in a new world without their father. Which isn't completely invalid (<i>Lost In Translation</i> does something similar), but it's also a bit problematic seeing an entire country, and in this case a dead child, used to stand in for a dead white man. None of this is outrageously underlined in the film and it's not as big a problem as it could be but there’s a few people who point to Anderson’s treatment of race and point to this film as crossing a line and using Indian people as props and while I don't think it's as cut and dry as that, it's hardly invalid either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> I do think that criticism is more merited here than in the past. Part of it is about these guys being ugly Americans abroad and not appreciating what’s around them, not being respectful of or interested in the culture except as a form of exoticism (which is something a lot of people knocked without realizing that the film is being autocritical). And they are more than props. I like the two major Indian characters on the train: The Chief Steward (Waris Ahluwalia), who’s furious with the brothers for their reckless behavior, and Rita (Amara Karan), who’s treated similarly to Inez in Bottle Rocket but more successfully. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>Because they can understand each other. Schwartzman goes after her because she’s hot and Indian, but back in reality, she’s clearly got some shit going on, and is in a complicated relationship with the train’s head steward that may or may not be on the rocks. That’s a very humanizing moment, but I wish we saw more of that character. She’s the one who reminds me of Margot Tenenbaum, not Adrien Brody. I really wish she could have shown up near the end. I could have seen a movie about her.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>But that’s not what the movie is about. It’s about these guys getting perspective. By the time they part, he realizes that she’s just as filled with life (and just as messed up) as he is, and that she’s not just some exotic object to be obtained. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> Then there's the way he shoots India. This is the most location based film he’s worked on at this point, there are still artificial sets, but less than in his previous few films, I do get the sense that he’s trying to portray India as a place that exists in reality rather than sticking purely to his normal fantasy diorama mode. But at the same time, I think he’s trying to have it both ways with how he portrays this foreign culture.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> That’s fair. I think she’s handled well, as is the head steward. His reactions are funny, he’s the straight man to these out-of-control characters, but he’s also the most reasonable person in the film. The only point where the film does have some problems for me is the death of the Indian boy, which is used as a way to bring them together and realize the importance of family. It ties into the film’s tendency to rely on big, literary symbols, like their fathers’ baggage that they cart around standing in for the baggage they carried over from their parents, or the physical scars Francis bears on his head from a motorcycle crash standing in for his emotional scars. It’s a bit much, and the boy’s funeral is an extension on that with the added problem of accidentally trivializing his death to bring them together and call back to their father’s funeral. It’s trying to be humane, it’s just a bit off in execution.</span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></b> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>The thing I wondered about probably around halfway through the film is, considering that this film is much more somber than most of Anderson’s work, is whether this film is meant to be a comedy or Anderson’s first drama that just happens to have comedic moments?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>That’s a good question. It’s certainly more somber than his previous work, it’s tipping towards drama, but there’s too much of Anderson who’s a comedic stylist to cancel that out. It’s closer to a pure drama than anything he’s ever made.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>I do feel that even though the film is indulgent in a lot of ways, he is trying to break out of his Wes Andersonisms, even though in doing so a lot of people think this is the most Andersonian thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>People who made the criticism that it was schtick rather than an aesthetic, which, no. It has different drawbacks, though I don’t think they’re as problematic as you do. Now, do you think it does gain cumulative power by the end? It might be a more personal thing for me, since I do have siblings and I do view them collectively rather than separately.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>Absolutely I do. There’s a lot of stuff that works, but I also found myself wondering whether it would be more powerful if it happened to the Tenenbaums or the Belafonte crew. Their dimensionality gets added in, but it doesn't totally make up for how much I was twiddling my thumbs in the first twenty minutes. But it does have some of his most masterful moments of filmmaking. We mentioned the opening, but there’s also a great flashback to them almost missing their father’s funeral (set within one of Schwartzman’s “fictional” stories). And when they finally meet their mother, Huston shows up in another wonderful role. I love these two together almost as much as I love him with Bill Murray. There’s a line where she suggests that they can have a connection better without words, if they say everything with glances. It’s a little cloying, but then it goes into one of Anderson’s most interesting sequences, set to “Play With Fire,” where there’s a tracking shot through all of these little vignettes between these different characters they’ve encountered, and it’s all shot as if they’re connected on a train, but it’s looking into their houses, their airplanes, their bedrooms. It pans off of it to this tiger in the jungle, a bit of an overt symbol, but very powerful when combined with the music. That got me. That always gets me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Here’s the interesting thing about Huston’s character: it’s a smaller role than we’ve seen from her in past collaborations with Anderson, and it’s a different role. In the past, she was a warm and giving mother figure or at very least the person who maintained a sense of order amidst the chaos. Here, she’s removed from them. She’s had the same effect on them that Royal had on his kids. She was absent at their funeral, but when we first meet her, her behavior echoes that of her sons. She’s very controlling about what they’re going to eat and do, like Wilson, but she also insults the flower pot that Brody’s wife made, which is interesting because it’s the kind of behavior that Brody does. And she’s retreated from the world, much like Schwartzman. That’s how much he’s reacted, he’s tried to get away from them just like she did.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>And up to this point, the questionable parent in Anderson’s films has usually been the father. Here, they lionize their father and have an issue with their mother.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>There’s a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to this film regarding Owen Wilson. The same year this was released, Wilson attempted suicide after a relationship broke up. In the film, he claims to not remember the details regarding his motorcycle accident that smashed up his face and body, but we later learn it was intentional. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>I think it might have had a tougher overtone had he co-written the film, but it’s hard to watch without that extratextual knowledge. Obviously it wasn’t intentional. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> Which is also why the blatant symbol of Wilson removing his bandages and seeing that, in their words, he still has “some more healing to do,” is groan-worthy on one end but still very moving. I’m still shaken by how affected he is by everything he’s been through.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>Anderson and Coppola have worked together since, but Coppola also directed a little movie called CQ, which has an amazing score by Mellow but the film is just okay and clearly a Wes Anderson wannabe. It features a prickly artsy-fartsy guy editing a sci-fi movie who has daddy issues and want’s to assert his creativity in a meaningful way. They have the same cinematographer, Robert Yeoman. It’s interesting to see Anderson take in an imitator. Anderson wrote Darjeeling with Schwartzman and Coppola, which is interesting because both Schwartzman and Coppola are part of the Coppola family, with one as the son of Francis and brother of Sofia, the other as the son of Francis’s sister Talia Shire. It’s almost like Anderson is a lost Coppola cousin, considering the subjects he takes on.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> I hadn’t considered that, but it’s an interesting thought, considering that two members of a big, famous family are writing about family. It’s also worth considering that so much of this is about the possibility of losing a sibling, and Roman Coppola’s brother Giancarlo died in a boating accident in the late 80s. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG:</b> When there’s three screenwriters, we don’t know who’s responsible for what, and I don’t want to theorize too much. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO: </b>Me neither, but it’s an interesting parallel, and as I said, your art inevitably reflects your life to some degree. And that Schwartzman’s character acknowledges that by the end, that’s interesting to me. And I love the final gesture: Wilson, the controlling brother, tries to give back the passports he took from his siblings, and they trust him to keep them.</span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></b> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>That got me. That’s one part that got me that made me feel that it had to be those characters, and I wish they were just more interesting before that point. Also, there’s a very powerful snapshot as they let their baggage fall away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MO:</b> A shot that’s so well handled and set beautifully to “Powerman,” but it still kind of bugs me for the over-the-top symbolism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LG: </b>Maybe. But that final moment does tie back to their bickering well, yeah. I do think this is his weakest film, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff even if it’s minor. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>GRADES (SHORT/FEATURE)<br />
LOREN: </b>A-/B-</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MAX: </b>A-/B+</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That
concludes our discussion of Hotel Chevalier and The Darjeeling Limited, if you agreed or disagreed,
feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas
on Facebook by clicking <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GBlattsDreams/">here</a><b>.</b></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/02/wes-anderson-roundtable-bottle-rocket.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-rushmore.html">Rushmore</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-royal-tenenbaums.html">The Royal Tenenbaums </a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/04/wes-anderson-roundtable-life-aquatic.html">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</a><br />
<i>Hotel </i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chevalier</span> / Darjeeling Limited</i><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-88595080711898114912014-05-22T19:08:00.001-05:002014-07-22T10:03:22.703-05:00GODZILLA (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's common for <i>Godzilla </i>movies to overestimate our interest in their human characters. It's an honest miscalculation, after all cinema is about human concerns and heartbreak and we extend this to our monsters as well who are often anthropomorphized, but it is in this respect that <i>Godzilla</i> is different from all other kinds of movies. Even in the 1954 original, which heartbreakingly dealt with the Japanese psyche after WWII, the actual characters are mostly bland as to not steal focus and the appeal of much of the series is not in watching humans doing human things, or even in political allegory, but in watching Godzilla smash things and the beast has no human qualities except for those of a 5 year old smashing the giant Lego towers he just built.<br />
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Yet it's interesting that no film in the franchise has circumvented humanity completely, we're needed not just as filler but to give context to the destruction. In his new American reboot of the series, director Gareth Edwards has taken this series convention and run with it as an existential idea. He doesn't give us deep and nuanced characters, but highly sentimental ones to drive home the point that we, in a cosmic way, simply do not matter.<br />
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The human story, such as it is, is an inter-generational tale involving Joe (Bryan Cranston), an American living in Japan as a nuclear technician when a mysterious earthquake causes a meltdown that destroys the whole town and kills, among many other people, his wife. Joe doesn't believe it was a natural event and years later is still trying to find answers and looks to all the world like he's joined the tinfoil hat brigade. His now grown son Ford(Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is tired of him but reluctantly sets out to try and bring him back to reality.<br />
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In the background there's a lot of clever reconfiguration of the Godzilla mythos. We get Ken Wantanabe as a scientist who explains that Godzilla wasn't created by U.S. atomic tests but was simply awakened by them and later tests were really attempts to kill the beast. This doesn't shift responsibility for the monster away from America so much as reposition him as being an allegory not just for nuclear energy but for all attempts by mankind to tame nature. <br />
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The bursts of sentiment work wonderfully up to a point. It helps that Cranston is an actor of such electric
intensity that I partly expect him to fight Godzilla. But
the focus eventually shifts to Ford in a way that inadvertently also
closes off his story and new goal the film gives him, simply isn't as
strong and our investment wains somewhat to the detriment of the third act. But that's okay to a degree because none of this matters and for once the answer is deeper than "because it's a <i>Godzilla</i> movie." It doesn't matter if Joe is vindicated or reconnects with his son because these creatures are here to, in the words of the film, "send us back to the Stone Age." The humans are irrelevant but the film knows this and instead of just rushing past them, Edwards and screenwriter Max Brenstien pause to underline the futility and insignificance of humanity. After Godzilla and the other monsters show up and start smashing, NATO quickly drafts a plan to destroy them but we know that no matter what they do, they're essentially rearranging deckchairs. Humanity is basically impotent and all we can do is run and cower as these ancient titans do battle above us.<br />
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The fights themselves are beautifully done. They have everything we want out of large scale monster-smashing and there's a joyous element of this being a wrestling match but Edwards stages them with a canny mix of a Spielbergian wonder and Lovecraftian revulsion that gives everything in the film a unique flavor. He also manages to avoid many of the traps of large scale destruction by always sincerely emphasizing the humanity of the situation. The film isn't entirely successful, but it's rare to see a blockbuster with this clear an idea told with any kind of distinct voice, but Gareth Edwards is clearly onto something here. Finally after all these years, someone did something with the humans.<br />
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Grade: B+</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-65432552875324286502014-05-16T20:26:00.003-05:002014-07-22T10:00:50.541-05:00THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I knew <i>Amazing Spider-Man 2</i>, the sequel to the 2012 reboot which I defend with increasing faintness,<i> </i>was in trouble in its opening moments, which features characters we have no connection to in a dreadfully dull action prologue (never before has fighting on a crashing airplane felt this serene). But I expected the film to recover. After all Spider-Man is one of our most durable characters, but I was shocked to see that not only did it not recover but it got steadily worse over its extremely generous run time.<br />
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Almost nothing in this film works: the humor is off, the effects have no sense of weight (CG Spider-Man is often animated like a Loony Toon), the charm between Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is weaker, but the worst problem is the script, the latest and reportedly final collaboration between Robert Orci and Alex Kurzman, which stuffs a plethora of subplots without the benefit of any connective tissue. At least Sam Raimi's overstuffed <i>Spider-Man 3</i> had an emotional throughline. Worse still, while it's clear from the amount of fan service on display that returning director Marc Webb and co. know who Spider-Man is on a superficial level but have no understanding of who he is. They don't get him, they don't even try to get him.<br />
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Spider-Man is one of the most important characters in comic-books. The first generation of Superheroes (Superman, Batman, et all) were initially conceived as simple power fantasies. They're strong, wise, have amazing powers and represent the people we wish we could be. But creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko subverted that with Spider-Man by being honest about the emotional realities of being an ordinary person with superpowers. In the comics, TV shows and movies, Peter Parker is always on a path of emotional growth, learning that his powers are often a curse and come with, say it with me now, great responsibility.<br />
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But none of that ethos is present in this film, nor is it replaced with anything. This Peter Parker doesn't don the suit, which admittedly looks great, and use his powers for the greater good at the expense of his personal life, he does it because being Spider-Man is great ego trip. Take his introductory scene where he stops in the middle of foiling a plutonium robbery to give a meek scientist (Jamie Foxx) an inspirational pep talk, before going off to not just stop the robbery but needlessly taunt the ringleader. Spider-Man has often quipped while defeating his enemies but seeing him pull down Paul Giamatti's pants whilst humming his own theme song instantly made me side with J. Jonah Jameson.<br />
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Watching these scenes I expected this cruelty to be part of an arc about how Peter had let his powers go to his head and needed to tone it down, but no, he acts this way throughout the entire film with no sense of awareness. In fact the film does precious little to give him an arc of <i>any</i> kind. The closest it gets is a weird subplot where he occasionally sees the ghost of Gwen's dead father (Denis Leary) judging him for continuing to date his daughter. This leads to endlessly repetitive scenes of Parker and Stacy not committing to their relationship because being Spider-Man might put her in danger. The idea kinda worked in the Raimi films because it was based in 1) Parker's insecurities and 2) the fact that Mary Jane had been in danger because Peter was Spider-Man. But we don't get that in this iteration, Gwen is never in danger and when she finally is, it's not really Peter's fault. <br />
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The previous film had something with the chemistry between Garfield and Stone but this film doesn't do anything with their relationship but remind us <span style="color: red;">(Spoiler Alert)</span> that Stacy is the biggest <a href="http://lby3.com/wir/">fridge</a> in comic-book history. The practice of killing off female characters simply to advance the hero's story is a hideously outdated trope that's only being used here because the comics did it 40 years ago. Worse still, that moment has no meaning. Sure Peter feels bad about it for a while but he gets a pass because the film carefully plays it so that it's entirely Gwen's fault for being there over Peter's objections. <span style="color: red;">(End of Spoilers) </span>Nothing in the film is Spider-Man's fault, he has no flaws, makes no mistakes and learns no lessons (except for how batteries work). For what it's worth, Stone does better than Garfield with the material (who is too twitchy), and my general feeling is that the franchise doesn't deserve her.<br />
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The villains are also a problem. Both Foxx's Electro and Dane Dehaan's Harry Osborn seem to have graduated from the Joel Schumacher school of subtlety: their motives and intentions constantly shouted yet change on a whim based on whatever the plot requires at that moment. After their first encounter Electro develops a Rupert <span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">Pumpkin</span></span> style obsession with how great Spider-Man is until he hates him because – contrivances! The superfan angle could have worked but it would have required empathy and consistency, as it is, he could have been cut completely without losing anything. Osborn, dying from a mysterious skin illness that could perhaps be cured by Spider-Man's blood, fairs almost as bad. It's completely unclear what he's supposed to be: is he a tragic figure, pure evil from the start, smart, dumb, entitled, humble, does he know Peter is Spider-Man or not? Poor Dehaan is caught in the middle trying to mug his way through it, and his eventual transformation into Green Goblin is so completely unearned that he could, in a very literal sense, have easily shown up as Doctor Octopus or The Vulture.<br />
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If these were the extent of the film's problems, it would already be in trouble, but it continues on and on, for 142 agonizing minutes, to include other subplots that range from the inane (Aunt May is a nurse but has to keep it secret for no reason), to the damaging (the secret behind Peter's parents undoes even more of what makes the character special), all of which are handled by a tone deaf Webb who at one point the film literally goes from Spider-Man's first fight with Electro to a music video of Peter searching for his aforementioned parents, creating one of those string filled photo collages we see in conspiracy thrillers, set to an inspirational faux folk song from Philip Philips.<br />
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It is the expressed hope of Sony Pictures that this film will start a mega franchise á la Disney's <i>Avengers</i>. Indeed much of the plot seems designed to setting up not just a third of these things, but a spin-off staring Spider-Man's villains. But as mediocre and transparent as some of those Disney movies are, the Marvel suits at least know they need to deliver a semblance of a good time centered around a likable character. Instead Sony's corporate board seems to feel that if it puts a lot of shiny stuff in a box labeled <i>Spider-Man</i>, the unwashed masses will eat it up. One of the few chuckles I had during this film was recognizing that Sony's plan of creating wave after wave of shiny yet empty superhero movies mirrors OsCorp's evil plot almost exactly. For a second I thought maybe Marc Webb or someone had snuck a bit of meta commentary into the film but I discounted it, if that had been the case, the point would have been as loud and dumb as everything else.<br />
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Grade: D+<br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-31289324411593882652014-04-19T11:39:00.000-05:002014-04-19T15:55:08.690-05:00CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Rarely has a franchise shifted gears so radically as <i>Captain America</i>. The character is, by far, the oldest in the Marvel Cinematic lineup, as testified by the decidedly retro tone of the original, a fun piece of jingoistic nonsense which saw Steve Rogers (Chris Evens) injected with super-serum and fighting rogue Nazi's. The sequel, subtitled <i>The Winter Soldier</i>, does away with the gee-wizz sensibility and thrusts it's boyscout hero into a much more paranoid and cynical world and even finds the time to cast the jingoism of the original in a colder light. There's still some retroness in this approach, but its 70's inspirations are carefully updated so that, until it goes completely nuts in the second half, it feels about as relevant and ripped from the headlines as any comic-book movie before it. <br />
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Part of the intrigue comes from Cap himself. Due to spending most of the last seventy years in stasis, he's about as removed from the modern world as it's possible to get. Sometimes that's adorable and winning (he keeps a running list of pop-culture to catch up on), but his rah-rah, straight arrow enthusiasm isolates him, he's almost friendless, and conflicts with his morally hazy missions for S.H.I.E.L.D., which often involve him flying into dangerous missions and busting chops of whoever he's being told is the bad guy that day. As the film starts, the once idealistic Rogers is harboring serious mistrust for his spymasters, a situation not helped when on one mission he discovers his partner Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) has a few secret objectives of her own. <br />
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For a little while, directors Joe and Anthony Russo (known mostly for their TV comedy work on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Community</i>), construct a fairly interesting social, political backdrop for Caps disillusionment that plays like a very savvy update of 70’s political thrillers. Cap's mistrust and discomfort mounts when he learns of a major operation to build a series of drone like helicarriers that can take out mass numbers of potential targets from sub orbit, completely at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s discretion. The film takes all the implications of this more seriously than previous Marvel films do, resulting in some interesting, character revealing discussions between Rogers, Fury and Johansson who all have different views of how to serve America. We also get Anthony Mackie as an ex-paratrooper suffering from PTSD who has some nifty superhero gadgets to rival Cap’s shield and, in a clear nod to the Russo's inspirations, Robert Redford as a S.H.I.E.L.D. higher up who will in no way turn out to be evil.<br />
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There's also the titular Winter Soldier, for which we should be grateful that, for once we have a compelling villain in this series. He isn’t the focal point we'd expect him to be, but he’s good for a few solid revelations (though fans already know what they are) and he gets a terrifying entrance, emerging out of a cloud of smoke after attacking Fury in broad daylight in the streets of D.C. with a cadre of mercenaries.</div>
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Action is, unfortunately, a bit of a weakness here. The Russos' smartly don’t oversaturate us with beats, but when the action scenes start, the sparse, almost minimalist aesthetic they’ve carefuly constructed falls by the wayside and we get a lot of shakycam set against bland backdrops. It’s not the worst example of the technique, but while the scenes stand in considerable contrast to classicism of the first film, they lack showmanship and the approach feels like a choice made by a second unit director rather than one that fits in with the rest of the project. The climax feeling particularly clumsy, with characters in multiple locations executing complex, partially unnecessary sounding objectives that editing refuses to make clear. The action is saved almost completely by virtue of the sense of danger the Winter Soldier brings with him as a character, which is a step in the right direction for a franchise where the stakes of action scenes are often flat.</div>
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Also, after all the enticing allegory of the first half, the film almost effortlessly jumps into la la land with a twist that attempts to further link the idea of mass surveillance to old-school fascism, and set up events for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avengers 2,</i> but is so comically on the nose that the film looses all semblance of credibility. I suppose that is to be expected in this kind of movie, which is a slave to pulpy thrills before anything else, but with such a great setup and all that great character development, it's a shame that it moves so sharply away from the relevance it started with. The film is another missed opportunity for Marvel, but the mega-franchise is getting closer to making a meaningful film.<br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-31650533113919029112014-04-08T14:44:00.002-05:002014-07-30T12:33:18.980-05:00JODOROWSKY'S DUNE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Alejandro Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dune</i> would likely have been either been one of the greatest films in cinema history or one of its greatest follies. Likely it would have been both at once, so enormous and ambitious was the production, as chronicled in Frank Pavich’s enthralling documentary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jodorowsky’s Dune</i>, that it was likely destined to fail. It was simply too awesome to exist.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">By the mid 70’s Jodorowsky had already lead an impossibly eccentric life. He studied mime with Marcel Marceau, became a prominent theater director, his first film (made illegally) caused riots in Mexico, but his follow ups,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> El Topo </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Holy Mountain</i>, turned avant-guard surrealism into box office gold despite occasionally stomach churning content. At this point he brashly decided to adapt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dune</i>, a book he had not even read at the time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It proved to be a good instinct. The psychedelic narrative of the book, centering around The Spice, a coveted drug used as spaceship fuel but is also a path to enlightenment, is a perfect match for Jodorowsky even as he stated throwing large parts of it out in favor of his own, deranged vision, which quickly swelled to 10 hours and featured galaxy spanning tracking shots, women being impregnated with drops of blood and other flights of fancy I'll leave the audience to discover.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To bring that vission to life he hired only artists whom he felt had the necessary passion. French comic artist Moebius doing storyboards and a great deal of the costumes, future <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien </i>designer H.R. Gieger designing the villain’s homeworld, and British illustrator Criss Foss painting the most amazing looking space ships ever.</span><br />
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The documentary unfolds mostly in the increasingly old-fashion talking head format, which can be forgiven because <span style="font-family: inherit;">the primary head belongs to Jodorowsky who is outrageously fascinating as he tells how he shamed</span> Pink Floyd into doing the soundtrack, conned Orson Wells and Salvador Dalí to play key supporting parts or put his teenage son through rigorous combat training to play the lead. His passion and optimism for the project is hypnotic he comes
off as history's most affable cult leader. His sales pitch to at least
one collaborator consisted of: "Sell everything you own and move to
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Other interviewees include <span style="font-family: inherit;">Gieger, who's voice is nearly as terrifying as his art, a smattering of critics, producers, and, for some reason, <i>Drive </i>director Nicolas Winding Refn. The stories don't always seem completely reliable, but they've been given just the right embellishments by Jodorowsky which are indulged by Pavich because they make such a good yarn. The documentary's best moments might be when he chooses to animate key segments from the script, including the opening shot which is so amazing I had had to remind myself to breathe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For a time it all seems achingly possible. But the film never got the green light needed to go into production. Even in the 70's, the peak of the ambitious New Hollywood movement, no studio wanted to pony up the proposed $15 million starting budget for the film with special effects that had never been tried, might last 10 hours and would probably be explicitly violent and sexual from a director with a well founded reputation for being nuts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jodorowsky remains understandably bitter, in a touching moment he tears up, takes the money out of his wallet and curses it, not just for <i>Dune</i> but for all the other projects he's been burned on. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He would eventually move on to other films of varying quality, but has mostly left cinema behind for comics were he's respected and budgets aren't an issue. Lots of his ideas for <i>Dune</i> ended up in a series he co-authored with Moebius, <i>The</i> <i>Incal</i>. <i>Dune </i>eventually did reach the screen as a different debacle helmed by David Lynch and latter as a pretty decent mini-series by John Harrison. But both of those try and take the book head on, </span>Jodorowsky wanted to change to world with his mega budget, spiritual blockbuster and was rebuffed like many filmmakers with larger than life ambition. It's sad that his <i>Dune</i> had to join the parathion of other great unmade films such as Kubrick's <i>Napoleon </i>or Del Toro's <i>Mountains of Madness, </i>but it's fortunate we have </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pavich's</span></span> spellbinding documentary<i> </i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">to give us just a tiny peak into a film that might have changed the world. <br /><br />Grade: A</span><br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-68357772129140482602014-04-03T17:54:00.000-05:002014-07-22T11:30:15.633-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at <a href="http://thefilmtemple.blogspot.com/">The Film Temple</a> to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj962BPIQK29HTDpQHTzo2zn4_cZbAEyFJ9mvKVJm5G3ZEl97ko6qyFK3qx7fO6UJhg4JY2Bhxqz9-RuPnqsXgfLtqhsuB_1eKSssXCIUkR-1gBZ7RAmvPZRBA37NY1rT9OSACMRMVpvm8/s1600/Wes-Anderson-by-Andrew-Eccles..jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj962BPIQK29HTDpQHTzo2zn4_cZbAEyFJ9mvKVJm5G3ZEl97ko6qyFK3qx7fO6UJhg4JY2Bhxqz9-RuPnqsXgfLtqhsuB_1eKSssXCIUkR-1gBZ7RAmvPZRBA37NY1rT9OSACMRMVpvm8/s1600/Wes-Anderson-by-Andrew-Eccles..jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Loren Greenblatt:</b> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou </i>is Wes Anderson’s fourth film, and not his best received. Some might view it as his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One From the Heart </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York, New York. </i>It’s heavily stylized and he had more creative freedom, but it wasn’t well liked on its initial release. <br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max O’Connell: </b>Well, people think the reviews were worse than they were. They were highly mixed with a lot of disappointment, but it wasn’t seen as a disaster by as many people as the story tends to go. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I can see why this film turned some people off, though. I wasn’t crazy about it on my first viewing (a bad projection didn’t help) but it’s grown immensely for me on repeat viewings. My initial complaints do line up with what the some of the critics said at the time. The film feels very arch and removed, and as stylized as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums </i>was, this is so much more. I can see a lot of people viewing it as hipsterish or ironic: it starts off with a film-within-a-film of oceanographic explorer/filmmaker Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) brings his latest documentary to a festival, and the credits for the main film appear within the documentary in this 4:3 aspect ratio, with curtains on the side of the screen to emphasize that we’re in a movie. I can see how this turned some people off.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yes, but it turned off people who were previously fans, too, and of his archness. I wonder if it might be that he has a different screenwriter this time. For his first three films and his first short, Anderson co-wrote it with his longtime friend Owen Wilson. Wilson has the second biggest role in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life Aquatic</i>, but he was also becoming a more prominent comic actor at this point, and he didn’t have time to work as a co-screenwriter, or so I understand. Anderson instead brought aboard Noah Baumbach, a director who at that point hadn’t worked in seven years. He made a big splash with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kicking and Screaming</i>, followed by a pair of indifferently received comedies (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Highball, Mr. Jealousy</i>), and Anderson is the one who brought him back out, first with this, then as producer for Baumbach’s best film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Squid and the Whale. </i>Baumbach is a much more abrasive collaborator than Wilson.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s not like Anderson’s past characters were warm and cuddly, but Steve Zissou is by far his most prickly protagonist. In terms of archness, this is Anderson’s first big attempt at world building and on paper, the 60’s high seas adventure trappings make it look lighter and more rompish than his previous films. He’d get to making lighter films in the future, but here he actually doubles down and presents a world that under all the whimsy is darker and more bitter than anything he’d done until now. We meet Zissou, a washed up Jack Cousteau type who looses his best friend/right hand man Esteban (Seymour Cassel) when he’s eaten by a “Jaguar Shark” who Steve now hopes to track down and kill. Between the stop-motion sea creatures, rival ships and pirates, I don’t think any of us really expected to see this middle-age, hard to like control freak in the lead, even if that type of character is 100% in keeping with both Anderson’s AND Baumbach’s style.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>But oh, the wonderful things around him! How delighted are we by those?</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Pretty darn delighted! It’s telling that for Anderson, actual sea life isn’t sufficiently whimsical, so instead he invents sea life in stop motion creatures made by Henry Selick, the director of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Nightmare Before Christmas </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coraline</i>.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>The stop-motion is really wonderful. It helps accentuate the fantasy of this world, they remove us from reality, the handmade quality of the whole thing, right down to the sets. They’re very lived in, but they have a dollhouse feel.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He turns Zissou’s boat, the Belafonte, into an actual diorama. There’s a wonderful scene that’s maybe the most Andersonian scene ever, in which Anderson cuts the boat in half on a set so we can see all of the characters walking through the various rooms and we can see all the gadgets they have.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s also a scene later that shows that diorama view where Steve has a fight with Ned (Wilson), the man who’s possibly his son, and there’s a long shot following the two as they argue. As they’re doing it, Steve stops the argument to address whoever he passes, and he’ll either lash out at them or, when he runs into the one intern who didn’t quit, he’ll swing to overwhelming praise and say, “Awesome, you’re getting an ‘A’,” followed by a slap on his injured shoulder. It’s a long take that shows the intricacy of the set, but also how Steve’s moods can swing from one moment to another. And it’s a case where I can’t picture it being done better than the way it was done with those dioramas.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisk5mIZ5w4qfRWZyuXdKQaaAsvAlmB1_8fjDrjZVrXK1EjIXNcs88HYAhq7oM0hbR8MNIVMIM72FUlansg5uwQIF5XsvwauFl29lCD6vGIVsc2BMgnZnY013tO-GrY8pYrfVHY9ftKT-o/s1600/06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisk5mIZ5w4qfRWZyuXdKQaaAsvAlmB1_8fjDrjZVrXK1EjIXNcs88HYAhq7oM0hbR8MNIVMIM72FUlansg5uwQIF5XsvwauFl29lCD6vGIVsc2BMgnZnY013tO-GrY8pYrfVHY9ftKT-o/s1600/06.jpg" height="305" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>There’s a key moment in the film for me where they’re in Italy, and Steve is completely dominating Ned, the son he never wanted but now needs to micromanage. He changes his name to “Kingsley,” he orders wine for him, and he pushes away any sense of individuality Ned might express. And that’s interesting because he has this sort of Bill Nye/Jacques Cousteau profession where he’s supposed to foster individuality and imagination, but he actually stifles it.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yes, and Ned is willing to go with it for a while because he’s found a new father figure after having lost a lot personally (his mother killed herself after she found out she had terminal ovarian cancer), but after a while Steve micromanages to the point where he pushes away the one man who’s still on his side. Whenever Ned ad libs on camera, Steve is annoyed. The first time, Steve pretends to like it, and the second time he chastises Ned and demands that next time he whisper his idea in Steve’s ear so he can say it in front of the reporter, Jane (Cate Blanchett). Ned goes with it until it gets to this great scene where they’re underwater in scuba gear, and Ned asks Steve if he can call him dad. Steve quickly suggests a different nickname, “Stevesie.” </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And I like that it’s in scuba gear that obscures their faces and lets Wilson express his pain through his voice, his eyes and body language, and then the camera drifts away in a very expressive shot. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>You talked about how Steve’s supposed to promote individuality while collecting all of these weird and wonderful misfits on his crew. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That’s right, he doesn’t just do this to Ned, he has an entire crew of people to bully around.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>The crew of the Belafonte is like this big, dysfunctional version of the Enterprise. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>They’re also like a surrogate family that could fall apart at any moment, because they’re working at the whims of a very inconsiderate man. There’s Anne-Marie (Robyn Cohen), the script girl who’s casually topless, which seems to get no attention from anyone.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It is Europe! But what I love about that character is that she’s kind of like the bratty yet very responsible sister, the only one who will tell Steve that his plans are going to get them hurt. Something I noticed is a dichotomy between the old and young in the crew. The young include Anne-Marie and Pelé (Seu Jorge), but then there’s the old, who in the documentary-within-the-film, are given ages that are way off. No way that Klaus (Willem Dafoe), Steve’s eternally loyal German second-in-command, is 45. Nor is the sound guy in his 40s. This is another part of Steve’s control over his world: he’s is living in the past, and not acknowledging their ageing he gets to avoid acknowledging his own. There’s a sense that these guys were once big (this is a world where oceanography and documentaries are big). In the 80s and 90s, they were big enough to have merchandising in the form of Adidas endorsements, action figures and pinball machines. But that’s halted. Steve admits, “I haven’t been at my best this past decade.”</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>To which his estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) plainly says, “That’s true.” It’s interesting considering Bill Murray’s background: onetime comic megastar who, in the 90s, started appearing in low-rent movies before Wes Anderson revitalized his career. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And it’s easy to be on Eleanor’s side, because as they say, she’s the brains of the outfit. There’s a montage where we see everyone doing their job, and Eleanor’s crossing off things that they have planned that are too impractical, like “Skydiving into a volcano.”</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>One of the interesting things about this movie is that it’s only Wes Anderson’s fourth movie, when he was in his 30s, yet it’s about middle-aged failure. It’s almost like he’s making a movie about not only what he could turn into, but what he could turn into soon enough following these massive successes.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I don’t know how much he intended it, but there is a very meta angle to that.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Owen Wilson is still there in a major role, but it’s interesting that he’s gone as the co-screenwriter in a film in which a man loses his right-hand man in the beginning. The other interesting thing is that there’s a concern about losing your touch by fakery. Steve is clearly affected by Esteban’s death, but he didn’t capture it on camera, so he restages it. That’s become a regular part of his movies, fakery, but here’s a point where it reaches its most egregious. He knows he doesn’t have it anymore, so he’s just going to fake it. And this is a point in Anderson’s career where some felt that it was a lot of fakery and not enough heart (which is absurd, but whatever). </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And there’s a classic Wes Anderson thing of people using fantasy to insulate themselves from the real world. Steve is dealing with tough stuff, so he uses the fact that he’s in a film to shield himself. Any time he starts to feel something, he asks if it’s being caught on film. That, for me, is him pushing away something real. That might have turned people off, too. There is a sense of remove, and Bill Murray’s performance is very minimalistic. At first glance, it seems like he’s not doing much, but he’s actually doing a lot. There are little tonalities that are very important. There’s this one moment near the end where he’s reading a letter he wrote to Ned many years ago, and the way he emphasizes, “I remember your mother…” is very subtle, pointed, and effective.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Not just in emotional ways, because this is one of Anderson’s saddest movies, but Murray is also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really </i>funny in this. His timing in this is great. I love in the opening scene where he’s being interviewed by the press about his latest film, and his pauses for every answer are priceless. “What would be the scientific purpose of killing the shark?” (long pause, then very matter of fact) “Revenge.”</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I also love the autograph scene, where an older fan has around 20 posters that he wants Steve to sign (based on a real event Anderson saw Murray go through). After so many signatures, he just says, “Just sign the rest yourself.” </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>To be fair to Steve, at that point, I might lose my patience as well.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Let’s talk about the music. Every Wes Anderson film is somewhat anchored by one particular musician or style: British Invasion in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>, mainly varying kinds of folk for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums</i>, etc. Here, it’s anchored by David Bowie songs, but not just the originals. Seu Jorge’s crew member plays acoustic David Bowie covers in Portuguese, and they’re wonderful. Bowie even prefers some of them to the studio versions.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s interesting how he uses Bowie for key emotional scenes. The use of “Life on Mars?” when Steve first meets Ned, and later on the use of Seu Jorge’s version when Ned first realizes how awful Steve can be, it’s a terrific emotional standpoint. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love the use of the “Space Oddity” countdown by Jorge as a group of pirates arrive on the Belafonte in a really interesting shot as they emerge from the fog. And Anderson does have a proper rock star doing his music. This is the last score Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo did for Anderson, and the best. I hope they’ll work together again today.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Now, what do you think is the major difference between Steve and his rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum)? It’s interesting how there’s a bit of an Indiana Jones/Belloq thing, where neither of them are necessarily great guys, but one of them is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our </i>guy.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Hennessey is the more successful one. He’s just been made a knight in Portugal! I want to become a knight in Portugal!</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Hennessey is much more confident than Steve, but he’s also much slimier. Steve, at least, you know where you stand with him. Goldblum pretends he doesn’t hate you.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He’s also a character who isn’t a complete villain, which is something about Wes Anderson films that I love. No matter what, there’s always a moment of empathy. Even with the Jaguar shark.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. It’s funny when Hennessey is kidnapped and the pirates sink his ship, but it’s also moving when they do rescue him. He does seem genuinely a little touched that Steve took the time, because he knows Steve doesn’t like him. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Yeah. The pirates killed his crew, and more hurtful to him, made soup out of his research turtles. I don’t know why but the way that line is delivered, it always registers to me like they might as well have been cannibals. The character relationships in this film are very interesting. Dafoe plays Klaus beautifully against type, more childish than scary. He’s competing with Ned to have Steve as his father figure, despite the fact that they’re clearly about the same age. And the reporter, Jane, has a difficult thing with Steve, who fancies himself as a bit of a stud and hits on her, but she’s not having it. But she develops a romance with Ned. So we gotta a a weird love triangle with a father figure/son fighting over the same woman.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s a lot of stuff with father figures. Ned has a new father figure for the first time in his life, then finds out that he’s not a very nice man. Steve never wanted to be a father because he hates fathers, which implies something painful in his past. Jane finds a surrogate father for her child in Ned after the real father essentially abandons it. And Klaus sees Steve and Esteban as father figures.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> Wes Anderson maintains that he and his parents have wonderful relationships, but it’s much more interesting to write bad dads. There’s actually an ongoing art instillation at Spoke Art in San Francisco covering his work that was even titled “Bad Dads.” It’s a common trope in his work that also links him to Spielberg in a lot of ways.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s a good dad in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i> in Seymour Cassel’s character, but they’re very rare.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I’d like to believe that’s what his dad is really like. One of the things that still doesn’t 100% work for me is the implication that Steve has faked the death of Esteban, which I think the film plays with a little too long. There are a few moments that imply that Esteban is still alive somewhere.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I didn’t think that. I thought it was more a thing where he’s taking advantage of his friend’s death.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Eleanor says at one point that she doesn’t want be around because one is already dead, and it’s played as if he forgot or doesn't know what she’s talking about.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah, no, I didn’t get that at all. For me, Esteban is conclusively dead throughout, he just restaged it because he didn’t get it on camera and that’s kind of the person he’s become.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s one of the lingering things that doesn’t 100% work for me.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There are a few things that don’t work 100% for me. It’s odd, because there aren’t too many scenes that feel like they’re not there for a reason, but this film feels a bit flabbier compared to Anderson’s previous work. It doesn't move quite as well.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>For me it moves very well, but I understand, it does stop for whimsy a lot.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>An example would be the scene where Steve points out the radios they have in their headsets. It’s a funny bit, but it’s like, “We’re gonna stop now for a joke.”</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>For me, it’s a transition to another scene, but I understand how you might think that.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s an awkward transition for me. There’s a handful of those. And I think Anderson has talked about this, but the shootout with the pirates is not terribly well staged. I feel like he’s trying to go for chaos and clumsiness, but accidentally makes it more trouble than it’s worth.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>“John Woo I ain’t,” I believe was his quote<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">. </b>I actually like that scene. There’s a very handmade aspect to it. Like it was made by a bunch of energetic kids who just went out and grabbed some shots. It’s a cute action scene. I also love the gag where Bill Murray uses the unpaid interns for cover.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>That is funny, it’s just the directing of that scene is a bit clumsier than it’s supposed to be for me. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I kind of felt it was going for clumsy. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It is, but the execution is off.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The weird moment where they pause for the Northern Lights does bother me.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO:</b>…yeah, I don’t know what that’s there for.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I feel it's a "tide has turned and nature is with us" thing, it's just awkwardly done. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Hmm. Maybe. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s also one of his most overtly New Wave films – oodles of jump cuts, bright, saturated colors denote this as a “movie-movie” in a very New Wave way and when Ned dies at the end, there’s flashes of red and white frames that feel straight out of a late 60s Godard film.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Not just that, but it’s at a point where Steve has come to terms with being a bad father and is trying to rectify that. It comes through on the raid in the pirates’ compound, and he tells Klaus how much he means to him, and he apologizes to Ned. Ned has become a full member of Team Zissou, and he’s extended the olive branch to Klaus, effectively becoming a surrogate brother. So much of this film is about not taking for granted the things that really matter, because they could be gone at any point, and Steve connects with Ned just as he loses him. There’s this great montage of Ned’s life flashing before his eyes as he dies in the helicopter crash. And that scene is shocking, but it’s not out of nowhere, because they do mention how the helicopter wasn’t in great shape earlier.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And there’s a running gag with Klaus where he’s supposed to be the guy who fixes things but never does, and just as Klaus becomes friends with Ned, he loses him because he didn’t fix the thing. There’s two things I thought about in that scene. First, there’s a moment where Jane sends him a letter to Ned’s bunk before he leaves, and for me, I feel like that’s a marriage proposal, or an invitation to be the father to her child. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Oh, you know what, that sounds about right. And this is the death that Steve doesn’t exploit, and he puts it in his film respectably, and he’s changed at a terrible cost. It’s brought back emotional honesty in his work.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And I love the ending, the happy 80s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buckaroo Banzai </i>homage where, out of the ashes, a new crew has emerged to go on new, presumably happier adventures together.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Here’s the thing: we talk about all of the great David Bowie songs in this, including “Queen Bitch” over the end credits with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buckaroo Banzai </i>homage, but my favorite use of music in this film isn’t a Bowie song. It’s the use of the Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside” during Ned’s funeral. That’s a moment that’s almost as moving as “The Fairest of the Seasons” for me. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That one gets me every time. There’s a really interesting touch in that ending, though, where as they’re walking to “Queen Bitch,” as they finally board the ship, Ned, despite being dead, is on top of the ship as a spirit of Team Zissou. That’s a very unusual, borderline surrealistic touch. You might not notice it the first time.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I didn’t notice it until this time. That’s stuck in right at the end there. I love how accepting this film is. Even Bud Cort, the prototypical Wes Anderson character in Hal Ashby’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harold and Maude</i>, plays a bond company stooge who’s in Steve’s corner, not just a bond company stooge. “No bond company stooge would stick his neck out like that.” And everyone who’s still alive is accepted into this big family when they finally see the jaguar shark. It’s wonderful how he uses that great anamorphic framing in a small space there to get it more intimate, to use density to imply togetherness.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I know when he was making the film, he wasn’t always very clear what that jaguar shark scene meant to him. I think, it is a very interesting scene. A lot of people put <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby Dick </i>stuff on it, because of surface comparisons, but that never really held a lot of water for me.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I think it is there, in that it’s a revenge story where our Ahab realizes, as Matt Zoller Seitz suggested, killing his friend was “nothing personal.” Death comes for us.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I don’t think of it as “nothing personal,” I think of it as Steve staring death in the face and seeing it as something big and awe-inspiring, which is kind of what he probably got into this business for in the first place. The world is so big, and beautiful and strange and more fascinating than we think.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And uncontrollable. He’s tried to control nature in his documentaries, and now he’s accepted that he can’t, and here comes the most moving moment he’ll ever be able to capture. He’s encountered this thing that’s responsible for the death of one friend and tangentially responsible for the death of his son, since they died while searching for it, and he’s able to just let it wash over him.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He lost his spiritual brother and spiritual son. </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s maybe not the cleanest thing Anderson has ever done –</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I don’t think it needs to be. Sometimes it’s better to be messy.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Sometimes it’s messy to a fault, but it’s also messy to wonderful degrees, and it’s one of his most thematically interesting and adventurous films, which is why I’m glad it has found a cult following in the years since. Its most passionate defenders stuck by it.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s one that’s gotten better on repeat viewings. All the stuff that bothered me fell away, and all of the stuff I was missing popped up </div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s struck me as much richer on each repeat viewing.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>LOREN'S GRADE: A-</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MAX'S GRADE: A-</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b>That
concludes our discussion of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, if you enjoyed it,
feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas
on Facebook by clicking <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GBlattsDreams/">here</a><b>.</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br />
</b></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/02/wes-anderson-roundtable-bottle-rocket.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-rushmore.html">Rushmore</a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-royal-tenenbaums.html">The Royal Tenenbaums </a><br /><i>
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</i><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html">Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited</a><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> </div>
</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-63358650995746539402014-03-15T23:17:00.002-05:002014-07-22T11:27:50.362-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at <a href="http://thefilmtemple.blogspot.com/">The Film Temple</a> to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7DAj8uyKJnzJcbA88CpbxoLV5XzPY_HaUFKYzJ840ctHP_ZoKu8YenF5g3L6QVmkvbInTiFTCykDm-OB1ZYbFuFyHGyCNCn063IV5kKRt8aXTVDyHQF3SYiyWEQICV43IHgwv_f5YjvM/s1600/Wes-Anderson-by-Andrew-Eccles..jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7DAj8uyKJnzJcbA88CpbxoLV5XzPY_HaUFKYzJ840ctHP_ZoKu8YenF5g3L6QVmkvbInTiFTCykDm-OB1ZYbFuFyHGyCNCn063IV5kKRt8aXTVDyHQF3SYiyWEQICV43IHgwv_f5YjvM/s1600/Wes-Anderson-by-Andrew-Eccles..jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Loren Greenblatt: </b>I think in some ways <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums </i>serves as a companion piece to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>, where the earlier film gives us a young precocious lead bursting with talent and ambition, Anderson’s third film shows us the same kinds of people only to fast forward to show us how that talent and ambition can be beaten down and diminished. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max O’Connell: </b>It’s a more mature film, one that recognizes that initial success can lead to great failure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I’ve always felt that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums </i>was Wes Anderson’s greatest masterpiece, and it surprised me when I figured out recently that a lot of people don’t rate it so highly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It surprises me more when people don’t rank it in their top three. It’s so clearly his most personal, his most ambitious and his most formally exciting to me. It’s bizarre that there are Wes Anderson die-hards who don’t adore it the same way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s his first foray into this really large palette of world building in filmmaking. It’s a multigenerational New York tragedy, to some degree his version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Godfather</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>More specifically, it’s his version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Ambersons, </i>which it’s very consciously modeled after: the title, the downfall of a great family, and the detached narrator (Orson Welles in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ambersons</i>, Alec Baldwin here)…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> And that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amberson-</i>esque opening is one of the most arresting moments in Anderson’s carrier. It’s a prologue where we get the details of the Tenenbaum glory days along with the cracks in their façade of perfection. It starts with Royal (Gene Hackman) announcing that he and Ethel (Anjelica Huston) are splitting up to the kids. In a roundabout way, he sort of blames it on them even as he says that it wasn’t their fault. “Obviously we made certain sacrifices as a result of having children…”, cue the butler entering with a martini.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s perfect, because kids tend to blame themselves regardless, and he has not made things any better.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Something I really keyed into with this viewing was Royal and his intentions. He’s passive aggressive towards his kids because he’s intensely jealous of them. Everyone else in the family is a genius from a young age: Chas (Ben Stiller) is a real estate agent as a teen, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), whom he introduces as his “adopted daughter,” won $50,000 for a play she wrote in the ninth grade, and Richie (Luke Wilson) is a tennis champion. These kids are so bright, and the mother is also a beacon of warmth and supportiveness. I don’t think Royal felt like he was ever a part of that. He needs their love, but he needs to push them away. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And I don’t think that’s ever a conscious thing for him. He doesn’t seem to totally understand how horrible he’s been to them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>But at the same time, he’s consciously manipulative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yes he is, but he doesn’t take into consideration how this has shaped his kids until late in the film. But that opening, while not my personal favorite scene in the film, is right up there. It closely models <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ambersons</i> in how much ground it covers in six minutes. You have a similar montage to the buildup of clubs in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore, </i>but in a much more melancholy way. Instead of a joke about how overcommitted our young hero is, we see of buildup of how doomed they are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And it’s scored beautifully to an orchestral version of “Hey Jude,” which is notable because Paul McCartney wrote the song to John Lennon’s son, Julian, when John abandoned him. It’s very conscious, watching Royal interact with and then abandon his kids. It’s one of several songs choices where Anderson seems to be playing extratextual notes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s this glow of the past, but also this bitterness to it that reverberates throughout the film. I always get the sense that the Tenenbaum family is almost living in exile, that there’s this magical place of happiness they could return to if only the figured out their own demons. After the prologue, we jump twenty years and see that everything the kids have done in the interim is an attempt, to some degree, to hold onto the promise they had as kids.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Most of them are dressed in a slight variation of the way they dressed as kids. They’re all damaged to some degree. Margot is almost totally withdrawn emotionally, and she doesn’t respond to most of the people around her. Chas lashes out at everyone. Richie, meanwhile, is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too </i>sensitive. He’s so willing to forgive and embrace everyone in a way that’s not necessarily healthy, and whenever he is hurt, his reaction is completely without control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Royal related to Richie more than the others, took him out while he left the others behind, and that’s why Richie responds to him. He actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has </i>a relationship with him. And he doesn’t understand the bitterness that Chas and Margot have, because he didn’t experience the same degree of alienation that they did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And it’s sad, because Richie tries to be empathetic towards everyone, even Chas, who really tears into him, but he doesn’t fully appreciate how fully hurt everyone else is in that family. Chas confronts him, saying that he’s been suckered and that whatever he’s trying to get, it isn’t worth it. Richie responds by saying that he loves him, but he also unintentionally downplays the real pain that Chas feels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, there’s another major player here, who is notably not a Tenenbaum: Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson (who served as Anderson’s co-writer for the last time and received a Best Original Screenplay nomination for his efforts), once again playing best friend to his real life brother.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Here it works. For me, the characters they were playing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>should have been brothers, because of the dynamic in that film. Here, the separation is more intentional. Eli “always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” He lived in a little apartment with his grandmother, where he slept on a futon, and he’s very drawn to the Tenenbaums and their perceived encouragement. He’s not quite there in terms of their brilliance, but he tries to be. As an adult, he’s become professor and writer (just about everyone in the film has written a book other than Royal). Eli’s a third-rate Cormac McCarthy type who doesn’t get good reviews but has been very successful lately. He’s secretly in love with Margot, as are a lot of other people, most notably her husband Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), whom she’s drifting apart from, and Richie, who notes that Margot is only his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adopted </i>sister. As the film begins, Richie has been traveling the world to get away from her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s interesting to see Eli looking for the kind of approval that the Tenenbaums got. He didn’t get the kind of encouragement that they got from their mother (though Royal sanded away a lot of that), and whenever Margot makes an off-handed remark about how Eli’s talents are limited, he’s really hurt. “Please stop belittling me” is one of his key lines. Moving onto another subject, I feel like this is the best cast Anderson every assembled.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It has a lot of actors who don’t really get their due. Luke Wilson is fantastic as this sensitive, forlorn man, and I never understood how he didn’t become a bigger star. There’s a lot of levels. He’s very funny and warm, but remote. It’s a difficult balance to pull off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He’s frequently cast as the handsome but generic love interest, and he’s capable of so much more. We see that sometimes in stuff like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Idiocracy</i>, but not enough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Then there’s Ben Stiller, a performer I have a very contentious relationship with, because he does a lot of terrible stuff. I think he’s a very smart guy who doesn't always pick the right projects. He’s good at goofball but even in a lot of his comedic performances, he’s really good at playing abrasive, but until this point I don’t think<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’d ever played anyone quite this misanthropic and certainly didn’t again until <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greenberg</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Both characters bring up the neuroticisms to a pathological degree, where he lashes out at everyone around him. It’s easy to empathize with him even though he treats people terribly. Even Margot, who’s emotionally withdrawn, will defend people from Chas, as she does with Ethel’s suitor Henry Sherman (Danny Glover, perfectly understated). But Chas is an intensely lonely, intensely unhappy person, which has been exacerbated by the death of his wife in a plane crash. I’m not just thinking of his outbursts, I’m thinking of the scene where he briefly leaves his twin sons alone in his old room (they’ve moved back in with Ethel), only to re-enter about two seconds later and decide that he’s going to sleep in their room, too. It’s played for a laugh, but it’s so fucking sad to see how he has nothing else but his children, and he’s smothering them, and Wes uses the song “Look at Me” by John Lennon perfectly here. Royal warns Chas later, after he realizes what a shit he was, to go easy on his boys, because he doesn’t want Chas to end up like him for the exact opposite reasons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I think to some degree he has. He decided early on not to be his father, but he’s ended up just as bitter and vindictive, if not more so. At least Royal can be avuncular and warm in moments, even if you can’t tell if he’s being genuine. Since the death of his wife, Chas and his sons dress up in matching Adidas jumpsuits so he can pick them out of a crowd quickly, and he’s started running endless safety drills. He never feels safe, and that leads to him moving back to the Tenenbaum house. And that feeling of never being safe ties in perfectly to how a child might feel if they were raised by someone as untrustworthy as Royal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Wes Anderson wrote Royal directly for Gene Hackman, who wasn’t sure he wanted to take it because he prefers to disappear into characters…but how perfect is he here?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He’s excellent. He’s retired recently, and this is easily the peak of his late-period performances which consists mostly of thrillers of varying quality (let’s ignore that his last film was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Welcome to Mooseport</i>). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s a really important mixture of genuine charm and casual cruelty, one that another actor might overplay or, worse, underplay and try too hard to ingratiate himself to the audience. Or how about Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s received a bit of a backlash from overexposure recently, but I’ve always thought she was a talented actress. She’s frequently cast as a very charming character, even if they’re hurting on the inside (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hard Eight, Seven, Two Lovers</i>). Here, she is against type, not even sort of hiding her unhappiness. She’s so close to being emotionally dead that she’s had a number of affairs (and an annulled marriage that no one in her family knows about), because she’s looking for anyone to connect to. It makes the way she shuts people out even sadder – her family doesn’t even know she’s smoked since she was 12. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LO: </b>I love the black eyeliner she has. It makes her sad eyes so much more expressive, like a silent film character. Anderson also does a good job of framing her in ways that accentuate her loneliness. She’s often either to the side of everyone or in the far background compared to everyone else. The removal is a reaction to her, but it’s also a choice that she makes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>She doesn’t trust anyone to not hurt her. Even from the beginning, when we see the doors to all of the children’s bedrooms, hers is the only one that’s closed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>She was adopted, and Royal never let her forget it, so she never felt like she belonged. Maybe that’s why it was emotionally okay for her to embrace the feeling she has for Richie. It’s a way for her into the family, just like she’s a way into the family for Eli. It’s this very weird push-pull element.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>We should talk about the style of the film. Anderson really doubled down on the densely-packed anamorphic compositions, the dioramas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> He’s pushing his wide angle, anamorphic diorama aesthetic harder than ever before. The Tenenbaum house is treated very much like a dollhouse visually, particularly in the opening where Anderson moves from floor to floor carefully noting the intensely manicured décor of each room. At one point in that sequence, we see young Margot building a model set for one of her plays, and we can’t help but notice the echo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And while there’s a lot of sadness, how joyous is it to watch the way the film was made?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Oh, I absolutely adore it. It’s so meticulous and perfectly done. One thing I noticed about the house is…normally, especially in early color films, you paint the walls a pale color, then dress the characters in something more saturated so they pop out. Wes Anderson and a lot of other 90s directors said “fuck all that.” The Tenenbaum house is filled with saturated reds and pinks and blues, and it’s a very warm, cozy look for all the coldness within the façade. There’s also a lot of little text inserts, which we saw a bit in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>, but here there’s Helvetica and Futura fonts in here. He’s moved away from that a bit in recent years, but it’s very emblematic of Anderson’s style. Those modernist fonts call attention to themselves as objects first, and parts of words second, just like Anderson’s style does.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And yet, there are moments of…I wouldn’t say extreme verisimilitude, but we’ve talked about how handheld shots are an underrated part of Anderson’s style. There are two that are used as bookends of sorts, both related to Chas. The first shows him racing through his house with his kids for a fire drill that shows just how much his attempt to instill order on his life has actually thrown him into chaos. The second is at his mother’s wedding, after a stoned Eli crashes a car and almost runs over Chas’s sons. Not only is it the same style, but the same pounding drum music theme plays. It’s a nice touch that doesn’t get called out enough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Those drum parts of the scores are another underrated Wes Anderson element. Every score Mark Mothersbaugh did for him have them. Maybe Wes is a frustrated drummer?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>How about the framing, how it’s used as a way to hammer a joke home? Raleigh is a neurologist, and his recent subject, Dudley (Stephen Lea Sheppard) is, among other things, colorblind and dyslexic, but has an extraordinary sense of hearing. When Raleigh mentions that Dudley is color blind, Dudley is shown in a long shot down a hallway, and he overhears it and questions it, because he doesn’t realize he’s colorblind. As written, it’s kind of funny, but with those visual dynamics it’s hilarious. It doesn’t work without that framing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>We talked about darkness, loneliness, and suicide, but we should stress that this is a comedy, and a very funny one. Dudley has a few other great moments, like when he points out something that’s beside the point for the rest of the scene (“there’s a dent in that cab…and another dent…and another”).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s a bit that was played up in the trailers, but it does make me laugh – Chas mentions in a flashback that Royal stole bonds from him, to which Royal can only pause and give a nervous laugh. It’s played perfectly. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>There’s a montage at one point after Raleigh and Richie hire a private investigator to find out about Margot’s infidelities, and after we see a litany of men Margot has slept with (set to “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones), and all Raleigh can say is a quiet, understated, “She smokes.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And that’s only my second favorite montage in the movie. The best for me is set to Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” in which Royal takes his grandsons out on the town for a day of recklessness. It’s so joyful, and there’s an increasing level of absurdity, starting with them running into pools or racing go-karts, leading to theft, riding on the back of a garbage truck, and watching a dogfight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> That’s an interesting turning point in the film. He still has ulterior motives but it’s the first part where Royal does something that isn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">purely</i> selfish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yes. He tried bringing his family to his mother’s grave for the first time (Richie was the only one who was ever invited), but he botches it badly, especially as he trivializes the death of Chas’s wife with “oh, yeah, we have another body buried here.” Which is funny, but I felt terrible for laughing because he’s such a bad person. We’ve talked about how Anderson pays tributes to his favorite films without doing it in an obvious way. He reimagines his homages. Did you see any examples?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>There’s three I noticed in the “Me and Julio” sequence alone. There’s a moment of them driving go-karts under elevated trains that looks like the climax of another Hackman film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The French Connection. </i>The scene where they steal milk plays like a similar scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breakfast at Tiffany’s</i> (it should be noted that there’s a bit of Blake Edwards in Anderson’s sense of framing)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>And there’s also a sequence of three characters jumping into a pool that’s reminiscent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i> (a scene he already referenced in Rushmore the twist here is that the people jumping into the pool are happy). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Two that struck me are Elia Kazan homages. One is a new version of what Kazan did for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">East of Eden</i>, where James Dean was framed in a hallway to make it look very claustrophobic (using CinemaScope in a similar way that Anderson uses anamorphic framing). This is a bit of a jump, but there’s a shot of Ben Stiller on the stairs that’s somewhat similar, and this is a similar tale of generational conflict. The other is another homage to the scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Waterfront</i> where Brando confesses to Eva Marie Saint. Here, it’s a scene between Eli and Margot on the bridge, where they discuss Richie’s love for Margot. It’s not exactly the same, because instead of using a shot/reverse shot rhythm and drowned out dialogue, here we hear the dialogue and Anderson uses slow whip pans between them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s one of Anderson’s most interesting use of whip pans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s a very deliberate shift to see how their words can hurt each other even without them intending it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s almost like they’re playing tennis and the camera is following the ball.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Speaking of Margot’s veil coming down, there’s a great two-shot of Margot and Raleigh at a key point in the film where he confronts her about her infidelities. It’s so simple, yet so effective, to see those two finally brought together and having a frank conversation about what’s going on between them without them dodging. That actually joins the “I coulda been a contender” scene from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Waterfront </i>as one of my favorite two-shots, because it relies on the two actors to carry the scene and let their characters finally be honest with each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Let’s talk some more about notable uses of music. There’s a lot of really sorrowful songs here, like Nick Drake’s “Fly,” or the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says.” One of my favorites comes with Richie’s arrival in New York, where he’s waiting for Margot to pick him up, and she gets off the bus in slow motion to the sound of Nico singing “These Days,” and it’s gorgeous. There’s a great reverse of the camera dollying to Richie, and the look on his face is, “yep, that’s my girl.” And these sailors walk behind him like The Beatles in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Abbey Road</i> cover. It’s this beautifully orchestrated moment of artifice and one of my favorite moments in '00s American cinema. I feel that a lot of undue emphasis has been placed recently on films needing to look and feel realistic. Shots like that make me think, “No, why are we bothering with realism? Film can do so much more!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It can be so much more expressive, just like it is here (in a shot that’s a subtle take on the bit of Cybill Shepherd in slow motion in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taxi Driver</i>), and that moment never fails to send a chill down my spine. As for the scenes where Wes tones down the artifice, I love the shot of Royal following Ethel and lying to her, saying “I’m dying.” For the most part, it’s a single wide shot that shows Ethel going in and out of the frame as Royal changes his answer, but on “I’m dying,” there’s a very effective axial cut (or close to an axial cut) that brings us closer to Ethel but maintains an illusion of continuity, so it almost doesn't register with us. I love when he tone it down, because it makes stuff like “These Days” feel all the more powerful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I also love how each Tenenbaum has their own theme music: Eli has some of the more coked-up rhythms of The Clash’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Police & Thieves” and “Rock the Casbah.” Chas has the drum music. Ethel has two Bob Dylan instrumentals. We talk about how Anderson uses left-of-field songs from greatest artists. How’s “Billy” from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid</i> and “Wigwam” from the much-derided <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Self Portrait</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That album isn’t his best but it’s still underrated, but that song is so joyous that every time I feel sad, I listen to “Wigwam” and I feel happy again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>We need to also talk about…oh boy…”Needle in the Hay.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>(heavy sigh) Gimme a second…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>That is still the toughest scene that Anderson has ever shot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>We’re in the middle of this comedy that’s dark, but still very funny. But Richie is at his lowest point. Margot has been with so many men, none of them him, and he’s so sensitive that he’s thinking, “She’ll never look at me.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And when Richie enters the bathroom, the lighting is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">much </i>darker than it’s been in the rest of the film. It goes from a warm look to a darkish blue hue, as if Ridley Scott briefly took over.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He takes off his thick sunglasses for the second time in the entire film. He cuts his hair, he shaves his beard, and it’s cut in a very French New Wave style with a lot of jump cuts. And as “Needle in the Hay” plays, he decides he’s going to kill himself, and there’s a lot of blood. It’s the most unexpected and daring thing Anderson has ever done. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>But it’s a very well-handled tone shift for what’s one of the major fulcrums of the film, not just for how it sets up Richie’s relationship with Margot, but it’s also the point where the family starts to come together a bit, and where Royal realizes what a shit he’s been and how devastating his affect on his kids was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>“Needle in the Hay” works so well that it makes you sad that the initial plan to have Elliott Smith record material specifically for the film, including a cover of “Hey Jude” for the opening, but that plan didn’t pan out due to his mounting personal issues (his death by suicide two years later doesn't make it any easier to watch).</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">The “Hey Jude” choice at the begging was apparently part of a larger plan to bookend the film with Beatles songs that fell through due to the difficulty of getting Beatles material which is the start of a general theme in Anderson films after this to highlight a particular artist in each soundtrack (Wes’s original choice for the ending was an alternate take of “I’m Looking Through You,” after which he moved on to the Beach Boy’s “Sloop John B” before settling on Van Morrison’s “Everyone”).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Another key musical scene involves The Rolling Stones: a left-of-field choice with “She Smiled Sweetly,” followed by “Ruby Tuesday,” a big hit, both off of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Between the Buttons </i>album.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s a very intimate scene, the first where Richie and Margot get a real chance to be alone. It’s post-suicide attempt, and they’re being very frank with each other. It’s interesting to see two songs by the same artist used back-to-back, that’s something people don’t do often.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>He’s playing these songs against type. So even though Ruby Tuesday is easily the more melancholy song. The way he uses it, it becomes downright triumphant .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>For the record, we completely disagree on the meaning of that song’s placement. You see it as a moment of progress for Richie, now that he and Margot have acknowledged their love for each other. I see it as a moment of great uncertainty, not unlike the ending of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i>, because they’re unsure of how they’re going to deal with it or move forward. I also think that viewing that scene as a triumph makes the cigarette exchange between Richie and Margot, the real triumphant scene, redundant. Considering Margot’s “I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that, Richie” line, “Ruby Tuesday” is used perfectly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to </i>type, not against type. It’s a beautiful moment because they’re so uncertain. The song just happens to have an up-tempo rhythm that makes it a perfect segue to the next chapter, where things actually do start to get a little better for everyone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Another interesting thing about the style is the conceit that the film is a novel. Every section of the film is broken up into chapters, complete with a shot of a title page. It’s such a cute thing that goes right in with the literary New York fairytale thing, not to mention the fact that just about everyone in this film is a published author.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Here’s the thing about it, though: I remember reading in a review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou </i>where Owen Gleiberman said that he wished that Anderson would stop having a tone of “Isn’t it ironic?” for everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>What? No…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO:</b> His films are so earnest that I don’t know how anyone could get that. You’ve mentioned what separates Anderson from imitators like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Napoleon Dynamite </i>is the level of empathy that Anderson allows his characters, even the minor ones, while being just removed enough to avoid wallowing like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Garden State.</i> Something that struck me this time was Dudley, who’s the jokiest character in the film, but there’s a shift that Raleigh takes towards him. In the beginning, he laughs at Dudley’s predicament. “How bizarre!” By the end, he still has a sense of humor about Dudley (“Can the boy tell time?” “Oh, my lord, no”), but he hugs Dudley closer to him. This is the kid he’s living for now, someone he can help.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>His characters are so well realized that we could spend the whole review psychoanalyzing these people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I can empathize with everyone on screen. It’s a real Renoir feeling. Richie is quick to forgive, but he doesn’t understand the depth of Chas’s pain, and Chas resents him because of it, not to mention because he was Royal’s favorite. The level of resentment these characters have for each other is understandable, and yet by the end we see how much they care for each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Agreed, there’s a lot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rules of the Game </i>in this film (lots of hidden and unrequited love affairs between upperclass people). One of the most heartfelt moments is between Eli and Richie. Richie tries to get him into rehab, and Eli says, “I wish you would’ve done this when I was a kid.” “You didn’t have a drug problem then.” “Yeah, but it would have meant a lot to me.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>The two best directors working today, for me, are Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums</i> has a lot in common with P.T. Anderson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magnolia</i>. Both are about how what happens to people as children shape their adulthood, about their pain and loneliness, about the humanization of the people who hurt them, and how difficult it is to move on, but both films are ultimately optimistic. And you talked about that moment, but I’m always touched by everything Chas does in the final twenty minutes. First, when he goes up to Henry Sherman to say that he’s a widower too – it’s like he’s looking for a new dad. And he does finally embrace Royal, saying, “I had a rough year, dad,” the response being, “I know you have, Chazzie.” I always need a minute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Wes has these moments of empathy with these characters. It never feels fake. Sometimes it’s a bit buried because the performances are minimalistic, or the style is arch, but the more you rewatch them, the more you realize how much the emotion is there and how genuine it is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. Another example is when Royal realizes how bad his advice has been for his children, and he admits that to Richie. He wants to have done better, and that counts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>“Can’t someone be a shit their whole life and repair the damage?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There are so many lines that could serve as the thesis. That’s just one of the best. And I love how the first things he can do to repair that damage is get a divorce. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>We need to make sure we talk about Anjelica Huston, who’s so warm and so amazing in this film. You almost wonder how it is that she and Margot never connected more, I think Margot was always going to be on the outside, but Etheline tries so hard to do good for them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. They’re messes of people, but they’d be a lot worse without Etheline. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> There’s something interesting that I noticed this time around. When they announce the divorce, it’s Royal by himself. I don’t think he’s doing this to take initiative. I feel like she left it to him to do this. And that’s an interesting choice, that she put it off on him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Why don’t we talk about the last 15 minutes, which wreck me completely. It starts with this great long crane shot that’s maybe slightly ostentatious, but essential. It moves around after the car accident at the wedding, where Eli everyone has found some solace. Eli is confessing that he’s on drugs and he needs help, but the cop booking him is a fan. Raleigh and Dudley get goofy and they get a connection. The Shermans are analyzing. Etheline is taking care of the boys. And Chas and Royal finally mend their relationship.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And then, after we get through the scene where Richie and Margot embrace their odd let’s-forget-we-were-raised-as-siblings relationship, “The Fairest of the Seasons” by Nico starts. The epilogue is perfect because of how it ties Chas to Royal, the son who hated him the most turns out to be the one who’s closest to him. It’s such a perfect moment of catharsis, and the shot of Gene Hackman on the ambulance gurney, slowly looking over with the air mask on gets me every time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>You talked about how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i> was a happy ending that nonetheless wasn’t naïve and knew that they’d still have to work through problems. That’s here, too. There’s negative stuff left behind: Margot’s play fails, Eli’s in rehab working through things but he’s lost Margot, Raleigh has Dudley but lost Margot, Richie is teaching kids, probably better adjusted than most. They have each other, so they’re going to be OK, and Royal finally made things right after being a shit his whole life. Those hurt feelings can be mended even if they can’t be totally cleared away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Then there’s the funeral, which I think is the last time Wes Anderson used slow-motion as the last shot if you include the end credits of the other movies. And it’s perfect here. My favorite detail about this funeral, because it needs a laugh for all of the somberness, is that Ari and Uzi have black jumpsuits for the funeral, and they’re firing BB guns in a salute. That’s a Wes Anderson detail if there ever was one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s a Wes Anderson detail, and it’s a nice throwback to Chas having been shot in the hand by Royal, showing how he’s let his anger go. And then that epitaph is perfect: “Died Pulling His Family From the Wreckage of a Destroyed, Sinking Battleship.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>With “Everyone” by Van Morrison playing them out in slow-motion. It’s just…I don’t know what else I can say. I think it’s his best film,</span><br />
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<b>LOREN'S GRADE: A</b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MAX'S GRADE: A</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b>That concludes our discussion of The Royal Tenenbaums, if you enjoyed it feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas on facebook by clicking <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GBlattsDreams/">here</a><b>.</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br />
</b></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/02/wes-anderson-roundtable-bottle-rocket.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-rushmore.html">Rushmore</a><br /><i>
The Royal Tenenbaums </i><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/04/wes-anderson-roundtable-life-aquatic.html">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html">Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited</a><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> </div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-44857625639524365882014-03-04T20:37:00.000-06:002014-07-22T11:29:26.909-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: RUSHMORE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max O’Connell: </b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>got Wes Anderson noticed
in a few places, but by and large no one was really prepared for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>. One of the most daring and
original comedies to come out of the independent film movement, it became an
instant cult classic, an example of how to make a comedy as fresh and formally
exciting as any drama. It’s been over 15 years since its release, but it feels
like it could have been made yesterday. <br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Loren Greenblatt: </b>Remember how we had that nuanced debate about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>last time? That ain’t gonna happen this time, I think we both love this film beyond all reason. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore</i>. I feel almost like I can’t talk about it reasonably, it makes me so indescribably happy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It was a film I saw when I was 15 years old, the same age as the character. For a long time, it was the most important film for me. Weirdly enough, I see an uncomfortable lot of myself in Max Fischer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I think anyone who ever had any sort of precocious talent can relate to Max Fischer. But who is Max Fischer?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:</b> Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is a teenager who’s dazzled by the possibility of life, but who gets carried away trying to grasp it and lets everything get away from him. Despite his intellect and drive he’s about to flunk out of the titular prep school to which he earned a scholarship in 1<sup>st</sup> grade (“I wrote a little one act about Watergate”). There’s a great montage early on showing how off-kilter his priorities are by showing us the clubs he’s involved with, I counted 19, set to The Creation’s “Making Time.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He’s almost uncommonly intelligent, but he doesn’t have the least bit of focus in the right places, and in a sense he sees his actual studies as beneath him. He will overcommit to the point where he’s doing great things, but he’s also failing out of class. “He’s one of the worst students we’ve got.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He does overcommit. But I also think he’s overcompensating in a way. He’s a working-class kid in a school for rich preppies, and he never got over his mother’s death. He’s hiding who he is. I think his greatest fear is being seen as ordinary in some way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He overcompensates with an almost impossible level of confidence, which does attract a lot of people, especially Dirk (Mason Gamble), his younger chapel partner and close confidant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Dirk Calloway is the fucking man.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He’s the fucking man, and he’s the only one with a good head on his shoulders, as he’s one of the only one who operates out of kindness and consideration most of the time. But he attracts other people, including steel magnate Herman Blume (Bill Murray). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s this very bizarre friendship between a 50-something man and a teenager. There’s this wonderful montage near the end where they’re riding bikes and popping wheelies, among other goofball stuff. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>The interesting thing about the Bill Murray character is that he’s like an older version of, well, the Bill Murray character, the guy we loved in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stripes </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghostbusters</i> who’s had his devil-may-care attitude worn down, and who’s deeply unhappy in spite of everything he has, or maybe because of it. He’s middle-aged, he’s deeply sad, and he sees a lot of himself in Max.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I completely agree. This is a film that came in a very interesting point in Bill Murray’s career. He had a few semi-dramatic hits like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Groundhog Day, </i>but he was stuck doing the stereotypical late-period funnyman trife. He was in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Space Jam</i> two years before this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Larger Than Life</i>, that “Bill Murray takes an elephant cross-country” movie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s wacky! He was getting tired of it, and he was looking for something better. He found it in Wes Anderson, and he’s been in every Wes Anderson film since. Hell, he loved the script for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore </i>so much he offered to do it for free. This is Venkman from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghostbusters </i>in ten years, in the middle of a failed marriage with kids he doesn’t like. There’s a really interesting undercurrent of sadness to it, which helps make it distinctive. This is a comedy, but it’s a dark comedy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And a very melancholy one. I’d like to talk a little bit about the style of the film. You felt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket</i> didn’t take place fully in Wes Anderson Land yet. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore, </i>I assume, does?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Oh yeah, he got the passport status moved down to X5, to quote a different Anderson film. He had the budget he needed to do what he wanted to do visually this time. Here that style works as an extension of Max’s plays (literally, with those curtains throughout the film). It’s sort of his ultimate refuge from reality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s some other interesting things about the look of the film. There’s this theory I’ve had for a while, that a lot of critics we respect have echoed (including Matt Zoller Seitz, whose book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wes Anderson Collection </i>is essential reading). A lot of the reasons that the compositions are so orderly is that these characters are trying to keep their lives in an impossible level of control. We get to see how they can’t. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I completely agree. Max is this guy who’s trying to have a ridiculous amount of control over his world, what with the clubs, and those amazing little handwritten invites that tell everyone when they should come and go. It’s his way of trying to force his control over the world he’s in. It’s hilarious what he does by sheer force of will, like trying to build an aquarium under the nose of the faculty. He has this confidence and charisma to him that makes you believe that he really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could </i>do that (Schwartzman is so good here). The dark side of that is that he’s tremendously entitled, and he has an out of control ego.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He’s an arrogant little shit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He is, and every teenager is an arrogant little shit at some point, and he’s going through that phase now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Some of the things I noticed visually is a shot in the opening scene where we see how perfectly organized Max’s desk is. It’s a throwback to what Scorsese sometimes does with how characters ritualistically arrange things (think of the guns in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taxi Driver</i>), but where Scorsese does it religiously, Max does it as a way of controlling things. It’s very charming, but it also shows how trapped he is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s very OCD.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Another thing is how much more assured Anderson is with the editing. There’s a very simple scene between Max and his crush, the kindergarten teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). The way it cuts back and forth between the characters from the wide, deep focus shots in the anamorphic framing to much tighter shots on the character’s faces, it’s a way to show how at one point, they’re closer to each other psychologically, and at another, they’re further. An example of when they’re further, for example, is after Rosemary informs Max that a relationship between the two could never, ever happen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The library scene is wonderfully staged. There’s another transition I noticed, where, being an arrogant little shit, he tries to get revenge on Blume, who’s also fallen in love with Rosemary and started a relationship with her. His first act of revenge is burning leaves on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore </i>school ground, and in the next scene, he sabotages Blume’s marriage by giving his wife information about the affair. And Anderson cuts from the burning leaves to a garage building that’s in smoke. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There are other scenes of him getting back at Blume, too. We’ll talk about some of the other great uses of music in the film, but I love the use of Donovan’s melancholy “Jersey Thursday” in both Max’s burning the leaves and flipping the bird to Rushmore principle Dr. Guggenheim (played wonderfully by Brian Cox) and giving the information to Mrs. Blume. But even better is the montage of Max vs. Blume set to the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Which is an especially long song, but he mostly uses one movement where the refrain is “you are forgiven!” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Which, judging by what’s going on the montage, not so much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And they get pretty dark with it. It starts off with little things like Max putting bees in Blume’s hotel suite, escalates to Blume running over Max’s bike, and then gets to the point where Max cuts the brakes to Blume’s car, at which point we’ve gone off the deep end. There is something pathological about him. There were some critics at the time that wondered if Max was going to kill everyone at the end of the film.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And there were some who felt the tone of that scene was misjudged. I think Ebert gave the film 2 ½ stars because he felt it didn’t know whether it wanted to be whimsical or dark. But it does show how immature these two are, and how they have no sense of proportion. And much of the movie is about them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">finding </i>that balance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And I’m not going to lie, the idea that he’d go psycho crossed my mind the first time I saw it for about half a second (he does purchase a large amount of dynamite near the end). But Anderson is in control, and on repeat viewings especially, it’s clear that as dark as it is, this film is too gentle to end up that way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>For all of the OCD framing, it’s a delicately handled film.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love the plays that he throws on as part of his escape from reality. He does a rehash of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serpico–</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s not a rehash<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serpico! </i>He does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serpico!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Here’s a question I have – in the film, he’s credited as the writer, not the adapter. In the world of the film is he meant to have written <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serpico?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>No. I think after a while, he’s remaking the classics of New Hollywood. He’s got <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serpico</i>, and then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heaven & Hell </i>is him remaking a lot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apocalypse Now</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It is every Vietnam War movie ever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>The way I see it, it shows how in debt young artists are to their influences, and it’s a nice tongue-in-cheek joke about how the 90s American independent film directors were in debt to New Hollywood. For god’s sake, the year before shows Paul Thomas Anderson blending Scorsese, Altman, and Demme (among others) for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boogie Nights. </i>You could play spot-the-reference the whole time if you wanted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boogie Nights </i>hasn’t completely shaken that criticism, unfortunately. Wes Anderson isn’t completely immune to that either. Though I see more French New Wave than 70s New Wave in here. I was watching Godard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Band of Outsiders</i>, and there’s a lot linking that to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore, </i>with this tenuous relationship fantasy and reality, and the handheld camerawork that isn’t talked about enough when it comes to Wes Anderson.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s also an early classroom scene (“the hardest geometry problem in the world”) that consciously echoes a shot from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 400 Blows, </i>too. There’s other shots taken from Lindsay Anderson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if…</i> (part of the 1960s British Angry Young Man New Wave), where instead of a machine-gun shootout, Max has a BB gun he uses on the bully. And there’s some American New Wave stuff. I mentioned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taxi Driver</i>, but there are also some bits of framing that are reminiscent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harold and Maude</i>, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Another throwback to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taxi Driver</i> in that phone scene at Grover Cleveland, with an uncomfortable moment of things turning for the protagonist. Instead of the camera panning away as he’s rejected, we see it in all of its glory as Blume betrays him on the other line and the teacher hangs up the phone for him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He does these references, but they’re never too obvious. He reimagines them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s another scene that’s a direct reference to one of my favorite movies, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Waterfront</i>, where the sound is drowned out by a foghorn as the protagonist tells someone bad news. It’s very close, but the compositions aren’t exact. It’s him rearranging films he loves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s very interesting to see Anderson talk about his influences. I never hear him talking about proto-Anderson films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harold and Maude</i>. He said his primary visual influence on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore </i>was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s Baby.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>(laughs very loudly in disbelief) Where’d you hear that?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s in a Charlie Rose interview. The way he shoots reality slightly off-kilter influenced him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>That’s incredible. There is a break between reality and fantasy in all of Anderson’s films, and this film has curtains at the beginning of every new month in the school year, almost as if we’re watching act breaks in Max’s play of his story. There’s a level of artificiality you’re either going to go for or not, and holy god, do we go for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>We’ve seen other directors try to do Wes Anderson’s thing, and it comes off as cloying or stilted. I’m thinking of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Napoleon Dynamite.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Or Jared Hess in general. I can also think of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Little Miss Sunshine</i>, which I don’t dislike as much as some, but which is Wes Anderson/early David O. Russell lite. Or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Garden State</i>, which I do dislike intensely. They don’t have the same warmth or self-criticism as much as Anderson, and they don’t balance whimsy and melancholy nearly as well, as you said in the last entry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And that’s something that, starting with this, he does on pretty much every film. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Speaking of influences, there are a lot of throwbacks to Mike Nichols’s New Hollywood starter <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate. </i>It’s pretty clear that Blume’s wife, even before the affair with Rosemary, is having her own affair, and Anderson described it as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate </i>as seen from Mr. Robinson’s point-of-view.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Well there’s that scene at the pool party, where instead of Ben Braddock coasting in the water, we see Herman Blume sinking to the bottom of the pool. It’s a moment of great depression, and it’s a very conscious echo. We can’t really talk about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore </i>without mentioning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i>. There’s a very interesting way where I can see Ben Braddock as an older Max Fischer with the verve kicked out of him. And there is a similar sense of melancholy where the world is slowly breaking him. Hell, Herman Blume could be Ben Braddock twenty years later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah, that great line about what happened to Ben and Elaine, “They became their parents.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Mmhmm. It’s part of what makes the friendship between Max and Blume work, they’re kind of going through a similar thing at different points in their lives. I can sort of see it in Blume’s intro, where he’s telling all of the working-class kids to take down the rich kids. There’s a bit of that rambunctiousness that he’s trying to force back into his life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>There’s an intense loneliness in all three of the main characters that bands them together. Herman is losing his wife, and his kids are annoying dipshits. Max lost his mother, and he’s in a school where he’s precocious to the point where he can be off-putting, and he’s a working-class kid hiding the fact that his father (Seymour Cassel) is a barber. It’s sad, since his father is so supportive, and he relates to the “take the rich kids down” thing, but he can’t quite admit that he doesn’t come from the same stock. He wants the appearance of success at all times. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That’s what I like about the bully, Magnus (Stephen McCole), a Scottish student who sees right through Max. There’s a very humanizing moment near the end where they recognize each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. Before that, Magnus is the one person who sees that Max can be a phony and that he uses people, which Max sees as a threat (also, Magnus is kind of an asshole himself). As Max grows and starts to have more empathy for others, he sees the goodness in Magnus. They’re friends by the end! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love the way they make up. It could have been so schmaltzy, but instead Max shoots him with a BB gun, and then offers him a part in his next play. Now, we also have to talk about the third major character, Rosemary, who’s lonely in her own way. Max finds her when he reads an inscription she wrote in a book given by her old husband, Edward Appleby. She lives in his room, surrounded by his stuff. She never got over it, and Max never got over the death of his mother – he literally lives next to the cemetery where she’s buried. He cuts through it on the way to school.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I feel that with Rosemary, he does fall for her, but much of it is also that he’s found someone warm and maternal as a surrogate mother. She’s so encouraging that I see it as him finding a new version of the person who supported him when he was a kid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I didn’t see that, but I see how you see it. In my mind his courtship of her is another way he’s trying to find a shortcut to adulthood by having an adult girlfriend rather than someone his own age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does find a girl his own age by the end, Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), a wonderful, bright, sweet person that he treats horribly throughout most of the movie. Part of his growing up is realizing that he could act his own age and realize that he’s still a kid to some degree.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And here’s the thing – he wants to grow up, but he also wants to stay in adolescence. Blume asks him what his secret is, if he’s got it so figured out. Max’s solution is “Find something you love and do it for the rest of your life. Mine’s going to Rushmore.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And when he’s expelled for the aquarium fiasco it shatters his reality, but he tries to pretend. After enrolling in public school he should theoretically drop the prep act and stop pretending to be rich, but he doubles down. He keeps wearing the Rushmore uniform like a suit of armor, and he tries to transport his Rushmore clubs to Grover Cleveland High School (he starts a fencing team, which is inexplicably not popular). But this school won’t put up with his shit as much. Rushmore at least gave him awards for Perfect Attendance and Punctuality (which, aren’t those pretty close to being the same thing?), but this school hangs up on his phone call to Blume when he doesn’t have a phone pass.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I love how he gives a speech about who he is when he arrives. He’s not exactly bullied, but they look at him like he’s this weird space alien, like, “Is this guy for real?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And when he’s led out by police later after he cuts Blume’s brakes, he’s posing like a badass and it’s moving in slow motion, and girls are like, “Him?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I love that, and no one thinks he’s a badass, no one finds him nearly that charming…except for Margaret Yang, who’s equally driven, and who’s attracted to his confidence and his ambition. I also love how the first thing that really endears Margaret to Max is that we learn she faked her science project results. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>There’s a bit of phoniness in both of them. They’re trying too hard for things that they might be good at, but they’re not where they want to be. I get that frustration; I look back on the stuff I wrote when I was that age and it sucks! It goes to your theory that the best he can do at this point is adapt someone else’s stuff.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love the arrangement of that scene. Rosemary has to reject Max, then we go to the play, Max’s retreat from reality (with the sound of applause exaggerated to an impossible degree). And then we’re brought to the dinner with Max, Blume, Rosemary and Dr. Peter Flynn (Wilson), the most affable and mild-mannered man ever. She’s getting a little cautious, and Max is upset, because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he was not invited</i>. He gets drunk because Blume made a very wise decision to buy him a whiskey-and-soda, and it goes over about as well as you’d expect. He acts like such an adult sometimes that you can understand how an adult might forget, oh yeah, he’s an immature teenager.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It speaks to how precocious teenagers are treated like adults, and then they do something that shows the adults why they can’t do that. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>There’s some interesting foreshadowing to Anderson’s later films, like the Jacques Cousteau book that hints at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou</i>, or the subplot about the aquarium. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Do we want to talk about Anderson’s use of music? We’ve talked about his use of unexpected songs from great musicians. He doesn't use The Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction”, he uses “I Am Waiting”, this great melancholy song that perfectly soundtracks the point where everyone in the film is lonely. Cross has left Blume, Blume is stuck in a hotel without his kids or wife, Max has essentially dropped out of school, Margaret is trying to connect to Max but can’t…there’s so many shots in this montage where characters are isolated in a side of the frame to augment their loneliness, and “I Am Waiting” is perfect for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And later on, we get “Oh Yoko” by John Lennon for when Max and Blume rekindle their friendship and start getting back in the swing of things. No one would expect you to use those John Lennon songs, but it’s so delightful and earnest for the scene. “In the middle of a shave, I call your name”, how wonderful is that?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>What are some of the better lines in this movie for you?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>“You’re like an old clipper ship captain, you’re married to the sea.” “I know, but I’ve been out to sea for a long time.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I love the exchange when Max visits Guggeheim in the hospital after he’s had a stroke. This is the guy who was so patient with Max for so long that you can’t blame him for finally losing it, and when Max visits him out of genuine kindness, I love that he goes from being resting in a hospital to “WHADDYA WANT? IT’S FISCHER!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That scene almost doesn’t work for me, actually. It’s a good laugh, but it’s much broader than the rest of the film. I’m not complaining too much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s maybe a little broader, but it’s funny, so it works. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The whole exchange at the end in the last scene of the film, where they explain that the Vietnam play was canceled when he tried to perform it at Rushmore. Why? “Too political?” “No, a kid got his finger blown off during rehearsals.” And the weird running gag of everyone pretending they’re getting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJKTkcq_xh4">handjobs</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s the immaturity of the characters. It says something that Max can’t think of anything beyond that when it comes to sex. When he tries to kiss Rosemary, and Rosemary confronts him by flat-out asking what he expects with regards to sex, he’s clearly uncomfortable with it. He’s just a kid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Yeah. That’s a very hard scene to watch. It’s what separates Anderson from other comedies. He’s willing to go to dark and uncomfortable places.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He never forgets that, as messed up as these people are, they’re still people. They’re worthy of dignity. The level of empathy he has for them is essential, because it’s a movie that shows growing up as learning to care about people other than yourself. Max learns to really appreciate Rosemary’s loss. He fakes being hit by a car in his last asshole act, but he realizes the profound hole her husband’s death left in her life, and how profoundly lonely Blume is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That’s an interesting scene, because it starts with him being an asshole. He’s heard that Rosemary dumped Blume, and he’s there in part to get them together again, and in part to charm her. He climbs a ladder onto her roof to get into her room and brings a mix CD with an Yves Montand song to romance her. But he realizes, “Oh, fuck, I’m a dick.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>He also apologizes to Dirk and Margaret by the end, and the play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heaven and Hell</i>, for all of its clichés, has a remarkable effect on the characters. On one hand, the Rushmore custodian played by Kumar Pallana thinks it’s hilarious (“Best play ever, man”), but Blume who was “in the shit” during the Vietnam War, is moved by it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love how you can tell he was there because he’s the only one who doesn’t put on the safety goggles and earplugs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>The sweetness of his gestures by the end, with the dedication of the play to Rosemary’s husband along with his mother. That whole ending is sweet. He’s mended his relationship with his friends, everyone has a partner for the dance. He’s mended the relationship between Rosemary and Blume, he’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">finally </i>realized that Margaret Yang is incredible and they’re dating. There’s a friendly dance at the end between Blume and Margaret, and Rosemary and Max are left alone. There’s this great off-center framing that I think Anderson said is influenced by Demme. The shot/reverse shot shows Max and Rosemary on opposite sides of the frame, but the way it’s arranged actually shows them close together rather than far apart. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I love that scene. It’s a perfect end. It’s a great teenager scene where there’s a happy ending, and he’s over her, but he’s still getting over her a little bit. But it’s going to be okay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Because he’s learned to care about other people. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s not a trite “everything is solved” thing. It’s slightly more mature. And it’s hammered home by the use of the Faces’ “Ooh La La”, a melancholy but still upbeat retrospective on relationships.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Not to mention another left-of-field song choice from Anderson, since “Ooh La La” is the one song by the Faces sung by Ron Wood rather than Rod Stewart. It’s a slightly ironic use of the song, since the lyrics are to some degree sexist, but the exuberance and the wistfulness of the song fits. And as the various couples dance in slow motion and the curtains close, we end the film smiling. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I think a lot of times, great directors’ first films are a little uneven, but with Wes Anderson, he really hit a home run on the second film. This is the arrival of a major director.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s still close to being my favorite of his, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who named it as their favorite. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><b>LOREN'S GRADE: A</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MAX'S GRADE: A </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/02/wes-anderson-roundtable-bottle-rocket.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Rushmore</i><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-royal-tenenbaums.html">The Royal Tenenbaums </a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/04/wes-anderson-roundtable-life-aquatic.html">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html">Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited</a><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> <br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-37893861626318462822014-02-26T11:44:00.001-06:002014-07-22T11:30:39.928-05:00WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: BOTTLE ROCKET SHORT/FEATURE <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Loren Greenblatt: </b>The thing that strikes me about Wes Anderson in comparison to the other directors we’ve talked about is that while Cameron and Del Toro are certainly very stylized, they are also among the small percentage of directors with public personas that are separate from their films. Cameron is famously prickly and arrogant, whereas Del Toro is a happy 10-year-old on a sugar binge. Anderson, on the other hand, has a sort of invisible persona. He does interviews galore but I feel the general public knows him primarily as an extension of his visual style than as his own person, and I think that’s by design.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Max O’Connell</b>: Well, he’s a very private person, and I think he wants to be known for his work more than his personality. And his work is well known: for a while in the early 2000s, he spawned more imitators than anyone on the art house scene since Tarantino. It also makes his work ripe for parody, both good (Wes Anderson <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5KfHEoZDKI"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spider-Man</i></a>) and terrible (SNL’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders</i>, which makes references in place of jokes). But before Wes Anderson was the most idiosyncratic comedic director working today, he was just some kid from Austin, Texas.</span></div>
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13Lsc4-qkSxWcqvesJ3KuiVB0i0GZV_eBXIIkkSWT6AvyZVUgz6j5_BscceAMNot3MVghtwG1jmdyym3jh1p1VR9_Q33QPsTWR9r7YYWk-COlkQL7pxgdNTCrHTWXK0MMRu7Agc7Aa-8/s1600/1964735_10152225694689060_393741926_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13Lsc4-qkSxWcqvesJ3KuiVB0i0GZV_eBXIIkkSWT6AvyZVUgz6j5_BscceAMNot3MVghtwG1jmdyym3jh1p1VR9_Q33QPsTWR9r7YYWk-COlkQL7pxgdNTCrHTWXK0MMRu7Agc7Aa-8/s1600/1964735_10152225694689060_393741926_n.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>He went to University of Texas where he met two of his most important collaborators, Luke and Owen Wilson. Soon, they started planning a feature film called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket</i>, which eventually became a delightful 13-minute short. The short is self-contained but<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>it’s meant to be part of a larger story. The idea was that this was part one, and they’d keep making them, like installments in a serial. The story centers on Dignan and Anthony (Owen and Luke Wilson, respectively), best buddies planning a house burglary.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>The short played at Sundance, where it got them noticed by a lot of people, most noticeably Polly Platt (the ex-wife of Peter Bogdanovich who had worked as a writer or production designer on most of his notable films) and one of her frequent production partners, none other than James L. Brooks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it’s easy to see why. Clearly Anderson and co are on a budget, and it’s much rougher and looser than we’ve come to expect from him, but I love how from the beginning of his career, he mostly knows what he’s doing. The editing is really crisp. Everything feels very exact.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s rough, but it derives certain energy from that roughness. His music choices are already really interesting; the use of jazz throughout almost makes it feel like a more high-energy Woody Allen movie. Also you can already see a lot of his personal quirks – there’s already his very peculiar type of close-up and insert shots and his whimsical, freewheeling characters, particularly Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the short).<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>You talked about his visual quirks. Obviously, he doesn’t really have the money to do those dioramas or the anamorphic widescreen he’s known for, but he’s also got a lot of throwbacks to a number of French New Wave movies he’s a fan of. I’m fond of a shot near a pinball machine that deliberately evokes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The 400 Blows, </i>which has similarly likable (if much younger) troublemakers. But there’s also nods to more peculiar influences: he uses Vince Guaraldi’s “Skating” theme from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Charlie Brown Christmas </i>when the characters have target practice. And that’s really charming, because it gets to the heart of these characters – they’re crooks, but they’re essentially a bunch of kids.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>It’s a very interesting juxtaposition: these people are setting out to do something dangerous that does have victims, but they approach it with childlike innocence. It hints at the reality/fantasy struggle that defines many of Anderson’s films. I wish that idea was fully explored in the feature, but it is clearly there in both incarnations of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket</i>, like many of Anderson’s characters, everyone in here is either bigger than life, or trying to be.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>To me, something that struck me in the fantasy/reality divide is how much they’re playing at bigger than life. We don’t see the bookstore robbery that’s shown in the feature version, but they’re kind of playing themselves up as cool criminals, but the movie ends with them betting on a race and Owen Wilson’s character cheating. They’re just a couple of innocent goofs at heart, really.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I really like that scene. It really encapsulates something essential about this material and I wish there were some version of it in the feature.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Well the most comparable section is the feature’s first act, which is more or less a remake of the material in the short. The main difference is that the feature tells that part of the story with more focus. Again, we get Luke and Owen Wilson planning the house robbery, but it’s colored by a new scene where we see Anthony leaving a mental institution. In the end Anthony is much more stable and down to earth, though melancholy, where Dignan is the goofy, wildcard dreamer who’s introduced trying to break Anthony out of the institute, hilariously not realizing that it’s a voluntary stay. Of the two, Dignan is also the ringleader who has a 50-year plan on how the two will become internationally renowned criminals.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">We get a better sense of their dynamic. There’s this sense of obligation between the characters. You get the sense that Dignan is doing all this intense planning not just to satisfy his own boyish urges, but to pull Anthony out of his funk in a very misguided way that Anthony doesn’t really want or need. Likewise Anthony goes along with Dignan because he thinks it’ll be good for him, but it in the end it really serves no one and that’s the gag. This complicated tension isn’t there as much in the short, which features a long conversation where they argue over the details of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Starsky and Hutch </i>episode which has a more aimless flavor we associate more with Linklater and Tarantino than Anderson and while it’s fine for the short, it’s ultimately one of the more fortunate casualties of the focus the team brought to the film version<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">.</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. You get hints of it in the short where they start talking about the plans they’ve got, and Dignan compliments Anthony on the things he thought of that wouldn’t have come to mind for Dignan. That’s great, but here, the plan is comically exaggerated. Wes Anderson’s characters always make elaborate plans to try to get themselves out of trouble or sadness. I feel like the diorama thing that we joke about, while we don’t see it visually in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket</i> –<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which might be because he hadn’t come into that as a style. He’s become much more confident over time. And initially, he wanted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>to be much grittier, more like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mean Streets </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drugstore Cowboy</i> (both of which have whimsical touches but aren’t thought of as whimsical films) but as it went along, the writing got more whimsical.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>But I feel like during the writing process, he found what worked for him, and I feel like he found his voice more than you do, I think. What I was getting at with the planning was that it’s a kind of way for Wes Anderson characters to make sense of their lives that don’t necessarily make sense. It’s a way for them to try to control things that they can’t really control. Dignan’s 50-year-plan…it’s absurd that he could possibly plan that far ahead, and with purpose.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I think we can identify with that. We’ve had that, “OK, we’re gonna start lifting weights and do that thing we’ve never done,” and it’s a nice exaggeration.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJI1hymd1mcuqstTZ8YF6XuogShx0sP8DeQ0Ky3cDJnB2IP16kZJwssU7F7y7GN3ObaHC9defEMnz5Kpvis_-GzRRehWydbGbLqDgjlGkKnEU_b6QPjI0DOv-MOjCoNgL-vos1ofd0m8I/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-25+at+3.59.08+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJI1hymd1mcuqstTZ8YF6XuogShx0sP8DeQ0Ky3cDJnB2IP16kZJwssU7F7y7GN3ObaHC9defEMnz5Kpvis_-GzRRehWydbGbLqDgjlGkKnEU_b6QPjI0DOv-MOjCoNgL-vos1ofd0m8I/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-25+at+3.59.08+AM.png" height="172" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>As with a lot of other Anderson narratives, this is to some degree a sad story, because while Dignan’s a big kid, he’s a big kid with a lot of failure and no direction. Anthony’s sister says he’s a liar and worries that if he follows Dignan, he won’t end up going anywhere. His plans don’t really work out, ever. It’s because of the playfulness of Anderson’s style that this isn’t completely downbeat throughout. That’s always been to his credit. Some of that playfulness comes through the music. The target practice scene isn’t as striking, because they don’t have “Skating” again, but some of the other songs are really delightful. They use a song called “Zorro Is Back” after they buy firecrackers after a successful robbery. There’s such life to it. They’re getting a kick of bringing themselves up.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The thing that I think doesn’t work about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket </i>is that undercurrent of melancholy. There’s a little bit of it there, but it’s so much more present as a counterpoint to the whimsy in his later films, where the whimsy is about masking the melancholy, and there’s this cycle of joy and depression, and there’s some teeth to that. I don’t think they get into that enough here. A lot of the characters here are just much flatter than most Wes Anderson characters.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I don’t agree. Granted, it’s going to grow in his next films, but Dignan especially works for me. He’s always been the most loyal friend to Anthony (and vice versa), and as soon as Anthony finds more direction in his love interest Inez (Lumi Cavazos, in a very sweetly handled subplot), Dignan reacts to that very negatively. It’s not just that he’s jealous – Anthony’s the only one who’s there for him. Their other friend, Bob (Bob Musgrave), is sort of part of the gang, but he’s much less committed and much less willing to put up with Dignan’s need to control things.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Also, I get the sense that Dignan doesn’t really like him, that they’re only friends because of Anthony, and he never quite settled in.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I don’t think Dignan dislikes him; they’re just clearly not as close. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEAD2nxUWhRDhFU7sc-XfR2IdpPYpz0Ui_oShMd2gNHAUrMHKIjsYdYkcdNzrEOrNActuQz1xQG7NF7KR6vrto9TR6qwNkoIzn_91GGIf5OZY6OJOdyNNzzQ9JN41GSwsjSclgJM2G2A/s1600/Bottle+Rocket+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEAD2nxUWhRDhFU7sc-XfR2IdpPYpz0Ui_oShMd2gNHAUrMHKIjsYdYkcdNzrEOrNActuQz1xQG7NF7KR6vrto9TR6qwNkoIzn_91GGIf5OZY6OJOdyNNzzQ9JN41GSwsjSclgJM2G2A/s1600/Bottle+Rocket+2.png" height="172" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>I think the trio is well developed, but when I say some of the characters are flat, I mean a lot of the tertiary characters don’t feel like they’re there at all. Every other film he’s made is so deliberately an ensemble that it’s kind of disappointing coming back to his first film and not seeing that. I feel I’m watching a film that could have been so much richer.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Okay, I see what you mean. Some of them are types, like Bob’s brother “Future Man”, who’s funny in bits but is kind of a cartoon asshole. That’s not terrible necessarily but not at the same level he’s going to operate at later.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>How about in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushmore, </i>where we have another bully who has a humanizing moment or two.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yeah. And here’s the thing: that bully has a similar turnaround as Future Man, but Future Man’s is off-screen and isn’t as convincing because we get less of him.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Exactly.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>What do you think of James Caan’s character, Mr. Henry, the landscaper/thief who mentored Dignan once upon a time?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>He didn’t make much of an impression on me, as a character or a performance, which is a problem because he’s built up so much as this bigger-than-life father figure to Dignan that he wants to be emulate.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And for me, it’s a bit of an odd complaint, because most of these sketched characters <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are </i>funny, but they’re not at the level we hold Anderson’s later works at. I do think a lot of the style is still there, though. The conversational rhythms are classic Wes. Like right before the bookstore robbery, where Dignan puts a piece of tape over his nose, and his friends look at him and ask, “Why are you putting tape over your nose?” His answer: “Exactly!” And then during the robbery, he loses patience with the bookstore owner and calls him an idiot, and when the man gets touchy over being called an idiot, he’s sincerely sorry about it. Because he really is just a big kid <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">playing </i>at being the tough guy. So much of it is there, he’s just growing still.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>That part is fantastic and it’s important to note there were a lot of issues during filming that might have inhibited what Anderson/Wilson were trying to do. In my research I got the sense that it was a contentious production between Brooks and Anderson. For instance, Anderson wanted to shoot it in the anamorphic widescreen format that’s become his signature outside of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantastic Mr. Fox </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moonrise Kingdom </i>(and the upcoming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>, which is at least partially in Academy Ratio), but wasn’t allowed to because the process is more expensive and would have slowed down the production with the added lighting concerns.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>And it’s understandable that Brooks might balk, but it is clearly something that’s missing from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottle Rocket, </i>and it limits what he can do, visually.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>One of the things that his particular use of that aspect ratio signals is that they don’t take place in the real world, they take place in Wes Anderson Land, this magical, primary colored place, where everything is dioramas, fantasy and depression. This film, you can see bits of that style peeking out, especially in the final heist, which is the most Andersonian bit in the whole film. But it’s not all the way there. It’s on the border of Wes Anderson Land.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>A little bit, yeah…I think part of it is him still figuring out his style and working on a budget. But I feel like the primary characters and the relationships are there. A lot of the influences are there, too. We mentioned Truffaut, which is still there, but I also see a lot of J.D. Salinger. I see a lot of that in the more withdrawn, sad aspect of the characters, especially Anthony. He’s trying to protect his younger sister, his sister’s cynicism takes it out of him…<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I do like that the little 10-year-old sister is clearly the more mature of the two. It’s a fun bit I wish there was more of.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>It’s a fun bit, and it’s indicative of what Anderson’s going to be doing for a long time with these people who are stuck because of emotional trauma. With Anthony, we hear bits about a bad relationship that sent him to check into a mental hospital. It’s nice that he’s able to get taken out of that. Dignan’s version of getting out of arrested development is being able to pull off – well, not pull off, because it’s a total failure, but he tries, damn it.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I do love Kumar Pullana, the older Indian actor who Wes Anderson cast a lot before his recent death. He plays an old safecracker who can’t remember how to crack the safe.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>My understanding was that he never actually knew, which to me might be even funnier.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I get the sense that he’s done it before. I do love the exchange, “I lost my touch, man! I lost my touch!” Dignan: “Did you even ever have a touch?” To me that’s one of the more interesting exchanges in the whole film. As he goes on, he gets better with subtext and dialogue. I feel in the better version of this film, “Did you ever even have the touch” would be the thesis statement for a few of Anderson’s films, including this one.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Maybe, but that’s an older man’s movie, and this is a younger man’s movie, so I don’t think that really fits. I see a lot of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson in the whole tale of upstarts trying to break in and one of them wondering if it’s even for him. It’s a nice parallel to them trying to break into Hollywood and not knowing if they’re going to make it.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Absolutely, it’s hard not to view it that way. It’s a first film about people trying to make it in something and struggling to do it. It might have not been conscious, but you can’t help but take it from there.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Are there any other things that are formally impressive to you? It is a pretty striking debut.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6R79HH2hJuDg3lQuAE7mfmYsSm3kqZ1SkdvoJJ8fhzmCP-LNB2o7Y9bC_sREXptMYo36TUxAqEhu2Zb1lrwLqjAXa1atMRIiayqLnS2VJEcLXakV5Oo-L3TxsUltMRHRRI-_a9clY9PQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-25+at+7.43.41+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6R79HH2hJuDg3lQuAE7mfmYsSm3kqZ1SkdvoJJ8fhzmCP-LNB2o7Y9bC_sREXptMYo36TUxAqEhu2Zb1lrwLqjAXa1atMRIiayqLnS2VJEcLXakV5Oo-L3TxsUltMRHRRI-_a9clY9PQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-25+at+7.43.41+PM.png" height="172" width="320" /></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Oh, absolutely. I don’t think it’s all there, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. He’s starting to use these dolly shots, colors are a big thing, I really love how he creates insert shots. There are these themes of mental illness and arrested development that he’ll continue to develop. And outside of Martin Scorsese, there are very few filmmakers who use music as surprisingly. It’s not just that he uses a Rolling Stones song. He uses “2000 Man”, a really wonderful song from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Their Satanic Majesties Request</i>, probably one of the least regarded classic-era Stones albums. It fits so wonderfully<b>.</b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I love the use of “Over and Done With” by the Proclaimers when Dignan and Anthony have to leave Inez behind. That brings me up so much, to the point where it almost feels like “Judy Is a Punk” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal Tenenbaums</i>. It makes me so happy that he has such imagination on how to use songs and finds the perfect commentaries on his scenes.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>The other thing I really love is Owen Wilson. That character is the most successful thing in the movie. He’s such a Wes Anderson character, right up to the animal noises he makes for signals, or the line “Let’s get lucky!” that he shouts before robberies. It’s infectiously joyous. He and Luke Wilson haven’t been served well by Hollywood as well as they should have. He’s a wonderful presence on screen. To me, there are some other things that are off. It’s a bit aimless structurally, and not in a way that really works. And you like that romance more than I do. There’s a sweetness to it, but it is a relationship where they sense each other’s innate sweetness and dignity, but because there’s a language barrier they’re doing a lot of projection onto each other. That’s something a more mature Wes Anderson might have gotten into more.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Maybe, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much. Maybe it’s because they’re less complicated characters, but it’s a simple thing of lonely souls connecting for me, I think. At any rate, Anthony’s relationship with Dignan is more important, it’s the conceit of the film. One of them has outgrown this goofball stuff, where the other knows he won’t have much left when his friend moves on. That leads to a lot of great moments. Much as I like the romance, the stuff that comes out of it is a lot more interesting. There’s a great shot where Wes plays with deep focus: Dignan is in the background playing pool while Anthony and Inez are romancing on the front porch. And then in the background, Dignan gets the shit kicked out of him, and Anthony isn’t able to protect him. And then there’s a great cut to Dignan having to put ice on a bloody lip, and there’s a growing distance between the two. I also love Dignan’s reaction of pure, tantrum anger after Anthony gives the money they stole to Inez. He throws a rock, punches a friend, and fumes. It’s understandable, more so because Anthony is moving away from his plans.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>And I don’t think Anthony was ever that committed. He’s doing it for his friend. There’s a great bit in the beginning where he sneaks out of a mental hospital he voluntarily checked into, because he wants Dignan to feel like he’s helping him escape. One thing I do want to make sure we hit is that visually, it doesn’t fit into Wes Anderson Land, but conceptually, it’s one of his more archly stylized pieces. In his other films, especially his next two, his characters are living with a recognizable reality in some way. In his later films, the balance tips back the other way. They’re deep-sea divers or something dealing with real problems. Fantasy trappings for real problems, and there’s something similar going on here, we got this fantasy gang of wannabe crooks who are sorta dealing with real issues. He won’t try something this out there again until he reaches a more confident place.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Hmm. I see it being more archly stylized, maybe, because Dignan’s trying to escape the realities of his life.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>But we never see those realities.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Yes we do. He has nothing else to live for. When he goes back into town after making up with Anthony and he’s planning to pull off a big job, he’s got that great yellow jumpsuit that feels like it belongs in a Wes Anderson movie. Future Man comes along and mocks him, saying he looks like a rodeo clown or a banana, which stings because Dignan actually really likes this getup. And Future Man mentions that Dignan used to mow lawns, which he doesn't anymore. Dignan couldn’t make it in the real world. This is his way of getting out of that.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Yeah, but he was mowing the lawn as a front for the robberies. He couldn’t do that right. That’s a nice bit, but I never felt enough of that simmering pain.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>You talked about how Dignan’s robbery is one of the best bits. How about his sacrifice to save Anthony?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>By the end, it’s become a proper Wes Anderson film, but a lot of the rest is phasing in and out. Some bits are there, some bits don’t hit like they should.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Then I’m also curious how you interpret the last shot. Anderson does that great slow-motion thing at his films’ endings or in another key moment. Here, the film ends on a slow motion shot of Dignan, in prison, being led back in after Anthony and Bob visit him. He’s looking back at his friends, and I feel like now he’s dealing with the real consequences of his fantasy, even though he did get to do something good for his friends. How do you interpret that shot?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>Huh. You know what, you’re starting to change my mind on this movie as we talk about it. There is this really sad moment, I don’t know if it’s him facing the consequences, or just being sad because he’s separated from his friends. He’s doing it for them, but there’s also an interesting selfishness in his need to help his friends that I’d have liked to see more. That is an interesting moment, part of the proper Wes Anderson film it turns into at the end.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>Okay. Anything else you’d like to add?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I do like it. It’s not my favorite of his works by a long shot, but it is a nice film. For me it falls squarely into the category of messy first films by great directors that show a lot of promise but are still figuring things out.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I feel like had we seen this before his later films, we would’ve been over the moon for it. He’s so confident, and so clearly on the verge of even better things. I’m more impressed with it I think in part because the Dignan character is one of my favorite Wes Anderson characters, and he’s the heart of the film. I think Wes really nails it there.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I’m watching it on mute as we talk here, I agree with you. Dignan makes the movie. The film didn’t do very well, it tested poorly, it was dumped in theaters. But I’m glad Anderson got another shot. Even in this flawed first feature, you can tell this is someone worth watching.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>How do you think it compares to the short?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">LG: </b>I kind of like the short better. Even though it’s less focused, and the feature does some things better. But I’m so surprised to see this rough style in the short, and that really floored me. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: right 6.0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MO: </b>I like the short for the same reasons, but the emotional content of the film does get it for me.<br />
<b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>GRADES (SHORT/FEATURE)<br />
LOREN: </b>A-/B-</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>MAX: </b>A-/A-</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Roundtable Directory:</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Bottle Rocket (short and feature)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-rushmore.html">Rushmore</a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-roundtable-royal-tenenbaums.html">The Royal Tenenbaums </a><br /><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/04/wes-anderson-roundtable-life-aquatic.html">The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html">Hotel </a></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2014/07/wes-anderson-roundtable-darjeeling.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chevalier</span> / Darjeeling Limited</a><br />
The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Moonrise Kingdom<br />
Shorts and Commercials<br />
The Grand Budapest Hotel</span> </div>
</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-48371643569688720152014-02-14T14:31:00.000-06:002014-03-23T23:40:59.694-05:00THE LEGO MOVIE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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On paper, <i>The Lego Movie</i> represents the worst of Hollywood filmmaking. Not only is it a transparent device to sell toys, it has a second level of product placement from other brands the marketing people would like you to be aware of (particularly DC Comics characters also owned by Warner Bros.). But if anything was to get me to give it a shot it would be the involvement of writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller who've been on a hot streak with <i>21 Jump Street </i>and the <i>Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs</i> films but in my mind will always be known as the creators of the irreverent, cult sit-com <i>Clone High</i>. The results here are charming, sly, and more complex than we might have expected. They succeed where other attempts to graft narratives onto toys have failed because they realize that whatever story that Legos tell are created by the kids and adults playing with them and their film revels in the joy of imagination and the diversity of play.<br />
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Consider the way the film renders its world. Taking inspiration from the stop-motion <a href="http://brickfilms.com/">films</a> Lego fans make, the entire film has a handmade quality which is unusual for CGI. The animation is designed to look like stop motion, horses move like an invisible hand is bucking them up and down and one character flies with the aid of dental floss, a choice that seems incongruous considering we've seen other characters fly the 'normal' way, but is completely in keeping with the films freewheeling nature. Even splashing water and explosions are represented as if they were stop-motion Lego pieces. All of this looks amazing and as accompanied by a playful Mark Mothersbaugh score that feels like a Daft Punk infused version of the music he did for <i>Rugrats</i>.<br />
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The rules of the world also speak to its toyetic nature: our hero Emmett (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker who joyously builds buildings all day long only to joyously knock them down at night. These Lego people only work, interact and fall in love in the limited ways a child might imagine. Also the film's central conflict is one that has long divided Lego lovers: to follow the instructions or go your own way.<br />
<br />
The deeper implications of that conflict aren't entirely lost on Lord and Miller. The 'instructions' side of the debate is represented by the large corporation that controls all the music, tv shows, food, construction, etc, headed by the films villain Lord Business (Will Ferrell), and who's opposed by a small, rebellious group of imaginative but ineffective group of master builders waiting for the long prophesized "special" who will have the power to... well, you know.<br />
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The extreme familiarity of some of these tropes is a bit of an issue – personally I've long ago reached my life long limit of 'chosen one' movies – but to the credit of the filmmakers, they never try and invest these elements with any sort of seriousness, and while the childlike playfulness and irreverence that they substitute sometimes falls disappointingly short of being a fill on spoof of action clichés, the childlike playfulness and irreverence they substitute manages some interesting subversions of the formula. I like that Emmett is almost as invested in following rules as Lord Business. Instead of being a power fantasy facilitating audience surrogate, Emmett likes being a normal, mediocre guy, going to work on time and listening to government supplied entertainment. There are stretches where he tries to be more, but mostly he doesn't have that breakthrough where he becomes the Lego God everyone wants him to, he remains as pleasantly ordinary as he starts and even encourages his comrades to conform 'just a little bit,' which opens up a philosophical debate about the rigidness of ideology the film isn't really interested in following up on and doesn't necessarily connect cleanly to its other ideas.<br />
<br />
But honestly that's okay. It doesn't matter that not everything gels. It's still an impressively well done film filled with gorgeous animation and playful, imaginative action scenes based on the idea that everything in this world can be built and reconfigured on a dime. There are also some fun supporting performances, Liam Neeson shows up as a cop with a split personality, and while seeing licensed properties reminds us just how much Lego sold out in the 00's, I liked seeing a Will Arnett voiced Batman cast as the jerk boyfriend to the film's sorta love interest. <br />
<br />
<i>The Lego Movie </i>is an effective toy commercial (I was never a huge Lego person as a kid, yet the film certainly made me want to give it a shot now), but the methods by which it's an effective commercial means it doubles as a wonderful exploration of imagination and play, particularly in the film's spectacular third act twist which features a fascinating father/son relationship. The film sells us on Legos not by showing us wonderful sets to buy (though it does that too), but showing that the toys are a conduit for imagination. Sure, not all the jokes land and, like many Lego products, it panders too hard to boys to the almost exclusion of girls, but I can certainly get behind it as a celebration of play.<br />
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Grade: B+ </div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-39510411868404852292013-12-31T16:37:00.002-06:002013-12-31T18:47:35.509-06:00THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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At the end of the day, I'm not sure Peter Jackson understands how to adapt <i>The Hobbit</i>, J.R.R. Tolkien's brisk children's book to which <i>Lord of the Rings </i>was a sequel. Jackson seems to feel that because both books are from the same author and are set in the same universe that they can simply be snapped together with some help from the <i>Rings</i> appendices. But the fact remains that <i>The Hobbit </i>is a fundamentally different work meant for a completely different audience<i> </i>and it's just not an epic, no matter how much Jackson wants it to be. So here we have the second in a trilogy of films based on a 120 page book. The first film visibly strained under the weight of serving both as an adaptation and a prequel to an existing, but dispirit franchise. The second film, <i>The Desolation of Smaug,</i> kinda gives up on<i> </i>the book and settles for just being the best <i>Rings </i>prequel it can be, which is for the best, even if as it continues to feel like the film is being upstaged by franchise obligations. <br />
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The film picks up with Hobbit pseudo-protagonist Bilbo (Martin Freeman), exiled dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage) and his extended entourage as they race to reclaim their homeland from a usurping dragon. The echoes from the <i>Rings</i> films start to pile up, particularly with Thorin, whom the film carefully paints as our new Aragorn, introduced here at the same inn where we first meet Aragorn in the previous film. The scene stresses that he too is a roguish heir to a lost kingdom who only needs the courage to take charge of his larger destiny. But whereas Aragorn was noble because he never wanted power, it feels like Thorin and co are, at least in part, in it for the money. Indeed there's an assertion that Thorin has a relationship to the Arkenstone (a McGuffin needed for part 3) that Jackson hopes we'll find analogous to and as compelling as the one between Frodo and The Ring. Further mining the <i>Rings </i>films is material from the books appendices designed to give the main quest more urgency by suggesting that the dwarves must defeat Smaug quickly because Sauron is gaining power and might try and recruit him.<br />
<br />
The resulting film feels more like a chase movie with ticking clocks
and the kind of easily surmountable impossible obstacles we expect in a
proper adventure: dark forests, ancient riddles, Ray Harryhousen
spiders, politically ambivalent elves, orcs, goblins, shifty rogues and
they even manage to squeeze in the titular dragon. On a superficial level, the action is all well directed, and as long as he sticks to action, Jackson has a great skill in extrapolation. He looks at small scenes in the book, like the one where Bilbo helps the dwarves escape from some elves by hiding them in barrels being sent down river and asks with boyish abandon: "what if there was a lock blocking their way and the elves caught them rasing the gate but then orcs attack everyone and it turns into a great three-way chase down river and one guy gets catapulted into the air, lands and rolls over a bunch or orcs in his barrel," and so on and so forth.<br />
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These extended scenes are fun without ever feeling as vital as they should, but as soon as he shifts to narrative, the film starts to dull. For instance, that barrel scene is a lot of fun, particularly with the addition of <i>Rings</i> favorite Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and his sidekick Girl Legolas (Evangeline Lilly) opening up a can of whoop-ass on wave after wave of faceless goons, but when they stick around to have a pointless love triangle with one of the dwarves that's all forbidden and junk, it starts to feel just a tad calculated.<br />
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If you're wondering where all these additions leave Bilbo and Smaug, the two title characters of the film, the answer is nowhere, the two seem strangely diminished here. Bilbo exists primarily to get the dwarves out of trouble while Gandalf (Ian McKellen) is off doing stuff (with thankfully little assistance from Radagast). As much fun as it is to watch Martin Freeman do stuff, this is sort of preferable to his treatment in the last film, which labored endlessly over his potential importance. That said, it's hardly ideal for him to just blend in with the group of 13, mostly undeveloped, dwarves.<br />
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Then there's the eventual encounter with Smaug. All the build up with Sauron kind of turns Smaug into a second-teir villain. Important not for his own villainy so much as his potential usefulness as a future henchman of the real bad guy who belongs to a different trilogy. Furthermore, while Smaug is played with gleeful menace by Benedict Cumberbatch and is given a magnificent entrance, he comes in at a point where the film desperately needs to start thinking about its cliffhanger but instead reaches greedily for just one more action sequence that every audience member knows wont resolve anything, alter the narrative or our perceptions of the characters. It's just another example of what this series needs less of: padding. <br />
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It's sad that Jackson feels so adrift. His <i>Lord of the Rings </i>trilogy should have been the beginning of a bold, new chapter of his career as a more manic successor to David Lean, but instead of finding big stories to tell, he seems to think he
can take smaller stories and stretch them to epic lengths, first came
his gargantuan <i>King Kong</i> remake, now this. He want's length, but he doesn't understand that length requires density. If he wants to continue in this direction, there are other great sci-fi/fantasy books to adapt and fantastic historical epics he could be doing (Napoleon, Musashi Miyamoto), or he could going back to his horror roots or do something completely new. Instead he's stuck in a rut of faux-epics, trying to stuff his past triumphs into ill-fitting forms.<br />
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Grade: B-</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-89353782188637269962013-12-29T14:55:00.000-06:002017-10-05T11:01:51.881-05:00SECOND CHANCES: JAMES WAN<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In 2004 I remember seeing the ads for <i>Saw</i>, the new horror film by first-timer James Wan. Many of them featured a woman in something I later learned was called a reverse bear trap and two strangers trapped in a room that reminded me of <i>Cube</i>, but with a twist: the people would have to mutilate themselves to survive. Word on the street was that the film was shocking, new and, most important to my 15-year-old self, ridiculously violent. But when I finally got to see the thing, I was completely let down by what I thought was an appallingly dull, terribly made film. <br />
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<i>Saw</i> might have become the defining Horror film of the decade, but at the time I was certain Wan couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag. But perhaps it's not best to judge a director based solely on one film, particularly a first attempt. Recently Wan has made something of a comeback and has earned a modicum of respect from critics and horror fans. Is it possible that he's gotten better, or that he was secretly great the whole time? I decided to rewatch <i>Saw</i> and then look at his three most recent films: <i>Insidious</i>, <i>The Conjuring</i>, and <i>Insidious Chapter 2.</i><br />
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<span style="color: red;"> Note: while I tired to tread carefully for his two 2013 releases, these are generally spoiler reviews.</span><br />
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Perhaps the most frustrating thing about <i>Saw</i> is that it actually has some pretty good ideas. They're just executed really, really badly. In the film's hideously shot opening sequence, we meet the aforementioned prisoners, played by Cary Elwes and Wan's frequent screenwriting partner Leigh Whannell. Soon they learn that they've been kidnapped by Jigsaw, a puppet-obsessed serial killer who places his victims in elaborate death traps to see if they have the right stuff to escape. In this case, one must cut through his own feet and kill the other to be released.<br />
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It's a good B-movie setup that should theoretically lead to a lean, economical thriller. But these scenes end up being only mildly engaging at best, and even then only in spite of every aspect being botched. Not only does the film look bad, but the miscast actors are terribly directed. Elwes looks constantly befuddled but Whannell is worse at delivering his own tin-eared, overly sarcastic dialogue in a clawing whine. I don't believe for a second that either character would be cracking jokes in this situation, nor are the cracks delivered in a way that makes us feel like the characters are trying to cover for their fear. But the thing that sinks the film is its insistence on cutting to scenes that just don't matter, which becomes Wan's signature bad habit. The film just can't deal with the situation in front of it. Every time things start to get good, Wan cuts to a series of tedious, ineffective flashbacks explaining how the pair came to be in the room, and it torpedoes every ounce of tension the film has struggled to build up.<br />
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Also in the "this should work but doesn't" department are Jigsaws death traps, many of which have a certain Rube Goldberg charm that could be gleefully dark in the right hands. They’re brought down by cynical dread, tired thriller tropes and Jigsaw's faux philosophy, which is endlessly reiterated yet feels so underexplored that it comes off as a self-conscious imposition to either "justify" the pornographic bloodshed or extol the supposed cleverness of the creative team behind it.<br />
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The moral of the film is simply that we should appreciate life and we're asked to believe that the victims are all sleazeballs guilty of not appreciating it enough, but damn if the crimes they commit don't seem feeble and pretty off-message for Jigsaw, like the man who apparently called in sick once too often for Jigsaw's liking, possibly so he could go appreciate life. This aspect feels like a weak echo of the killer in <i>Se7en</i>, who was all the more frightening because, despite his horrifically extreme methods, he actually has a point about the relationship between apathy and sin in modern society. Like <i>Se7en</i>, our fear of Jigsaw is supposed to derive from our awe of his power and intellect, except here it doesn't because Jigsaw is kind of a dunce and <i>Saw</i> doesn't want to explore or subvert. It just wants to cover its ass and the ideas it brings up fail to hold up to even mild intellectual analysis.<br />
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For instance: the idea of free will in the film is a flat binary. If you find yourself in a Jigsaw trap you either "appreciate life" enough to kill yourself trying to escape or you're a weakling who deserves to die. The message might have seemed potent to a post 9/11 audience shaken by sudden violence, but you can't bring up such ideas in this context only to boil down someone’s inner strength down to whether or not you're willing to crawl through razor wire to certain death or face a different certain death. There's no room in the film's worldview for someone who refuses to play Jigsaw's game who would, against every primal instinct, accept his death but would have spiritually beat the game by not submitting to it. The film isn't interested in exploring the logical endpoints of the philosophy it's extolling, but it desperately wants us to think so. It's telling of the film's nihilism that the only person to survive a Jigsaw trap thanks him and credits her horrific experience (which involves digging through the intestines of her still living cellmate) with getting her off drugs. Good for her, I guess.<br />
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All this is rendered in a visual style that's actually fairly distinct, unfortunately it's by virtue of being ugly. There's an aesthetic here that wants to be a distant cousin of Fincher and Demme, with its grainy, saturated greens and deep blacks but it fails at basic, technical things. Wan can't convincingly stage scenes and his compositions feel so awkward that it feels like this film was made for a different aspect ratio than the 1.85:1 it's presented in. David A. Armstrong's lighting is flat and muddy to the point that it's sometimes hard to see faces (this doesn't feel like a choice), and everything, regardless of location, feels sickly, like it was filmed in a sewer. Kevin Murphy of <i>MST3K </i>and <i>Rifftrax </i>fame once asked in relation to <i>Saw</i>: "Is there nothing in this movie that isn't grime encrusted?" There are tiny attempts at stylistic variety, most prominently when Wan occasionally gives us a sudden burst of fast motion coupled with snap zooms, but instead of being exciting, it just feels out of place in a film that's mostly going for something more brooding and does little to help the film look good. I guess the look is effective in that it hammers home the film's nihilism by rubbing our faces in muck for 100 odd minutes, but it also makes me want to claw my eyes out.<br />
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If <i>Saw</i> were honest about its intentions to be just a novel slasher, it might have been a more passable piece (technical shortcomings aside), but everything about the film feels two-faced. If that wasn't enough, Wan and Whannell further dilute their core ideas with a pseudo-arthouse structure, featuring multiple levels of flashbacks, a potentially scrambled timeline and an endless parade of ancillary characters and subplots. Wan keeps expanding the world and the mythology, he want's the most gore, the most characters, the most subplots because he equates most with best. By the time we see the cop (played by a visibly embarrassed Danny Glover) growing obsessed with the Jigsaw case to the point that he gets thrown off the force and takes up residence across from a suspect’s house, it's clear that this film should have packed it in long ago. <i>Saw</i> may have popularized Extreme Horror, but I doubt it would have survived if smarter directors hadn’t come along to do more worthwhile things with the form.<br />
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After the release of <i>Saw</i>, Wan all but disappeared as a director. He released two films in 2007 (an evil doll movie <i>Dead Silenc</i>e, which Wan basically disowned, and the similarly named but unrelated revenge thriller <i>Death Sentence</i>), but both of them were financial and critical disappointments. Wan and Whannell took a break before coming back with 2011's <i>Insidious</i>.<br />
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For about 30 seconds I got my hopes up about <i>Insidious</i>, which opens with what is easily its best shot: the camera fades in on a spherical lamp that reads "a James Wan film," the words fade and the camera turns right side up and we see a child sleeping peacefully before we pan around the room right past the silhouetted figure lurking outside the window who is soon revealed to be a hideous crone. It's campfire hokum, but it’s well-executed hokum. However the film tips its hand and resorts to making it's title card into a cheap jump scare, a tactic the film will rely on again and again and again.<br />
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On the surface, it seems that <i>Insidious</i> shows Wan branching out. After popularizing Torture Porn, here is a film almost completely devoid of blood and gore that theoretically relies on suspense and ideas to scare us. Unfortunately, that theory doesn't translate and it becomes clear that the dull viscera of <i>Saw</i> hasn't been replaced by anything.<br />
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The film centers on the Lamberts, an All-American family headed by Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), who have just moved to a new house. As they unpack, Renai notices some strange stuff going on: boxes are missing, the house creaks, strange sounds on the baby monitor, and other plays from the Standard Haunting Tactics Handbook, 5th Edition. Then, the morning after an ominous and dubiously staged accident, their son, Dalton, doesn't wake up. He's not dead, but in a medically unexplained coma.<br />
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It's not a bad start, but it would help if it were competently made. Whatever Wan's strengths are, atmosphere, suspense and jump scares don't seem to be among them. He attempts to build tension early on by placing the strange events against the backdrop of the families day to day life, but these scenes fall flat due to a general lack of inspiration, unconvincing family dynamics, a distracting resemblance to <i>Poltergeist</i>, and a series of strangely timed edits. Wan can't make up his mind whether he wants things to play out in masters or cut to awkward inserts.<br />
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The suspense doesn’t fare much better. Honestly, every film student should be able to make a moderately effective "frightened women descends into a dark basement" scene, but not Wan, at least not here. Perhaps sensing his ineptitude, he aims to make every scare a jump scare, with the burden handed off to composer Joseph Bishara, who's sole task seems to consist of occasionally banging a single piano cord as LOUD AS POSSIBLE! This isn't really scary as much as it's startling, and most of the time it doesn't even manage that. Many of the scares in the film went without a single reaction from me beyond growing irritation. It's easy to do a jump scare and plenty of Horror films use a few of them, but to have it be the primary mechanism Wan uses to scare us is cheap and easy and timid.<br />
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Equally frustrating are the strange narrative gaps that Wan and Whannell have left in the film, moments that cry out for some kind of plot development or action but receive none. It's curious but mildly defensible that we don't see the doctors run any sort of tests on Dalton, but how strange is it that Renai has no follow up questions when her other son mentions that Dalton (who, it should be stressed, is in a coma) walks around at night? Or when the burglar alarm goes off and Josh wanders around the house for a while before the camera awkwardly fades to black leaving us to wonder if the cops were called at all. Or most irritatingly, when Renai finds blood, BLOOD, on Dalton's sheets and doesn't immediately call the nurse in the next room. All these gaps and missed opportunities are so conspicuous that I was certain that they'd be resolved by the film's inevitable twist ending, but they're not. At least <i>Saw</i> followed up on the stupid plot threads it raises.<br />
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The film goes on and on and after many restless months of tedious haunting Josh takes action and hires a team Z-grade ghosthunters that even the SyFy channel would turn away. We're supposed to think these guys are funny, but instead Wan just proves he can't do comedy either. At this point Wan starts piling on: we learn that Dalton has been projecting his aura into an astro-realm called The Further (yes, really) and his coma is the result of getting stuck there, putting him in danger of being possessed by some ugly ass demon and the only way to save him is for Josh to venture into The Further and bring him back, something he was able to in the past but conveniently forgot about until just now.<br />
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The Further lives down to its name. It's full of twitchy 50's families that whistle while shooting each other, leather clad ghouls in bad rubber masks and trippy red doors. There are moments where Wan starts to finally build tension but mucks it up. A wide angle shot of an actor wandering dark, foggy moors at night with a lantern with eventually be tense if the director lets it play out and we believe he is truly alone. But just as in Saw, <i>Wan</i> demonstrates an almost pathological need to cut away to things that just aren't important in his faux-kenetic camera style. In this case to Josh's family watching over him while ghost hunter guru Elise (Lin Shaye) holds the audiences hand, delivers exposition, and coaches Josh form across the dimensions.<br />
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The problem isn't just that the mythology that Wan and Whannell have concocted is hopelessly dopey, it's that it's the film's primary concern. In the film's insufferable final act, it's clear that the two are laying track for sequels much like they did with <i>Saw</i>, right down the cliffhanger twist where we learn that while successful in bringing his son back from The Further, Josh has been possessed by the crone that haunted him as a child. It's not a bad twist, though it relies heavily on the film's convoluted mythology and strangely involves Renai having a flashback to events that she wasn't present for but we, the audience, saw not even a full minute earlier. When James Wan wants to make a point, you better believe he will underline the hell out of it.<br />
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Which brings us to <i>The Conjuring</i>, one of two films he released in 2013, and it's easily his best to date. At times feeling like a bigger budget version of <i>Insidious</i>, the film is another haunted house/exorcism movie, the difference being that Wan mostly manages to tame his worst habits somewhat. It's hardly a masterpiece but it's effective at times and could be mistaken for the work of a semi-competent filmmaker.<br />
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<i>Conjuring</i> follows two families, the Perrons and the Warrens. The Warrens, Ed and Lorraine (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are a pair of Indiana Jones-esque paranormal investigators who travel the country collecting cursed objects and doing college lectures. In "real life" these two cleaned up the Amityville haunting. The film opens in the late 60's with the pair solving a case involving a comically ugly doll that's a conduit for a demonic spirit. It's a fun scene and the Warrens are cool enough characters that Wan's emphasis on exposition and mythology almost works. Sure, some scenes are tinny and labored, but there's an intriguing bit of world building where the Warrens show off the room where they keep all the very dangerous artifacts they've secured, sort of a maximum security ghost prison in their basement. It would have been novel if Wan had just followed this couple as they got into supernatural adventures, but Wan and screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes (<i>Baywatch Nights</i>) decide to split their focus with the Perrons, a bland family in a typical haunted house situation.<br />
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We meet Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lill Taylor) in 1971 as they move into a new house with their 10,000 children (actually there are only 5, but it feels like way more because they're all interchangeable). As always in these type of films, the house is creaky, leaky and stuff starts happening: the dog shows up dead, Carolyn has strange bruises, daughter #23 starts sleepwalking, and daughter #17 finds a creepy music box that allows a strange boy to appear. Like <i>Insidious</i> these are fairly standard bits for the Horror genre; unlike his previous films, they're done with a certain amount of skill. Wan does a good "frightened women descends into a dark basement" scene. The editing seems tighter and for once a Wan film doesn't look hideous. While the film is still largely a machine to go 'boo' at the audience, but it helps that the stakes are higher this time out, the ghosts don't just wander around but seem actively bent on harming the Perrons. It's a shame that these elevated stakes happen to characters who are almost too thin to even be called 'types.' Eventually, things get unbearable and the Warrens are called in. They look the place over and quickly decide that the house needs an exorcism (no shit).<br />
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But before we can get to the exorcism, the Warren's need proof so they can get a Vatican approved exorcist (I guess Protestants don't do exorcisms?). That kind of conceit worked well for William Friedkin in <i>The Exorcist</i> because he used the investigation to turn up the intrigue. Here it comes off as a clumsy excuse to bring in a bunch of new characters to dump needless exposition. This is hardly the first film in cinema history to ever explain things, but it might be the first time I've seen a film stop to explain obscure concepts like Holy Water, the Trinity and demons not liking crosses.<br />
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It does get mildly better. I liked parts of the final exorcism: there's some tension going into it and some genuinely freaky imagery involving a woman's face bleeding through a sheet. But like in his other films, Wan sabotages the film by cutting away and overcomplicating. It's telling that several prominent plot points are completely abandoned. For instance, throughout the film Ed is increasingly worried about the toll another exorcism will take on his family for reasons that are built up till it's the primary audience anxiety point going into the ending but then it's just forgotten. Similarly, we're lead to believe the doll from the prologue will be integral to the climax but then never appears. If these threads were meant to be red herrings, they commit the sin of being far more interesting than what actually happens.<br />
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Perhaps I'm asking too much from the film. It's hardly aiming at greatness or even novelty the way that <i>Saw</i> was. It's aiming to be retro and conventional. In interviews Wan has stated that he want's this to be his homage to old school horror. But there's a difference between riffing on convention and resting on it. <i>Conjuring</i> is like a functional cover of a very well known song, too scared to do much with the arrangement. It's not bad, but it's pretty disposable and no substitute for the real thing.<br />
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It's almost not worth mentioning Wan's other theatrical film of 2013, <i>Insidious: Chapter 2</i>, a trite, dreary waste of space, made without an ounce of enthusiasm, a minor film in an already minor filmography.<br />
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The story deals with the direct aftermath the first film which ended with the death of head ghost hunter Elise at the hands of Josh who, having rescued his son from The Further (that most comically named astro-realm) has been possessed by an evil spirit. Unfortunately Wan and Whannell have no idea what should come next except that it should be kinda like <i>The Shining</i> without the being scary part. Strange stuff keeps happening to Renai and we get a lot of Patrick Wilson standing around being vaguely menacing like a milquetoast Jack Nicholson. In between are a lot of loosely constructed "scenes" where things creek and go 'boo!' Wan no longer punctuates every jump scare with a loud noise on the soundtrack, but they're as inept as ever.<br />
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The worst of these sequences is a long visit to a haunted hospital. 'Why would they visit a haunted hospital?', you might ask. I don't know. It kind of ties in later, but it’s mostly apropos of nothing except to tell us that there is a now deceased serial killer who might have been a cross dresser. The transvestite killer thing might have passed muster in the 60's and, who am I kidding, the 80's, but in 2013 it's tacky and insensitive to suggest that his transvestism, forced or otherwise, made him a killer. The sequence itself looks like a really bad rip-off of <i>Blair Witch Project</i>, and it reminded me that two of the producers on the film also make the <i>Paranormal Activity</i> series, the most prominent of the bargain-basement <i>Blair Witch</i> pretenders.<br />
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While we're at it, the things that James Wan finds scary look pretty hokey. This is a universe where ghosts wear cheap pancake make up and sing "creepy" nursery rhymes in rooms where the fog machines have been left running all night. It's so pastiche that I was beginning to work under the theory that the film was a comedy, which would explain why the comic relief characters got more screen time this time out, but the laughs the film gets aren't really at the intended jokes but more often at lines of dialogue like "I'm not interested in ghosts, I'm interested in the living people who create them!"<br />
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Eventually the "suspense" comes to a head with a surprise visit to The Further where the film gets even more idiotic. The Further is now kind of like purgatory and also a conduit for time travel, because sure, why not. Anyway Josh tires to escape to his body which, in our world, is busy recreating the end of <i>The Shining</i> but with more people and in a more confusing way. It's not to clear what happens at the end but it seems like the day is saved when someone beats a ghost to death, or at least into unconsciousness, whichever is more plausible.<br />
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I might not be a huge fan of Wan, but I know he's better than this film. Perhaps this is him in 'contractual obligation' mode, maybe he was just tired after shooting this sequel almost back to back with <i>Conjuring</i>, or maybe he's just tired of the genre. Recently Wan announced his retirement from Horror, and it's about time. He's been in the game for most of his carrier and his sole "triumph" is just kind of okay. Currently he's shooting <i>Fast and Furious 7</i>, which seems like an odd choice for such a grim director. But perhaps it's the break he needs. Maybe we'll learn that campy action was his real wheelhouse this whole time. I hope that proves to be the case, and not just because the production is already dealing with the tragic loss of star Paul Walker, but after watching four of his six theatrical films and trying really, really hard to like each one, I'm sticking to my original assessment with a caveat: flukes might occur, but this guy isn't much of a director.<br />
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Grades:<br />
Saw: D<br />
Insidious: C-<br />
The Conjuring: C+<br />
Insidious: Chapter 2: D</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-19140091330615444012013-12-24T23:52:00.003-06:002013-12-27T13:44:18.036-06:0012 YEARS A SLAVE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxR7AiDoj5sInBgFPGFDkpqfGUm1ANMAI86o_rq7jFi9t1zudezbERCQu0A1WCFZc8Zs3eGxC_AsBVaaB-zV9roZKabsjkZh8BBCgdDztOKglB935-p1EsOUVdFWK9LrHHj2z4OhiGt_g/s1600/12-years-a-slave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxR7AiDoj5sInBgFPGFDkpqfGUm1ANMAI86o_rq7jFi9t1zudezbERCQu0A1WCFZc8Zs3eGxC_AsBVaaB-zV9roZKabsjkZh8BBCgdDztOKglB935-p1EsOUVdFWK9LrHHj2z4OhiGt_g/s320/12-years-a-slave.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Over the years, English director Steve McQueen has been exploring how people deal with imprisonment. His previous film, <i>Shame</i>, showed a man imprisoned by his own body, alternately embracing and rejecting his own impulses as they destroy him. His first film, <i>Hunger,</i> showed an emaciated Michael Fassbender as an IRA prisoner becoming questionably delusional fighting his imperialist wardens with an impractical, perhaps suicidal hunger strike. Unlike in <i>Hunger</i> the protagonist of his latest film, <i>12 Years A Slave</i>, can't strike out no matter how much he wants to, and instead faces a slow and systematic damnation via his own sense of pragmatism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was drugged and kidnapped from his family before being sold into slavery in 1841. This sort of thing was fairly regular. Under the Fugitive Slave Act it was legal for bounty hunters to pursue runaway slaves into free states but many times it was easier just to grab any black man, say he was a runaway, and sell him for easy money. In this sense, Northup's story isn't that special, except for the fact that he happened to escape and be literate enough to tell his story well, and this film is all the better for recognizing how ordinary all these events were. Northup was well educated and made a nice living as a carpenter and violinist. The film seems to recreate this accurately, though it might overplay the contrast between his free life and slave life by suggesting that Northup, played in the film by Chitwetel Ejiofor (<i>Children of Men</i>), didn't face any racial adversity as a free black man in Saratoga before being drugged by strangers.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When Northup wakes, he is told that he's now a runaway named Platt and is beaten within an inch of his life when he tries to assert his true identity. Early in his journey he finds himself on a ship paddling down the Mississippi, (the incessant thudding paddles suggest at the machinery of slavery as an industry). He knows that when the ship reaches its destination, he will be sold and he’s presented with the option to violently fight and face certain death or keep his head down and survive. He’s determined to do neither, but in the heat of the moment he knows that he must appear to accept his new life while searching for a way to escape.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We see that decision to be pragmatic slowly crush his spirit. After being sold to his first master, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), he dares not reveal his identity but he looks to flash his intelligence so to be noticed. Ford probably senses that Northup isn't a runaway but is happy to have a useful slave. Any hope of being freed by Ford dies when he gifts Solomon a violin to "make the years pass more joyously." Furthermore Solomon's show of engineering skill earns him the ire of an overseer played by Paul Dano, who strings him up for hours from a tree just low enough that he might survive if he stands on his tip toes and doesn't slip in the mud. After a while his fellow slaves start to go about their business in the background. They don't speak up because there's no one to speak to, and because they would be punished for it. It's this pragmatism that literally keeps his life in danger in this scene </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">that Northup must attempt in order to survive, one that McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley present as the central evil of slavery: the ability to force a person to accept his own suffering and ignore suffering in other people. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Things get worse when he's sold to Edwin Epps (Fassbender) who gives none of the limited regard Salomon might have enjoyed with Ford. Epps is a monster who frequently tortures his slaves under the guise of scripture when they fail to meet their quota and delights in frequently raping </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">Patsy</span></span> (newcomer Lupita Nyong'o), a female slave he professes to love but occasionally has whipped to keep his jealous wife happy. </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">Patsy</span></span> goes along with this at first because she hopes it will mean better treatment as a House Slave, and then because she has no choice. More and more Solomon must play himself down to survive, leading to a harrowing moment where, for very complex reasons he is forced to torture a fellow slave.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's a lot of cruelty and McQueen plays it in his signature, matter of fact tone. But instead of removing us from it, the approach makes everything all the more horrifying. Under both owners we constantly hear slaves being tortured either just out of frame or in the frame but just out of focus. He uses the images to emulate the blinders Northup and his fellow slaves must wear to survive. By showing just how casual an attitude slaves and owners have to the human suffering caused by the institution, it becomes a film of almost surrealistic horrors. Take the scene where Solomon is sold: We're in a posh, middle class home, Paul Giamatti and his perspective buyers dressed in the finest of fashion as the slaves stand around mostly in the nude, staring blankly, desplaying their teeth and muscles on demand, while Solomon is forced to play violin concertos to make it all feel more normal.</span></span><br />
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The performances are all excellent, all the principals throwing themselves into their parts with method like abandon without ever overwhelming the film, <span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fassbender and </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nyong'o </span></span>are particularly good and Ejiofor's performance avoids the Oscarbait traps of appearing overly noble. This is a man who knows how vulnerable he is and that he's losing his soul day by day. Every attempt at defiance or escape he makes puts him in more and more danger. The fact that he does eventually manage it is so miraculous that it'll feel like Deus Ex Machina to some and in a way it is. Most people who entered slavery, either by birth or kidnapping, never escaped and </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the odds say that he should have died in bondage. </span></span> But the reunion with his family feels hollow. We know that his only way out was, ultimately, to ignore the cries of others, knowing that to speak out could spell the end of his own tentative freedom. The real Solomon Northup spent the rest of his life working on the underground railroad, so it can't be said that pragmatism broke him, but in McQueen's film, it certainly compromises him.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Grade: A-</span></span></div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-75852470532159181202013-12-24T12:41:00.000-06:002014-01-13T05:28:55.329-06:00AMERICAN HUSTLE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;">To him, it's all about the hair. For most men hair isn't a big deal, a couple brush strokes here, some gel or </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">mousse</span></span> or whatever and boom you're done for the day. But no, Irving Rosenfeld has a system. Most of the hair on his head is long gone, but there's still a tuft in front. As long that tuft remains, he figures he has hair and that he can glue little bits of foam to the top of his head, comb it over and call it real. It fools no one but him, not even his wife and girlfriend who seem to like him more for the confidence required to attempt it, yet such intimate acts of deception are central to David O. Russell's </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">huckster</span></span> epic <i>American Hustle</i>, a film that has a lot of what you need for a real film, even if the rest is all foam.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: normal;">Everyone in the film is a schemer or a cheat of some kind and the implication is that the artifice of deceit is so ingrained in them that they don't really know how to do anything else. Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is an entrepreneur who came up with the idea of </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".r[3wb8g].[1][3][1]{comment10201846725467299_6061128}.[0].{right}.[0].{left}.[0].[0].[0][3]"><span data-reactid=".r[3wb8g].[1][3][1]{comment10201846725467299_6061128}.[0].{right}.[0].{left}.[0].[0].[0][3].[0]"><span data-reactid=".r[3wb8g].[1][3][1]{comment10201846725467299_6061128}.[0].{right}.[0].{left}.[0].[0].[0][3].[0].[2]">breaking</span></span></span> windows for his fathers glass company as a child and by the late 70's skims off of several dry cleaners he owns but his big thing is fencing stolen/forged art and good ol' insurance fraud. His partner/lover Sydney (a wonderfully fragile Amy Adams), is an ex-stripper who's good at keeping everything bottled up. Irving notes that she's got everything needed to be a good con, she can look right through you and she understands Duke Ellington. In terms of self deception, she doesn't have a comb over but she does spend half the film wondering in and out of a British accent while inhabiting her perfected alternate persona “Lady Edith.” It fools more people, including Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), the hungry FBI agent who busts them before using their skills to set up stings that will hopefully put his name on the map.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: normal;">The partnership is uneasy, quickly becoming a love triangle. Actually it's a quadrangle because Irving is married to Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), perhaps the slickest con in the film, who soon becomes involved in the latest sting which, like many 'big scores,' has spiraled up in scope till they're trying to get Atlantic City rebuilt with money from a fake Sheik and bribe congressmen to legislate for his citizenship. If that last bit sounded familiar, the film is based on the famous ABSCAM case. If your worried about this being a historically accurate account, don't. Russell assures us at the start of the film that only “Some of this actually happened.”</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: normal;">The film enjoys being as removed from reality as its character, allowing the film to indulge in proper movie fantasy. Russell (<i>Three Kings</i>, <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i>) shoots the film in a modified Martin Scorcese style, and it's a lot of fun to watch the love quadrangle unfold with its elaborate camera moves, Jukebox soundtrack (Jeff Lynne in place of Scorcese's Stones), dueling narrators, and plenty of deliberate homages to the master. Russell makes the style his own somewhat. For instance: he sometimes has people sing along to the soundtrack, leading to a standout moment where Lawrence joyously sings “Live and Let Die” after potentially sending someone to their death. On the nose, sure, but fun. But you never forget you’re watching a Not-Scorsese movie, which is disappointing for Russell who used to swing much harder for the fences stylistically with films like <i>Three Kings</i> and <i>I Heart Huckabees</i>. He’s still produces good work, but he seems to have mellowed out considerably. The film isn’t completely forgettable visually: there's a great image with a laundromat carousel and a jaw dropper where all the bickering, spurned lovers arrive at an event like incoming rock gods from out of the fog to the stings of 10538 Overture.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: normal;">He also distinguishes himself with a sense of looseness that runs completely counter to the cocaine induced madness of <i>Goodfellas</i> or the greatest accused faux-Scorcese film <i>Boogie Nights</i>. Instead of being a massive explosion of plot, character exposition, and episodes from their lives that show us what they do, Russell aims to slow everything down to create a sense of intimacy. That approach is usually a strength for him and it does ensure that all the actors have moments to shine, but it </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span data-measureme="1"><span class="null">wrecks</span></span> the pacing and muddies everything up thematically. The film starts with a strong thread, but it's lost and found again many times along the way that the film feel adrift and directionless. </span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;">Still, <i>Hustle</i> is mostly fun, it might even spawn a catch-phrase with 'science oven,' and it'll make a good party movie, but it's ultimately a</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> formula movie without anything audacious to add. </span></span>There's substance here somewhere, but in a film with so many people trying to break free of artifice, David O. Russell doesn't quite manage it either.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;">Grade: B</span></span><br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-30156276663115193022013-12-05T14:25:00.000-06:002013-12-29T17:34:27.852-06:00OLDBOY (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For months I've been trying to think of a production as ill conceived as a remake of Park Chan Wook's 2003 film <i>Oldboy</i>. I have no idea who'd want to see this. Most remakes are done, I suspect, because the original is famous enough that the marketing can coast on the general public's nostalgia for the title. But <i>Oldboy</i> is fairly obscure, has little brand name recognition to cash in on, and is too unpalatable for general audiences. Furthermore, the people who do know it are mostly film lovers who generally hold it as a classic and wouldn't want to see it remade, even by Spike Lee, a great (if uneven) filmmaker in his own right. The only hope is for Lee, who delights in provoking, to come up with something so different that it stands apart as a new vision.<br />
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Unfortunately, Lee mostly just walks the line between doing his own thing, and staying within the confines of the established story. The results are well made and somewhat distinct from the original without being truly distinctive. The film starts in 1993 when we meet Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), a rakish ad exec who neglects his family and is on the verge of losing his job. One particularly drunken night he's snatched off the street and wakes up in the locked hotel room where he'll spend the next 20 years.<br />
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The scene where Doucett discovers his predicament is very well done and the sequence makes the best case for Lee's version as an alternate take. Many of the beats from the original are there, but instead of trying to outdo the sheer propulsiveness of it, Lee instead slows down for something more intimate. Doucett doesn't know who imprisoned him, but he learns through his TV that he's been framed for the death of his wife. As the decades pass he'll quit drinking, attempt suicide, get in shape, plot escape, eat a lot of bad dumplings and in one touching vignette (Lee's best addition) befriend a family of mice living in the walls before they meet a particularly nasty fate.<br />
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After he is mysteriously released, the film starts to lose me. He makes contact with his old bartender (Michael Imperioli) and Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), a pretty doctor who helps him track down his tormentors. He kinda wants revenge, but mostly he just wants to clear his name and be there for his daughter, meaning the film must now link the two goals if the plot is to move forward, leading to the intervention of his former captor who puts a timeclock on the investigation. The captor is played by Shartlo Copley as a series of cartoon affectations, his long fingernails and Draco Malfoy accent eliciting Python levels of laughter in my screening. He's not just in a different movie, he's in a different galaxy.<br />
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Copley's performance is emblematic of a major issue with the film, it has no idea what it wants to do tonally. Lee isn't interested in replicating the original's theatricality, but when the material is gothic, operatic Greek Tragedy, it doesn't respond well to the comparative realism Lee imposes on it and the film often seems to be fighting him. No mater how much Lee tones down his own distinct style to compensate, this needs to be a quirkier film. Copely and a warden played by Samuel L. Jackson are some of the remnants of the Park weirdness (albeit without the dark humor), but outside of Jackson, they don't work, partly because of cognitive <span class="null">dissonance</span>, and partly because Copley is terribly miscast.<br />
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Further wonkiness results from just how much of the original structure remains. Lee may deviate and elaborate, but he doesn't improve or fundamentally change, meaning fans will find Lee's alterations mostly distracting. Neophites will get the most out of this, but they won't confuse the film with being a masterpiece. The ending still packs a wallop, but I believe newbies will sense how Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich overcomplicate it and dilute its horrific consequences. While the film has more than its share of nastiness, frequently trying to outdo its source, it's much less daring too. The downfall of <i>Oldboy </i>2.0 (3.0 if you count the original manga) is that it does nothing to break free of the original's shadow, there are pieces of a truly original take on the material, but they're stuck in a film that just doesn't have the guts to go all the way with them.<br />
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Grade: C</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-36060857166392118792013-10-11T16:15:00.001-05:002013-10-12T10:15:58.118-05:00GRAVITY<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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After a painful, seven-year absence, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (<i>Y Tu Mamá También</i>, <i>Children of Men</i>) has returned with his most technically impressive film in a career. The nerve-wracking suspense thriller is one of those large scale epics that will probably be wasted on anyone watching at home. Its grand, vertigo inducing vistas featuring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney floating 30 miles above the Earth, demand to be seen in 3D and on the biggest screen possible.<br />
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The entire first act is captured in a single, stunningly extended, 17 minute take that starts with a breathtaking view of the Earth and a small speck that quickly grows into the Space Shuttle. As Cuarón's camera balletically zips around, we see astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney) testing a new jetpack while our protagonist, Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) completes repairs to the Hubble Telescope. We learn that while Kowalski is an old hand, Stone is a rookie, a mission specialist who's there more for her expertise with the equipment than her abilities as an astronaut. This inexperience makes what happens next so much worse for her. An unexpected cloud of debris strikes and destroys the shuttle, sending Stone flying off into the emptiness of space. Cut off from ground communication, low on oxygen with no
chance of rescue and only 90 minutes till the debris orbits around the
Earth and hits again, rarely have characters found themselves in more dire situations.<i> </i><br />
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<i>Gravity </i>might be the most authentic feeling space film ever made. All the equipment the astronauts use looks correct, Cuarón doesn't cheat the lack of sound in space, everything we hear in the film comes from the in helmet mics, and he makes extensive use of CGI to make the weightlessness work, and it all helps sell the peril, which is helpful in a film that was filmed with so many special effects. Even more than last years <i>Life of Pi</i>, <i>Gravity </i>blurs the line between what we consider to be an animated film and what is live action. <br />
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The CGI and the use of very long takes, which continues throughout the film, gives the film a decidedly videogame aesthetic. But what elevates <i>Gravity's </i>cinematography far above the level of a really good E3 demo is the personality that Cuarón and his regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, breathe into the camera movements. The camera never feels like a cold, remote observer, but instead flies around like an inquisitive child struck with fear and wonder and at the same time invigorated by the freedom of movement that zero-g offers.<br />
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For all of its intimidating technical achievements, the script (co-written by Cuarón and his son Jonas) is a bit clunky and too wordy, particularly towards the end. Also, while the film admirably tries to be weightier and give Stone an emotional back story, it sometimes feels like too much. Bollock delivers one of her best performances, but when we're spending the entire film thinking she could die at any moment the emotional stakes are already there and we don't have time to care about anything else. But these are minor quibbles, <i>Gravity </i>may not work as much more than a roller-coaster ride, but it's hard to care when it's the best damn roller coaster ride in town.<br />
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Grade: A-</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-76213034264169370932013-10-07T19:32:00.001-05:002017-10-05T11:12:09.777-05:00PRISONERS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Sometimes it seems that the whole world is on drugs. <i>Prisoners</i> is currently enjoying a fairly impressive box office run and glowing reviews despite being complete and total dog shit. It's a sleazy, exploitative Basic Cable thriller with Oscarbait aspirations.<br />
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It stars Hugh Jackman as religious survivalist Keller Dover. One afternoon the Dover family visits their neighbors, the Birchs, for a quiet Thanksgiving dinner. Director Denis Villeneuve takes his time laboriously underlining just how normal a day this is while a dank, dirty RV circles the neighborhood. Eventually, both families realize that their respective 6 year old daughters have been kidnapped.<br />
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The police are called and it's not long till Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the owner of the RV, emerges as a suspect. But after being held and questioned by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), Jones is released due to lack of evidence and the fact that he has the IQ of a small child, and is likely incapable of committing the crime. But Dover isn't so sure. Fearing the worst, he takes matters into his own hands and kidnaps Alex, holds him in an abandoned building and tortures him for information.<br />
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You might be wondering what everyone else is doing during all this, the answer is not much. With so many big name cast members, you'd think the film might focus on how this kidnapping effects the lives of these two families, but no. Rarely are casts like this wasted so badly. Keller's wife, played by Golden Globe nominee Maria Bello, spends most of her negligible screen time siting in bed doped up on pills. Will their older son feel guilty as his negligence inadvertently aided the kidnappers in act one? No, he'll be almost completely forgotten.<br />
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It's the same problem with the Birch family, they are played by Oscar nominees Terrance Howard and Viola Davis and they are absent from the film for such outrageous stretches that it's easy to forget that they're in the movie at all and that they too have lost a daughter. Sometimes they show up so they can be complicit in Keller's crimes, but nothing much comes of it. However unintentional, the film seems to be telling us that in this situation, only the emotional struggle of macho white men are worthy of screen time.<br />
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Worse still is that the film doesn't do much with that screen time. The film has a lot of potential ideas to mine, but for much of the extravagant 153 minute run time we're punished by endless scenes of Dover yelling and torturing Jones, every one plays the same note except louder than the last. Each one not sure if it wants us to marvel at just how villainous Keller has become, or to agree with his methods. Occasionally the film reaches for religious symbolism – opening with Dover reciting Our Father, or occasional insert shots crucifixes – as a justification. But while the film does it's damnedest to get us to notice these images, it never does the hard work of attaching any meaning to them. It's window dressing Villeneuve uses so he can pretend to condemn Dover's brutality towards this mentally disabled man before ultimately excusing it.<br />
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While Dover brutally tortures Jones, Loki's investigation stumbles around, pursuing a series of increasingly implausible red herrings presented with all the ceremony of a <i>Law & Order: SVU</i> episode but without the <span class="null">self-conscious</span> camp. We get murderous priests, and lots of snakes and mazes and bumbling on the part of the supposedly brilliant Loki and again, nothing much comes it except to put Loki in the right position to set up what may go down as <i>the</i> textbook example of how not to do an ambiguous ending.<br />
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<i>Prisoners</i> is the kind of film that mistakes misery for substance and as a result is a mean, sadistic bore. It puts us through the ringer only because it can, using serious issues and concepts like child kidnapping and faith in ugly, exploitative ways. Cinematographer Roger Deakins does great work lighting the thing, but don't be fooled by the film's artifice. It's just another tool the director uses to get you to think this film is more than just a shiny turd. Do yourself a favor and stay away from one of the worst films of the year.<br />
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Grade: D</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-29566381768907832472013-10-03T14:16:00.002-05:002013-10-09T11:27:35.366-05:00TREKKIN' IT: THE FINAL FRONTIER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Fair warning: review contains spoilers.</i><br />
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At its best Star Trek has been a standard bearer for intelligent, mainstream science fiction. But the longer it allowed its actors creative control, the more it risked being the victim of runaway egos. The series had done fine letting Leonard Nimoy direct a couple installments, but the franchise was about to suffer it's first bona fide dud with the William Shatner helmed <i>Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.</i><br />
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In interviews, producer Harve Bennett, who remains enthusiastic about the finished product, calls the film “Bill's turn,” referring to a contract clause that allowed Shatner a shot at directing solely because Nimoy had had one. That he would try directing a feature isn't surprising, he'd long been looking for ways to distinguish himself beyond acting. In addition to his infamous singing carrier, he had directed a few small plays and a smattering of <i>T.J. Hooker</i> episodes. The same year <i>Final Frontier </i>was released, Shatner published <i>TekWar</i>, the first in a series of cyberpunk novels he co-wrote with an uncredited Ron Goulart. Shatner viewed himself a storyteller and for his feature debut, he set his sights sky high for what he hoped would be the ultimate <i>Star Trek</i> film, one that would simultaneously take the franchise into darker, more action oriented territory whist pumping up the broad comedy and, most staggeringly, answer the question of 'is there a God' with a very preachy 'no.'<br />
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That's quite a checklist for a first time film director, but the film cannot be called a failure of ambition because that would imply that Shanter, Bennet and screenwriter David Loughery (<i>Lakeview Terrace</i>,<i> Nurse 3D</i>) had a clear, unified idea of what they were doing. Instead the film is the definition of egotism, going off in a hundred different, conflicting directions, thinking each one will be equally fantastic and perfect, and the resulting film is a complete mess.<br />
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The film is not without its moments. The film's prologue – one of the few moments where the film rises above its generally workmanlike visual look, a problem perhaps exacerbated by the films short shooting schedule – lands us on Nimbus III and introduces us to Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), a renegade Vulcan who's brainwashing the local farmers into serving as his own personal army. <br />
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From here it gets really convoluted, really quickly. Through some awful dialogue delivered by David Warner (who seems to be in physical pain delivering it), we learn that Nimbus III is a diplomatic outpost in the Neutral Zone separating the Klingon and Romulan Empires from the Federation. The place is even refereed to as “the planet of Galactic peace.” Why then, we might ask, is the conference room where the ambassadors meet in a storage closet behind a seedy dive bar in the kind of town waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride through? It doesn't really matter. The film may go through a lot of trouble explaining Nimbus III, but it's all about to be thrown away. All that matters is that there are important people in the capital city that Sybok will use as hostages so he can steal a starship.<br />
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All this exposition is intercut with some shockingly disparate scenes where Kirk, Spock and McCoy go camping in Yosemite National Park. This 'action' climaxes with a campfire scene where the gang teaches Spock to sing “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.” As a kid I remember kind of liking this, It's patently ridiculous, and the chemistry of the actors almost sells it, but as an adult it feels like little more than a way to fill time while scoring easy fan service. The fact is that real fans already know that these people love each other, and if the film wanted to remind us of their bond for later in the film, there are a hundred simpler ways to do so that don't stop the action cold. It's never a good sign when the first half hour of a film feels like the first half.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPddhI8UHbpwPVhOcmOZ3HNQQ5X91q7IO8ehkJNS5h_VXhDZoxh3WtFbJC4E4sVDR5tuhhUoirj-yucIY0DitCA_pK83CoDnt8ccx2FOZPIMVApIqu0mcMElBJQGG6tlumuFk7bz_r3Hk/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPddhI8UHbpwPVhOcmOZ3HNQQ5X91q7IO8ehkJNS5h_VXhDZoxh3WtFbJC4E4sVDR5tuhhUoirj-yucIY0DitCA_pK83CoDnt8ccx2FOZPIMVApIqu0mcMElBJQGG6tlumuFk7bz_r3Hk/s320/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a>Eventually, the crew is ordered to rescue Sybok's hostages and after arriving on Nimbus III we get a direct to video style action scene where Kirk and Spock ride on blue horses and charge a team of commandos into Paradise City (where the grass is not green and the girls are cats).<span style="color: red;"> </span>Eventually Sybok wins and uses Kirk to takeover the understaffed and chronically malfunctioning Enterprise A. At this point we learn two unbelievably ridiculous things, 1) Sybock is really Spock's half brother and 2) The reason Sybok wants to steal the Enterprise is so he can travel to the center of the Galaxy and meet God.<br />
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The film uses the family revelation to shake up the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship. It's an admirable idea, but giving Spock an evil half-brother we've never heard of is such an out of nowhere <i>Scooby Doo</i> twist that it's a non-starter, as is the implication that the overly pragmatic Spock might betray Kirk and their multi-decade spanning friendship for an outcast half brother with whom he has an anecdotal relationship at best. Still, the film doggedly peruses the idea that the crew's loyalty is up for grabs as Sybok uses his Vulcan abilities to “remove their pain.” What that means exactly is very inconsistent. At the beginning of the film it seems like he's brainwashing people into joining him. But as the film goes on it tones down the Charles Manson vibe and it suddenly seems like his glassy eyed followers have free will, especially when it comes to characters we like.<br />
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This culminates in the film's only good scene, where Sybok attempts to take away McCoy's inner pain. He's forced to relive his father's death, for which he was responsible, while Kirk and Sybok argue as to the best way to deal with our daemons. Sybok insists that we must purge ourselves of the past in order to move forward, hence his whole “give me your pain” shtick. Where as Kirk believes that our past, especially our misfortunes define who we are and should be preserved at all costs. This is the kind of intellectual argument that <i>Star Trek</i> is best at, and the film would have done better to have more of this, but alas the film decides it really wants to meet God instead.<br />
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The Enterprise approaches the center of the Galaxy, passing through lots of lightning bolts, energy clouds and other special effects nonsense before arriving at a mysterious planet the crew dub Eden. Sybok and the core Trek trio set down on Eden and search while Jerry Goldsmith's score does an admirable job instilling a sense of wonder. For a moment it feels we just might have something, but then “God” shows up. We should not expect very much from a film that promises a cameo from the almighty, we have such high expectations that it's hard to impress us. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sticking with the "big, white beard" look doesn't help.</td></tr>
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To be fair, the being that appears isn't very well defined, it could be God, the Devil, some kind of alien, or some kind of combination of the three. I take it though that he is meant to be God in some fashion because that's what the finished film has set up, and it never really suggests otherwise. At any rate, he is revealed to be a fraud. After a shockingly short encounter, Kirk outsmarts “God” who seems to be nothing but a snake oil salesman who, like Sybok only wants to steal a starship, prompting Shatner's famous line: “What does God need with a starship?”<br />
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That's a good line, but it's the beginning of a thought not the end of one. At this point in the film it's fairly safe to assume that Shatner is an Atheist, which is fine and dandy if that's what works for you, but his film casually brushes off the idea of a God without any thought, insight, nuance or debate. The film had the wonderful opportunity to explore how faith can be corrupted and trap people or even suggest that this being only wants a starship so he too can search for his creator, which would be really interesting. But instead of doing any of those things, the film decides to half-ass the whole Atheism thing and paint Shatner's alter ego as "God's" outright superior: according to this film, God and his followers are either glassy-eyed hicks or hucksters who are easily outwitted by the glorious Captain Kirk, envy of all! That is, of course, before "God" is killed by a photon torpedo delivered by Spock (<i>Trek</i>'s go to embodiment of all that is logical and scientific). <br />
<br />
<i>Final Frontier</i> had a chance to be something interesting, but mistakes the kernels of ideas for fully formed ones. It wants to have big ideas but would rather go camping. All and all, it would have been best if Shatner had stuck to acting. Time has ensured that film isn't necessarily the lowest point in the series, but it's pretty damn close.<br />
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Grade: D<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Trekkin' It directory:<br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/05/trekkin-it-motion-picture.html">The Motion Picture</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/06/trekkin-it-space-seed-and-wrath-of-khan.html">Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/07/trekkin-it-search-for-spock.html">The Search for Spock</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/08/trekkin-it-voyage-home.html">The Voyage Home</a><br />
<i>
The Final Frontier </i><br />
The Undiscovered Country<br />
<br />
Generations<br />
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact<br />
Insurrection<br />
Nemesis<br />
<br />
Star Trek '09<br />
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) </div>
</div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-17300832319517288772013-09-21T13:18:00.000-05:002014-06-29T00:43:21.732-05:00THE GRANDMASTER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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While watching <i>The Grandmaster,</i> Wong Kar-Wai's decade in the making martial arts biopic, I couldn't help but think of the films of Bruce Lee, particularly <i>Enter The Dragon</i>. This is partially because <i>Grandmaster's </i>subject, Ip Man (Tony Leung), went on to train Lee, but mostly because of the contrast in how these films handle action.<br />
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The photography in Lee's films were joyously overwhelmed by his physicality. The camera often staying far away, emphasizing his whole body moving as one blurry, unstoppable force. But <i>Grandmaster</i> isn't like that. It's approach to Kung Fu is much more intimate. Wong's camera is interested less in the whole and more in the individual pieces of the body and how they relate to each other. He uses many short close-ups of hands and feet moving into position, an impressionistic technique that, in other action pictures, frequently confuses, but here it provides insight because Wong is showing us strategy. It also helps that Wong is one of the most tactile and painterly filmmakers in the world to the point that he frequently uses step printing and other techniques to make it seem like we can actually see paint smearing on the lens of the camera and the film becomes a beautifully choreographed ballet of singing razor blades, rain drops splashing off hats, falling icicles, crumbling cakes and ritualistically lit cigarettes.<br />
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While Wong usually eschews traditional narrative to create his thematic mood pieces, a sort of story does emerge: the film follows Ip Man and Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), two expertly talented Kung Fu masters who find their destinies greatly altered because of the times they live in. The film begins in the early 1930's when it seems that Ip, a rising star, might be able to unite the Northern and Southern schools of Kung Fu. But his refusal to collaborate with the invading Japanese results in him being exiled to Hong Kong where he suffers terrible poverty and hardship. By the time Wong get's to the 1950's, the old guard is mostly gone and no one even knows Ip's name. <br />
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Gong Er's battle is even harder, she is the daughter of a northern grandmaster and an expert of her 47 Hand's style, she even beats Ip Man in a wonderfully conceived bout, but because of her gender she will always be denied her place as the shepherd of her fathers legacy. Her father, clearly bitter about the limits society puts on her, is forced to pass off his legacy to someone the community would accept and suggests she try her hand at becoming a doctor.<br />
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Though history has vindicated Ip Man (films about him are almost a genre unto themselves at this point), Wong views both these people as being defined by lost destinies. Indeed all the characters in the film seem to struggle living in the shadow of the lives they almost had. Like many Wong films, <i>Grandmaster</i> is ultimately about people in limbo, making the best of who they are and using love as a way to cope with crushing loneliness.<br />
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There are two cuts of Grandmaster out there. The original Hong Kong cut is not especially long at 130 minutes, none the less it has been cut down to 108 minutes for the American market. The cuts are noticeable but not fatal. The American cut, which Wong oversaw personally, adds a great deal of intertitles to help explain/rush past the complex plot, and it often feels like there are holes in the narrative. The Hong Kong version handles the exposition much more smoothly and there are more scenes involving the Gong family and more stuff with secondary characters such as Razor (Chen Chang), another exiled master. Strangely though, the American cut also contains a great deal of footage not found in the Hong Kong cut, some of which seemed essential when I saw it last week. Both versions are fantastic and worth your time.<br />
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Grade: A- </div>
Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-51164186721143251902013-09-12T14:09:00.001-05:002014-01-13T05:58:23.335-06:00THE WORLD'S END<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Few comedies are awaited with as much fervor as those of Edgar Wright who, along with frequent star and co-writer Simon Pegg seem to be vying for the title of "patron saint of Nerddom." While Wright's films, particularly those of the Cornetto Trilogy, are draped in nostalgia and genre thrills, they are unique in modern geekdom in that they don't rest on nostalgia so much as they serve as complex, enjoyably conflicted, frequently hilarious meditations on it.<br />
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It's hard growing up, particularly if you've been putting it off for a few decades. Such is the predicament of Gary King (Pegg), the rude, drunken and earnestly desperate protagonist of <i>The World's End</i>, the third and possibly best entry of the trilogy. For King, life never measurably improved on a drunken pub crawl he attempted with his friends when they were all 17.<br />
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Twenty-three years later King is suddenly eager to get the band back together and recreate that crawl, which he dubs "The Golden Mile:" 12 pints at all 12 of the pubs in their hometown of Newton Heaven, finishing at the titular World's End. But his friends (played by Wright regulars: Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan) aren't so eager to join him. Unlike King, who lives his life in a shabby flat doing God-only-knows between AA meetings, they've all settled down and joined society. But one by one they're lured back by King's oily charm and the promise of days gone by.<br />
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But recapturing their glory days proves difficult, everything seems just out of reach and they can't settle in like they used to. The town feels slightly off, particularly the all important pubs which have lost their individual flair after a series of corporate take-overs: "Starbucking," they call it. There's a nice, quintessentially Wrightian touch, where every time they enter a new bar, the camera repeats the exact same establishing shot in what is clearly the same set with different extras. This persistent offness launches the gang into existential crisis mode. It's as if the world is against them cutting loose. Of course, this being a Cornetto film, the assertion is soon proven true when we learn that the town's increasing plainness is actually the result of a stealth takeover by space robots. <br />
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This film might be the most confident of the series. We get no winking shots of flying saucers or anything to telegraph the genre shift a la <i>Shaun of the Dead </i>or <i>Hot Fuzz</i>. As much fun as that was in the previous installments, it's for the best that we don't get it here, as the importance of the pre-shift movie almost dominates the post-shift one. The film takes a lot of time setting up King and the gang to the point that we might all be perfectly content if the film remained Wright's version of <i>The Big Chill</i>. But the shift into <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers </i>territory works because it all clicks thematically in fun and surprising ways. It's no accident that a film exploring the links between nostalgia and conformity selects automatons as its antagonists.<br />
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The film's visions of what conformity means is interesting in that Wright and Pegg don't automatically discount the Starbucked life the robots are offering. Like in <i>Hot Fuzz</i>, it seems as if nostalgia and conformity are linked in Wright's mind. King may prod and tease his friends for working for 'The Man' and living flavorless lives, but it seems like they have more options than King. He may have succeeded in staying away from societal norms, but his freedom and his refusal to let go of his youth has put him in damaging routines that he isn't even aware of. The film sympathizes with his desire to be the ultimate individual while observing that the quest has made him a friendless slave to drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, it seems that King knows he's a fuck-up, but he wants the freedom to be a fuck-up, even
if that's not exactly freedom and has disastrous consequences for
everyone around him. That's a pretty tough conundrum for a comedy to present but Wright handles it about as deftly as one can handle such a messy worldview. In a dark, telling echo of <i>Shaun of the Dead</i>, the gang doesn't just have to fight robots, but King, who's insistence that they finish the Golden Mile and get to The World's End starts to seem more self-serving and suicidal by the minute.<br />
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That multifaceted view of King and his situation is what makes the film so good, and that lens is also turned on King's "friends" who all have their own outlooks on their youth and how the town has changed. Nick Frost does a fantastic job playing against type as the mature one of the group and there's a scene where Eddie Marsan encounters a former bully that's touching to say the least. It is a pity that we don't get the same kind of detail with the character played by the wonderful Rosamund Pike, who is saddled with being "the girl." Pegg and Wright have consistently shown an eagerness to be emotionally honest and mature with the film's they make together, so they owe it to themselves to stop underwriting their female parts.<br />
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Still, <i>World's</i> <i>End</i> is fantastic. Wright and Pegg have capped off an already excellent series with their most thoughtful entry without ever losing their sense of humor. The film might be about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction, but it's also a really funny movie about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction. Also the robots are a blast. In a year filled with dumb sci-fi (<i>Elysium, Man of Steel</i>) and moronic looking comedies (does anyone actually want to see <i>The Family</i>?), it's exciting to see a film like this, take on these issues so successfully and emerge as a great ode to the joys and pitfalls of getting loaded.<br />
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Grade: A<br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-67023301035698585502013-09-02T14:16:00.002-05:002014-07-21T21:48:07.772-05:00ELYSIUM<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In 2009, Neil Bloomkamp made sizable splash with his debut feature <i>District 9</i>, with complex characters and a well thought out world, it seemed like a real piece of visionary filmmaking on par with the likes of Paul Verhoeven. Unfortunately Bloomkamp is suffering from the sophomore slump with his follow up, <i>Elysium</i>, an earnest, reductive, pandering, startlingly dumb film.<br />
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The year is 2154 and the rich have left Earth to live in the titular, hood ordainment shaped, space station. Elysium is meant to stand in for upper-class America, but unintentionally comes off as Heaven, where beautiful, kinda ethnically diverse people sit around all day by the pool and tan themselves and there is no sickness or pain because every home has a med-pod that magically cures you of anything instantly.<br />
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Our unambiguous, White Savior/friend to children hero is Max De Costa
(Matt Damon), a lowly Earthling orphan with a dream in his heart to save
up enough money to cross that Space Border into Space America. One day while working in a factory, making robots for The
Man, Max sustains a heavy dose of radiation that will kill him in five
day unless he can get to Elysium.<br />
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Getting there is going to be a challenge as Elysium is off limits to the proles on Earth which, in the absence of the wealthy, has become an over-populated, planet
sized shanty town. Sometimes people try and sneak into Elysium, but more often than not they're shot down by the stations security chief, Delacourt (Jodie Foster in one of her worst performances), who really hates undocumented migrants for reasons never coherently explained.<br />
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Have you
figured out the metaphor yet? Because Bloomkamp doesn't think you
have. Max recruits the help of Spider (Wagner Copley), a techno coyote who agrees to help if Max first agrees to a very convoluted heist that requires him to go under the knife and be outfitted with a neural link-up and exoskeleton. But, the exoskeleton is one of the film's many ideas and details it doesn't have time to develop. Yes, the film does look fantastic, particularly the Earth segments and there are few people with a sharper eye for future tech than Bloomkamp but great production design means squat in a word this flat and cartoonish. I'm a real sucker for immigrant stories and blue collar strife, but the border analogy Bloomkamp draws never progresses beyond its initial conception. Everything feels sketchy, particularly as the action moves to the space station.<br />
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Bloomkamp has repeated a lot from his earlier film, both films are races against time with a hero who's physiology is altered against their will and must fight all powerful oppressors, and the similarities get even more specific from there. That's fine, there is a serviceable tradition of director's using newly acquired Hollywood resources to essentially remake their independent (or pseudo-indipendent) breakouts. What's startling is what he chose to not copy, namely the humanity. In <i>District 9</i> we had a protagonist who was pitiful one second and complicit in the oppression of an entire race the next. That complex relationship between a film's main character and the audience is rare and kind of magical. At the very least that unpredictability gave the action scenes a huge shot in the arm. <i>Elysium </i>doesn't have that. Its characters are cardboard at best, running around, shouting and getting involved in some very badly done action scenes and the one or two moments where Bloomkamp does try to undercut Max are mindbogglingly forced. <br />
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Instead of treating the genre as a gateway to complexity, he indulges in simplistic, pandering fantasy. In Bloomkamp's mind, the poor are all helpless saints waiting for an able bodied white man to save them, women are damsels and the rich have always had the ability to magically cure all that ails us with a literal push of a button, but choose not too out of pure evil. If the film didn't favor the common man, Ayn Rand would be proud of how reductive this film film is. The film does have an admirable social consciousness, but an allegory this simplistic and lacking in humanity doesn't do any good.<i> Elysium </i>isn't a terrible entertainment, but boy it's a disappointing come down from an ambitious debut.<br />
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Grade: C<br />
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-965882820605508456.post-81409897234414089032013-08-21T13:44:00.000-05:002013-10-03T14:44:06.409-05:00TREKKIN' IT: THE VOYAGE HOME<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Leonard Nimoy is a big softy. After the financial success of <i>Search For Spock,</i> he was given greater creative control to direct <i>Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home</i> and what kind of film does he make? Not a space combat film like <i>Wrath of Khan </i>or a sterile, alienating thinker like <i>The Motion Picture</i>, but a movie about friendship, teamwork and saving the whales. On paper, it's this film, not <i>Final Frontier</i>, that ought to be considered the big misstep, the one no one talks about. But instead <i>Voyage Home</i> is one of the best, and certainly most delightful films in the series.<br />
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Picking up where the last film left off, we find Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of the crew in exile on Vulcan, deciding to return to Earth and face the consequences for all the rules they broke so they could save Spock (Nimoy). As they approach Earth, things get impossibly goofy: in a reworking of the V'Ger set-up from <i>TMP</i>, the planet is being devastated by a mysterious, alien probe. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) decodes the probes signal as a Humpback Whale song. Evidently, the probe had expected to make first contact with some kind of Whale based civilization and instead only finds the Humans who, in this world, had long ago hunted them into extinction. Consequently, the only way to save Earth is to go back in time and find some whales to talk to the probe. Yes, that is the actual set up and it's a real testament to just how good these actors are that they sell the gargantuan leaps necessary to move the plot along.<br />
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After a trippy time travel sequence, the crew sets down in 1986 San Fransisco and splits up into teams. Kirk and Spock case out a local aquarium while the rest of the crew concentrate on modifying and repairing the ship. It's at this point where the film gets to what it's best at: fish out of water comedy. We get a lot of fun scenes of the Enterprise crew trying to adjust to their 20th Century surroundings.The highlight might be Scotty and McCoy trying to figure out how to use a Mac Plus and handing out future technology willy nilly.<br />
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The film is unusually democratic in handing everyone screen time. For years Walter Keonig's Checkov has had very little to do but sit around and be the likable<i> </i>Russian (it's telling for a franchise where people are defined by their jobs that Checkov's skill set remains undefined), but here he finally gets his own subplot, scoring some of the films better laughs when his obliviousness to Cold War hostilities lands him in trouble when he has to sneak around a U.S. nuclear vessel.<br />
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We also have a small subplot about just how culturally displaced Spock is. He's unable to relate to his crew mates, the 20th Century is even harder. There's an endlessly amusing gag about him being absolutely terrible at swearing, even worse than Kirk, who charmingly thinks "Double dumb ass on you" is a real phrase people say in 1986. Spock's inability to act Human is interesting as he is indeed half Human. Because he was raised in Vulcan culture, he was never that warm to begin with, but he used to be able to fake it just a little. The film makes a point of telling us that the ritual that brought him back from the dead also reset his brain and erased all the years he'd spent trying to reconcile his two sides.<br />
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While this is a very small subplot in the film, and a character point rarely touched upon, Spock's regression is the flip of the direction the film's were taking. Like Spock himself, <i>Trek</i> has always had to navigate between brains and heart. At one point <i>Trek</i> was primarily about allegory and big ideas, but that began to noticeably shift during Nimoy's tenure as director, and it's most apparent here. The big ideas in <i>Search for Spock </i>where jumbled and confused, here they're stripped away almost completely so the film can romp around with the crew. No one's going to argue "save the whales" as a goal, and the crew is alarmingly unconcerned with altering timelines. This is the first <i>Trek</i> film that's more about the star-power of the actors than anything else. The human focus is a welcome 180 from where the series started, but in going for the opposite extreme it also sets precedent or the series most indulgent, least enjoyable entries as we'll see with <i>Final Frontier</i> and the mostly ego driven <i>Next Generation </i>films. <br />
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<i>Voyage Home</i> is goofy, strains all credibility, but it's funny and it works like gangbusters. While easily the broadest, and most accessible of the series, it's also the boldest departure. Until now, the series had followed the traditional "bigger, darker" sequel model, but after all the heaviness of the last few films, it's nice that the <i>Trek</i> series took a break and made an impossibly fluffy, vacation style movie like this. <br />
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Grade: B+<br />
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Trekkin' It directory:<br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/05/trekkin-it-motion-picture.html">The Motion Picture</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/06/trekkin-it-space-seed-and-wrath-of-khan.html">Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan</a><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/07/trekkin-it-search-for-spock.html">The Search for Spock</a><br />
<i>The Voyage Home</i><br />
<a href="http://screenvistas.blogspot.com/2013/10/trekkin-it-final-frontier.html">The Final Frontier </a><br />
The Undiscovered Country<br />
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Generations<br />
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact<br />
Insurrection<br />
Nemesis<br />
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Star Trek '09<br />
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) </div>
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Loren Greenblatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07731332031322980609noreply@blogger.com0