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Reviews
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
At Last, A Neutral Review of Synecdoche, New York
I think Charlie Kaufman was sincere in his intent and there are valuable nuggets in the movie, but he overloaded the cart. Things that worked well included the contrast between Adele the extreme miniaturist and Caden the omnipotent world-creator. The twists of fate such as Caden beginning the movie on the fast track to an early death but surviving for decades as he built his mystery house.
The acting, however, bothered me a lot. Big cast of Hollywood's most actory actors acting at their most actory. It felt at times like a thespian Live Aid concert. Also, for the first time, I noticed Hoffman dealing out one practiced schtick after another. Too many incidents of Stan Laurelesque blubbering I've seen in other Hoffman performances. I know that Hoffman is no longer with us, and regret that, but truly great actors oscillate between outstanding performances and swan dives. No real reputational harm done in this case.
In the end, Kaufman ran up against the limits of movies to convey complex artistic and philosophical concepts. Bergman packed a lot of layers and nuances in his movies, but kept things economical when it came to themes. Bergman also worked in an era when it was possible to comfortably make one movie per year over decades, with budgets that enabled financial backers to risk small bets to reap modest rewards. Kaufman did not have the luxury of this kind of penury, and had to place the biggest possible bet on the steepest odds on the green baize. The end result is too much for two hours. Would this have worked better as a high-end cable mini-series?
The Woman on the Beach (1947)
What Would Hitchcock Do?
As much as I admire Renoir, I don't think he had found his Hollywood sea legs yet in this intriguing misfire of a film. The strange thing to me, is this had all of the elements of one of the more psychologically intense Hitchcock films--wounded hero, masochistic relationships, lurking menace, even a flock of sea birds--but it comes off as half formed and coded in a cipher that eluded me.
Some of it is clearly preposterous. Did the Coast Guard really have a cavalry? If so, shouldn't they be riding seahorses? Why so much screen time for the local bumpkins? And yet, there is something uncanny about the picture. A film noir that puts aside gats, bad girls, and goniffs that did well in the war, and goes for a dreamy haze of shadowed unease. That, and a glimpse into bohemian lifestyles before they went mass market.
I do not agree with other reviewers about Bickford's performance. Hammier than a Hormel packing plant in my book. Robert Ryan plays the Robert Ryan we have come to find deeply alarming. Joan Bennett has to tell us that she's bad, which is not a fault in her stars, but in the script.
71 minutes hints at butchery in the editing room. I could say I'd like to have seen what they threw away, but really regret that the picture seem to lack the budget for a competent script rewrite.
Gravity (2013)
Scriptwriters Lost in Spa-a-a-a-a-a-ce
I'm usually not a nitpicker and am probably duplicating comments from others, but the disappointment began with noticing that the space vehicles seemed to be traveling East to West, rather than West to East as is standard practice. The technical gaffes cascaded from there. Let's just say the filmmakers had the same understanding of orbital mechanics as four year old. Disdain climaxed when Sandra Bullock crawls out of the mud without a single bruise on body despite undergoing far too* many collisions with space hardware in the preceding 80 minutes. Still, spectacular visuals of space and Bullock's physique kept me watching.
*"Um, how do we keep this scene moving? I know! We'll slam her into the space station again."
Of Time and the City (2008)
It's Still Grim Up North
Nice visuals, but tiresome, completely unoriginal commentary. The audience appeal of this movie is based on praising its viewers for their preconceptions. Church: Wrong and sick. Monarchy: Absurd. Liverpool: Victim. Pop culture: False consciousness.
And was there an original word in the narration? Or was it copied out of secondary school literary anthologies? And how clever are witticisms like "born-again atheist" in the first place? The narrator comes off as a depressive version of Withnail's Uncle Monty, a tiresome old bore that will breathe his decaying pseudiness on you for hours if you don't have the courage to get up and leave.
The movie I can ignore. I just hate to think of the millions who find this sort of thing bracing and imaginative.
After.Life (2009)
Dead, But is She Grateful?
The budget and box office stats tell you everything you need to know about this movie. Made for $4.5 million, grossed about $100,000 in theatrical release. For once the public were right to neglect a thoroughly incompetent attempt at a horror movie.
Where to begin? Start with an artless script that remains implausible from its grand design, to its subplots, to individual scenes. I might be able to suspend disbelief about a talk therapy mortician and his indecisively dead clients, but the subplots really were preposterous. Christina Ricci and Whatshisname, the forgettable leading man, had no plausible basis for a romantic relationship. No Orpheus and Euridice here, more like a 20-something George and Martha. And how does a grown man violently assault an 11 year old in a public school and not go to jail? What's with the creepy 11 year old in the first place, except as added ornament? Do we also need a necrophiliac cop? CGI dream sequences that look like they were programmed on an Atari 64? Other objects of derision. Liam Neeson's two note performance. Middle C unctuous funeral director. D sharp petulance when bickering with his lukewarm clientèle.
The aforementioned forgettable leading man. Unattractive, although manfully struggling to bring believability to preposterous situations.
Christina Ricci's makeup that could not help remind of me of her earlier work as Wednesday Addams. Although I have admit to she looked pretty good for someone who had a couple of tons of steel pipe massively traumatize her upper body.
We finally come to the very worst element of the production: The horrendous soundtrack with every audio effect taken from the Synclavier Cliché Fakebook.
Surprisingly enough, I watched the movie through to the end of the credits. I had a morbid fascination to see who's career ended with this picture. No Afer.Life.In.Hollywood for them.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Sloooooooooooow
There are movies your forget immediately after watching them. I kept forgetting what was going on in this movie every 10 minutes. I really don't blame the director for this exercise in the spectacle of drying paint, but the producer. When Hollywood operated as a dream factory and not an outlet for overpriced artisan craft goods, the producer would exercise his (rarely her) authority as audience advocate and insist on discernible plot development, characters you could tell apart, and some action that built to a climax in 90 minutes or less. No, we get to watch every precious frame that the director could not bear to cut. Every so often, people predict the revival of the western as a genre. I assure you that 2007 wasn't the year that that happened.
Drive (2011)
Have Seen Better
I don't why I'm adding the 848th review to this thread, but here goes. Count me in the this-movie-is-overrated camp.
I absolutely hated the international market minimal dialog approach to screen writing. Not only subliterate, but it gives Ryan Gosling an opportunity to do a bad imitation of Keanu Reeves. I'd never really seen Gosling before, but have no reason to seek him out in other pictures. I also couldn't get over the idea of Carey Mulligan as a struggling waitress with $500 haircuts.
I Netflixed this on the basis of rumors of Albert Brooks' performance. I found it competent, but oddly bland. Dare I suggest that Barry from "Storage Wars" would have put more edgy psychotic humor into the character while retaining the West LA marginal showbiz player gone wrong persona? The pacing was odd. It took forever to get the movie started, but did pick up after 30 minutes.
Plot clangers. There is no way to get a car onto the LA river for a casual drive. The Chevy Impala is not best selling car in Southern California. Every one I've seen has a rental car barcode in the back window. The Toyota Camry has this distinction as sales leader, but you'd get tripped up on installing sufficient horsepower into this muffinmobile. And who in the movies is dumb enough to steal a million dollars from the Philadelphia mob? Could be trouble!
Finally, what's with the Star of David garage door in Shannon's shop when Brooks slices his veins open? That and Brooks reassuring him of the lack of pain and finality of this killing method suggests Kosher butchering technique. I haven't read all 847 previous reviews, so I'm probably not the first person to detect antisemitism here. I guess they thought they were just being cutely transgressive, but it was repulsive nevertheless.
The Descendants (2011)
Fundamental Things Apply
This is a conservative movie from the philosophical point of view. Absolutely nothing to do with crude Punch and Judy politics, but a rich, satisfying meditation on what we owe to posterity, that at any moment we live at a pivotal point between the future and the past and struggle to do right by both. The film constantly contrasts inadequacy, shallowness, and shortsightedness against grandeur, depth, and eternity, very often in the struggles of individual characters. The George Clooney character, while probably the most self-aware of the bunch, realizes what little he knows about important things in his life, including his daughters, wife, extended family, his role as a man, and the fate of Hawaii itself. We see the eldest daughter's perfectly natural adolescent shallowness smash against the rocks of mortality and adulthood.
It may also be the only movie I've ever seen with fully realized characters who are living, dead, and in-between. But after awhile, we understand that the comatose wife's lack of situational awareness is only slightly deeper than anyone else's in the movie.
The brilliance of this movie is that very little of this is explicitly sign-posted and we must make the inferences ourselves only from what we see on the screen. Payne recognizes the images are just that--a surface that an audience must dive beneath. Yes, he speaks to us with filmic language, but after that we are on our own.
I withheld a tenth star as there were moments when I was aware that it was George Clooney up there on the screen, and I am a little uncomfortable with movies that get too heavy with the lesson plan. That's not what movies are really there to do. This one largely succeeds, but would you rather take 90 minutes from your life to watch "Stagecoach" or something as hideously didactic as "Inherit the Wind?"
Less profoundly, I think this movie has the potential to do for Hawaiian music that "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" did for pre-Nashville country music. I'm keeping my eye out for the soundtrack album.
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Hollywood at its Best, Not Without Minor Flaws
This movie is clearly one of the highlights of the 1950s, a confident exercise in popular art. Everybody associated with the picture did a great job, but I do have some misgivings.
Probably inherent with the problem of reducing 900 pages of text to two or so hours, the film's pace is relentlessly fast. It's one of the few movies I can think of that could have used an extra 10-15 minutes to linger on key scenes and set up suspense. The famous beach scene goes by far too quickly. Even Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had more time to get wetter in their Your Show of Shows parody. I also think that they should have spent a little more time setting up a peaceful, partly hung-over Saturday night/Sunday Morning before the Japanese attacked.
The against-type casting is justly celebrated for this movie, but are are some risks that didn't work out. I do think Deborah Kerr was a bit lost in her part. Nothing to do with her sexual persona, but the difficulties of playing an American and the impossibility of fully understanding the social milieu of American officers and wives. Kerr was very far from awful, but I sensed a tentativeness.
I'm really going to step into it by saying that Montgomery Clift was wrong for Prewitt. Just too pretty and sensitive to be both someone whose last resort in the 1930s was to join the Army or be a boxer. Robert Ryan comes to mind as a more convincing choice--just as sensitive and ethically torn, but more convincingly proletarian.
Donna Reed is great here, but I think the script let her down. The final scene between her and Kerr on the Lurline comes off as a misfired plot twist. Reed revealing herself as a fantasist going home to reinvent herself yet again inspires more "WTF?" than "Ah Ha!" I think there could have been slightly better set up earlier on with regard to the gap between her working life at the Congress Club and her almost college girl domestic setup bridged by her impressive powers of denial.
Technically, the Pearl Harbor attack was marred by insertion of some obvious file footage and I also winced when the camera lingered a second on a calendar marked "December 6." The best things in the movie are the cinematography, Ernest Borgnine, Burt Lancaster, and Philip Ober as the disgusting Captain Holmes. A real career-killer of a role. One of the things I've complained about is the movie's main strength: The script that strips down the novel to a censor-safe two hours. The audience knows what the Congress Club is about and that everyone wears their birthday swimsuit under their clothes at all times. Far more artful to deftly imply these things than make them obvious.
Still, a wonderful movie.
Homicidal (1961)
Psycho: The Reproduction
If you can't afford to catch Psycho at the local revival house, this is the movie to see. While it's clear that Homicidal had no pretensions of seriousness or originality, the camp fun is marred by lapses into incompetence. It's starts off with a bang and then bogs down into an endless talky exposition. But then, it attracted an audience that required careful explanation. While it probably stands as the only picture ever set in Solvang, they made disappointingly little use of the town's attributes as a miniature golf course version of Denmark. The references to Denmark also were a tipoff to the gender bending plot gimmick at the heart of the picture, due to that country's early 60s reputation for leadership in sex change surgery. I would also have to say that Leonie Leontovich had the makings of a great rap artist, conveying a surprisingly nuanced range of emotional subtleties in her non-speaking part. A shame, really, that she was neither seen nor heard more widely in the movies.
Rubber (2010)
Erased From Memory
Pretentious bilge. Turned it off after 5 minutes. This is what happens when one spends too much time in film school. I know a kid at Chapman. I'll hold this up as a cautionary lesson. Far better to make infomercials for bogus MLM products than anything like this. Since IMDb requires a minimum of ten lines for a review I'll just pad this out until I reach the minimum. There's no cause to read any further. I am not wasting you're time. IMDb is. I have nothing more to say, which is more than I can say for the people who made this movie. But still I can wonder who is worse? The creators, or the financial backers who blew a wad on this tripe, when they could have been putting money into Habitat for Humanity, the Malibu 4H Club, or other worthier causes. 10 lines. Hooray!
The Commander: Virus (2005)
Subprime, Suspect
This would be a perfectly adequate police procedural, but I'm marking it down as it appears to be an identikit paste up of scripts not good enough to be Prime Suspects, and most of all for the gross overuse of hand-held camera. Gives it a documentary feel, torn from today's headlines, right? No. Not only hard to watch but it must mean that someone with inner ear problems had been crouching down everywhere the action takes place, framing too tightly on actor faces. The police HQ, the suspects' and victims' homes, inside cars--everywhere. Would all concerned--cops, villains, subsidiary characters--have invited videographers to capture their every move close up? I'd have amply reasonable doubts.
It isn't the fault actress' fault that she looks like Hillary Clinton or that they dressed policewomen to look like flight attendants in early 21st century London. But throw in clichés about creepy computer hackers, ethically damaged tabloid reporters and an ill-advised love interest on the part of the main character, and it's going to be a long first season.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
The Limits of Enchantment
When I heard that Werner Herzog was going to apply 3D technology to a documentary on the Chauvet cave paintings I regarded it as a stroke of genius. Having seen the movie, my admiration for the concept is undiminished, but have to say I found some missteps in execution.
First, the music is execrable. This might be simply a matter of taste, but it is really presumptuous to impose any kind of recent artistic creation on something clearly not of our time or cultural understanding. Would the residents of Chauvet, circa 28,000 BC want to have anything to do with the loopy new age violin scrapings and acapella yodeling? Herzog made things worse in the silent scenes where he added a human heartbeat to the sound track. Very, very corny and made me wonder when Pink Floyd would open up with "Breathe" from "Dark Side of the Moon." I thought the archaeologists and anthropologists commenting on the cave had a decent sense of humility regarding the impossibility of fully comprehending what happened 30,000 years ago, but I still couldn't put Spinal Tap's Stonehenge number out of my mind: "Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing." I really don't get the postscript about the albino alligators; thrown in, I guess, to contrast ice age Europe with a 21st century artificial paradise for swimming reptiles courtesy of a nuclear power plant.
Still, for one who finds less and less reason to visit a movie theater these days, seeing Cave of Forgotten Dreams will be a highlight of 2011 and I'm very glad that Herzog made the film. Highly recommended, despite any reservations expressed here.
Death of an Expert Witness (1983)
Miraculous Survival
My spouse and I are long-term fans of the Dalgleish series, but are a little surprised that it survived this near disaster of a production. The leads are fine in UK stock company tradition, but many of the supporting players turn in really terrible performances.
Distractions mount up to the point where we started looking for things going wrong with the production rather than the main flow of the narrative. For example, watch for a seen where an actress is bottle feeding a baby. Baby Debbie audibly gurgles in the scene, duly captured and sweetened in the soundtrack with unintended humorous effect. The scene collapses into hilarity when the actress yanks the bottle from Baby Debbie and the kid's expression looks like she has been traumatized for life. The actress reveals herself as never handling a baby before and the scene gives the feeling that Debbie was thrust into her arms followed by a quick call to "Action!" by the director.
Like any avalanche, once the snow starts sliding downhill, there's no stopping it. What was the use of a "extra" policeman bobbing his head framed by an interior door window, distracting from the main business of a scene? Was this an early appearance by Ricky Gervais? Why did Dalgleish need to arrive at the former stately home crime lab on a helicopter? Did the entire cast need to stare out of the windows to ooh and ahh at this dramatic arrival? Why does Dalgleish talk to himself? Why does the plot unfold in Agatha Christie style: victim plus half a dozen plausible suspects?
We'll keep watching, but not for the keenly modulated suspense and story telling that we have come to expect from the Dalgleish series. I give the production six stars out of loyalty, but deduct four for clumsiness, as enjoyable as it might be at certain moments.
Running on Empty (1988)
Abraham and Isaac for Atheists
I'll cover the technical points first. The movie's pacing is really striking. It starts out fast and then slows down to let the conflict build, characters develop, and set off internal debates in the audience on issues--familial, philosophical, political--covered in the film. I usually think of Lumet's films as fast with lots of abrupt cutting, but here he shows that he can linger at let things ripen in their own good time. He is really under-rated and I will definitely miss him when he's gone.
Politically, just because the movie's milieu is from the left, it doesn't make it a left wing movie. Quite the contrary. The Judd Hirsch character is a monster sacrificing everything and everyone for an 'ideal' indistinguishable from narcissism. It turns into an atheist version of the Abraham-and-Isaac story.
Other things I liked in the movie. Abandoning the family dog is an early indicator of Dad's scorched earth approach to managing relationships. Nice parallelisms in the Lorna character's need to move on from her family background and cast her lot with Danny. The family singing along with "Fire and Rain" shows that this song does not merely comment on the action, but has been internalized into the family narrative. Repeated references to the blinded, crippled janitor reminds the audience that the terrorist action had a victim who was not forgotten.
Things that were over the top and Hollywoodish. I can forgive Danny looking like River Phoenix, but the self-taught concert pianist trope was really "Oh yeah. Right." The composer he played was not Beethoven but McGuffin. The little brother was obnoxious, but I have to concede realism on this point. Would a high school music teacher really have the pull to get a pupil into Julliard, much less the interest to force a career direction on someone he just met? In the final analysis, I don't think this movie could have been made after 1989. Communism and the left collapsed. The Dad would clearly would have thrown in the towel, gone straight, and would now be cruising around a dented Subaru with a faded Obama sticker on the back.
Fog Over Frisco (1934)
Great Movie? No. Great Fun? Yes!
I saw this at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto last week on a double bill with Of Human Bondage. At any rate, nothing really groundbreaking about this movie except that it was a fast paced, low budget bill-filler made before Bette Davis had broken through as a big star. The real treat here is the location shooting in San Francisco, showing the city before they built the bridges and a car chase that predates the one in Bullitt, except never exceeding 35 miles per hour. I also give the scriptwriters high marks for authentic use of forgotten place names ("Butchertown," "South of the Slot"). I'll admit my admiration is parochial, but you could do worse if it ever turns up on TCM or a streaming video service.
BTW: I can't recommend the Stanford highly enough. Beautifully restored movie palace featuring live intermission organ music on weekends and the cheapest date in town at only $7/ticket for a double bill. Google Stanford Theatre for the latest program.
I Want to Live! (1958)
Busted for Blatant Scenery Chewing
This is a perfect example of a bad performance that turns into an award winner. I have nothing against Susan Hayward, but bellowing and shrieking at high volume is not great acting by any stretch, although frequently confused as such.
The rest of the movie, nifty and cool atmosphere, with crazy camera angles and an uncompromising jazz soundtrack to delight any latter day hipster. You can also see the anti-death penalty propaganda from a mile away, although it's easy to understand from the evidence as presented why a jury, judge and the decisive legal system of the day would have her and her buddies on the express to San Quentin. Nothing wrong with propaganda--movies were made for it and it's a highly respected genre when done effectively.
The movie is also interesting as it mixes four genres into one--film noir, "women's picture," liberal guilt string puller, andprison movie. There's some very interesting interplay between the 50's home and hearth lifestyle and the deviantly criminal. Here's there's no middle ground between fulfilling domesticity and a sordid life of crime. One slip, and they're carefully wrapping the cyanide in cheesecloth just for you.
The Last Legion (2007)
There won't be blood.
I was vaguely aware of this as a recent release when I pulled the DVD from the local library, and approached it without expectations when I fired up the disk player. I realized in the first three minutes that this was no "I Claudius," but stayed with it out of curiosity.
The film clearly targeted 12 year-old boys, but had real trouble finding its audience. First, the hero appeared to be 9 or 10, an age 12-year-olds view with disgust. Why would they go see anything with their little brother in it? The attempt to project a puppy love interest to this audience, in the form of an introduction to a young Ygraine, would also make 7th grade flesh crawl. All of the violence pulled punches, with impalings, amputations, and clubbings yielding no blood and polite collapses and closing of eyes of the victims.
The Goths looked like Oakland Raiders fans, and further confused the audience by not wearing black raincoats or pale make-up like the more familiar Jr. High Goths. When unmasked, the villain Vortgyn looked like Willie Nelson the morning after a deep dive in Whiskey River.
Everyone in the film appeared to be aware how dire the project was, but did their best to hide their embarrassment. I'm sure they had words with their agents later.
The movie's best point was its relative brevity--no attempt to persuade the audience that it was getting its money's worth by stretching things out to three hours. But then, this movie didn't end so much as set up a sequel. As the old joke goes, there must have been days on the set of "1941" that they looked forward to "1942." In the final analysis, this appeared to be a European shot at a Hollywood-style formula picture. The Europeans used to be pretty good with sword and sandals epics if the budget stayed low. But this attempt at a Gladiator-meets-Lord of the Rings hybrid falls flat at every turn. Going forward, I'll keep my eye out for Doug Lefler. I'm sure he as several bad films in him before producers force him to fall on his sword.
Hollywoodland (2006)
Disappointing
I don't object to a stately pace when called for, but this film seemed like it was wading through a vat of goo. I don't know what things were like on the set, but if shooting moved at the same velocity of the finished picture, the actors got too much time on their hands, which resulted in some very mannered and afflected performances. Adrian Brody in particular seemed to be in some kind of acting coma, and as the picture went on, his character converged with Peter Falk's Lt. Columbo--but a >serious, solemn> Lt. Columbo, not the one played for laughs on TV.
I also thought the dialog contained a number of anachronisms. For example, I don't think that "off" as a verb entered the vernacular until the late 60s by way of Vietnam.
Diane Lane stood out as the only believable, living character in the picture. I enjoyed her performance very much. Affleck played himself and Hoskins didn't have to work hard to do an American-accented bastard act.
I'm also surprised by the tone in some of the comments in this thread that regards industry awards as some kind of yardstick for excellence. Don't we know by now that industry awards are just a hype exercise? Sure, they pay the car leases for a lot of under-assistant west coast promo men, but are otherwise a worthless line of discussion.
Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)
A Political Plot Wrinkle
The final sequence--A dying French guy in a big American Cadillac careening through the streets of Paris accompanied by an eight year old in a cowboy suit having the time of his young life.
This couldn't be a metaphor for the post-war political situation in Europe, could it?
Rififi is more than a classic, it's an archetype for every caper film that came after it. A fabulous movie!
I really don't have more to say, but IMDb insists that I stretch this comment to 10 lines or more. Reminds me of why I like films noir. They usually don't run more than 100 minutes and there is no pressure to pad them out so viewers will think they are getting full value for their thrill ride money.