Category: Film Page 84 of 101

Review – Enchanted

On November 29, 2007

Enchanted was the number one box office hit of the holiday weekend, with something like the fifth highest Thanksgiving opening ever. So, chances are you and your family have already seen it.

However, if you haven’t, GO NOW. I’ve been nervously excited for it since I heard about it, but feared that the story of an animated princess being thrust into the real-life world of New York City would end up being either hopelessly silly or nauseatingly saccharine. But Enchanted is neither of those things. I’ll admit there are moments when it started to slip toward one or the other, but it always came back to being heartwarmingly adorable before much damage was done.

Amy Adams is absolutely perfect as would-be princess Giselle, pushed into a portal-well by her wicked stepmother-in-law-to-be on the eve of her wedding to Prince Edward (James Marsden). Her performance starts out with every action overdone, as befitting her animated past, but gradually becomes more nuanced as Giselle learns to navigate the real world, where princes don’t always catch you when you fall, where suddenly bursting out into song doesn’t guarantee that that special someone will love you back, where not everyone appreciates woodland animals in their homes and restaurants, and where marriages don’t last happily ever after (Robert, who helps her in New York, is a divorce lawyer). Yet coming to terms with the real world doesn’t mean the loss of Giselle’s innocence; rather, her openness and belief in love transforms everyone she comes into contact with, as well. The musical numbers help, too.

Okay, see, now I’m starting to make it sound like one of those family films with a super obvious message that I always rail against. But it isn’t like that. I hardly ever like family films (except Pixar and Aardman), and I haven’t liked a non-Pixar Disney film for quite some time, so that should tell you something. Enchanted is refreshing; a film that both kids and their parents can (probably) enjoy. I put “probably” in there because you should probably check any latent cynicism at the door. But you should do that anyway. Cynicism is overrated. ;)

Speaking of Disney, any fans of Disney’s animated history will be in for a treat, since nearly all of Disney’s classics are referenced. Giselle is quite obviously a mix of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, with a pinch of Belle and a smidgen of Cinderella. The evil stepmother is half Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent and half Snow White’s wicked queen. Lump up all the various Prince Charmings and you’ve got Edward. And there are sight references to Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella, and I’m sure many others that I didn’t catch the first time around. The film is tender towards Disney’s history and conventions, but also gently parodic and willing to laugh at itself, which goes a long way toward guarding against the maudlin tendency.

All in all, if you have kids, especially girls, and haven’t taken them to see Enchanted, I highly recommend you do so. Or go yourself. Because I and my three grad student friends enjoyed it greatly. And did I mention how good Amy Adams is? I know, every review has pointed that out. But it’s worth saying over and over. In fact, I have decided that pretty much every movie would at least 72% better if Amy Adams were in it.

edit: I forgot the one bad thing. Idina Menzel is in it, and she didn’t sing! I mean, COME ON! That’s like having Kristin Chenoweth in the cast of Pushing Daisies and not having her sing every week. Wait… But seriously, as soon as I recognized her, I started waiting for her musical number, and there wasn’t one. So don’t hold your breath for that. But Amy Adams does her own singing, too, and very, very well I might add. This is why we need more musicals, folks! Actors have hidden musical talent that I want to know about.

Pushing Daisies and Hitchcock

By Jandy

On November 29, 2007

In Film, Television

So, what is up with all the Hitchcock references on Pushing Daisies lately? Two weeks ago, I thought the dog breeder’s death scene was vaguely reminiscent of Psycho, what with the black and white, the window looking over a nondescript city, the violin music, the shots of a knife NOT going into a body, his hand grabbing the wicker box (like Marion grabbed the shower curtain), and the circle motif as he lay on the ground.

Several minutes later, a VERY obvious Vertigo-esque dream made it clear that I hadn’t imagined the Psycho similarity:

And then tonight’s episode has a nearly exact recreation of the scene in The Birds where Melanie crosses Bodega Bay taking the love birds to Mitch. There are more birds in the Pushing Daisies version, but still. The body of water Molly Shannon is crossing is even called Bodega Bay, for crying out loud.

Obviously, as a huge fan of both Pushing Daisies and Hitchcock, I enjoy the tributes. But what is the point? Are they only doing it just to be doing it? There doesn’t seem to be any solid reason to connect any of the Hitchcock films with the episodes in which they’re referenced. Is there some bigger scheme I’m not seeing yet? Is Hitchcock the only one they’re referencing, or have I missed other references due to unfamiliarity? More importantly, have I missed any Hitchcock references? The Psycho one was relatively subtle, so now I’m wondering if there have been other subtle ones that I didn’t see.

In bad news, no new Pushing Daisies next week. Sadness. :(

FBTop 100: #100 – The Cranes are Flying

By Jandy

On November 16, 2007

In Film

This post is part of a project to watch the Film Bloggers’ 100 Favorite Non-English Films. See my progress here.

The Cranes are Flying
USSR 1957; dir: Mikhail Kalatozov
starring: Tatyana Samojlova, Aleksey Batalov
screened 11/13/07, Criterion Collection DVD

Previous Viewing Experience: Never seen it before.

Knowledge Before Viewing: I know it’s a Soviet film, and not much more. I’m pretty sure there’s a central romance, and possibly something war-related. I purposely didn’t read anything about it, even the Netflix envelope. I feel like a Soviet film would be depressing, or dark, or overly restricted, but that’s a preconception of Soviet cinema and not this film specifically. A preconception which is likely unfounded, because my knowledge of Soviet cinema is pretty much…Eisenstein. For some reason I also have a sense (though I have no idea from where) that this film isn’t going to be depressing. Possibly it’s because the image of cranes flying seems uplifting. Okay, I keep being tempted to add to this section as I’m watching the first few minutes, and that’s bad. STOP. NO MORE WRITING.

Synopsis: Young lovers Boris and Veronika are separated when he volunteers for the war. Never hearing from him, she marries his cousin, who has an exemption from the draft. Later, she realizes her mistake and continues to hope against hope (and reports from the front) that Boris remains alive and will return to her when the war ends.

Initial Viewing Response: Well, it’s definitely sad. Sadder than I expected, but I still agree with my preconception that it’s not depressing. The thing I’m mostly coming away with is a great pleasure in the painterly aspects of the film. The mise-en-scene is really powerful, if a little more posed than what we’d consider realistic today. In fact, there are a lot of things that aren’t realistic in style at all, and aren’t meant to be. The cousin, Mark, seduces (not a violent enough word) Veronika in a scene which is very nearly expressionistic, during an air raid with Tchaikovsky banging in the background and the wind whipping through the blown-out windows. In a Russian film, this doesn’t really seem unnatural (hello, country of Dostoevsky, who I love BTW), but the scene would be hopelessly overwrought in many other contexts. Another part uses bizarre camera angles and highly disorienting editing (persistence of vision is destroyed first by the slats in a fence, then by unmatching sequential frames) to depict Veronika’s near-suicidal mindset at one point; that sequence is nearly avant-garde, though the rest of the film isn’t terribly (it’s the first minute and a half or so of this clip). The use of montage to create visceral responses in the viewer is a very Russian technique, pioneered by Eisenstein and others in the 1920s. The flip side, though–the use of very careful and painterly mise-en-scene–I tend to associate more with Germany. It’s very interesting to see both of them together in the same film, and both so effectively.

Found the air raid scene on YouTube. I *heart* YouTube. It’s subtitled Spanish, but basically, they hear the air raid sirens, Mark tries to get Veronika to go to the subway (the impromptu air raid shelter), but she refuses because her parents were killed in the last air raid, and she hasn’t quite gotten over it to the point where she’s concerned about her own safety. So Mark stays with her and plays really loudly to try to drown out the noise; after he grabs her in the corner he tells her he loves her, and she cries “no” and hits him a lot. This style of highly theatrical acting is not really found anywhere else in the film, suggesting that it’s very intentional. I haven’t decided yet whether the scene works on that level, but on the level of photography and lighting, I think it’s gorgeous.

Picspam! (I don’t know if I’ll do this all the time; probably depends on how pretty I think the movie is, and how tired I am after watching it)

Reflective Response: Looking back over what I wrote three days ago under initial reactions, I realize that I didn’t talk about the plot hardly at all, which is based in two tendencies I have in general about film. First, I don’t want to spoil anyone who hasn’t seen it yet and might (note: I do spoil a bit of the end in the next two paragraphs–it’s really hard not to when trying to move into criticism instead of just reviewing). I greatly enjoyed watching The Cranes are Flying without knowing anything about it. Second, I’m starting to believe that plot is sort of secondary. I don’t mean that the plot is unimportant, simply that “what is the story” is a less helpful question than “how is the story told.” I’m very interested in narrative and narrative structure, but that’s a bit different than just the events. I was about to invoke David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s distinctions regarding story and plot, but I’ve already mangled the two by using them interchangeably, and I don’t have a copy of Film Art lying around to remind myself of the specifics. Let’s just leave it that what happens in a film is a less compelling value criterion than how it happens. (Same thing is true of books.)

I initially thought some of the motivations in The Cranes are Flying were underdeveloped, specifically Veronika’s decision to marry Mark instead of wait for Boris. But I think it’s more that the narrative underplays the motivations. They are there, but they’re subtle. Mark’s attraction to Veronika is set up very early, but in a light-hearted, playful way that contrasts with his almost menacing advances during the air raid. Is this a character shift? Maybe, because the air raid scene is so very stylized and exaggerated that character is almost subsumed into atmosphere. Yet, on the other hand, the very stylistic differences emphasize the huge shift between two carefree characters who haven’t even considered the possibility of war and two characters whose families have been torn apart and destroyed by a war which invades their very living rooms. Veronika seems to give up on Boris for a while, but the script accounts for that as well–she never receives a single letter from him. It’s not clear if he’s not writing or if the mail isn’t getting through, but the couple of scenes where she hopes to hear from him and doesn’t show her wavering in her belief that he’s still alive or that he still loves her, opening the door for her to succumb to Mark’s advances when they come. Her point of view switches later, when she almost blindly expects to see Boris after the war ends, even though she’s been told that he is dead. Blind disbelief switches to blind belief, though the film ends on a bittersweet note of hope within pain.

It would be easy to criticize the wide range of stylistic devices used in the film as uneven and jarring, but the tension between realism and expressivism is, I think, very important to the visceral difference between war and peace. It isn’t always as balanced as it could be, but it is largely effective. Tatyana Samojlova holds the film together as Veronika, growing from the silly young girl of the beginning into the bitter, unhappily married nurse in the middle, and finally into a strong, centered woman who is able to grieve herself and also join in the joyful celebration of those around her. While watching the final scene, I was struck by how different this woman is from the near-child she was in the first few scenes, and yet the continuity of character was never lost. Her performance alone is worth seeing the film.

New Project: Watching the Film Blogger’s 100

By Jandy

On November 15, 2007

In Film

I wanted to catch up on the recap posts before I started this new film-watching project. I don’t really know why, because they’re mostly unrelated. But ah well. Goals don’t have to have extrinsic meaning to be useful. Anyway, now I have caught up, so here’s my project. A few months ago, I linked to a list of 100 favorite non-English language films chosen by lots of film bloggers, coordinated by Edward Copeland. Now, this list isn’t definitive, and several people in the comments have mentioned films that do seem to me like they should’ve been on it. Still, I’ve only seen about half of the films on the list, so I figure it’s as good a place to start giving some direction to my viewing as anywhere else.

So I’m going to watch it. All of it. Even the ones I’ve seen before, because these are the sort of films that richly reward rewatching (try saying that three times fast–without sounding like you haven’t learned to pronounce your “r”s yet), and several of them I saw when I probably lacked the maturity and cinematic knowledge to really get them. Then I’m going to post a review of each one, telling my preconceptions, my original reaction if I’ve seen it before, initial post-watching thoughts, and then my thoughts after a few days of thinking about it. There are multiple reasons for this way of going about it; I want to see how my reactions have changed over the years on films I’ve seen before, I want to see the differences between gut reactions and reflective ones (although a few days may not be long enough), and I want to see how preconceptions play into my reactions. These are things that are always in my mind when I watch and write about film, but I want to make them explicit. For the recaps, my usual procedure is to write a sentence or two right after I see a movie, then refer back to that when I write the recap; sometimes, depending on how long the entire recap takes to write, I go through three or four mental drafts, sometimes drastically changing my entire evaluation of the film–but the final recap is an amalgamation. I want to see what it looks like if I keep the drafts separate. This is as much a writing exercise for me–encouraged by the rhetoric and composition class I’m taking right now, no doubt–as anything else, but maybe someone else will find the process interesting as well.

The biggest question is, can I keep it up for 100 films, which will likely take me multiple years to get through? My previous track record with projects like this would suggest no, but hey. Best way to fail is to never start, right? I’ll keep a list of films and review links here.

Since I’m going in reverse order, the first film up is The Cranes are Flying, which I’ve had from Netflix for like three weeks, waiting until I was ready to embark. I watched it last night, so I’ll probably finish up the post about it tomorrow. The only exceptions to the list order will be when reverse-watching the list places series films out of order (I’ll decide how to do those when I get to them–if I’ve already seen them, I may stick with list order rather than film order) or if the film isn’t easily obtained; several of the films on the list are out of print or have never been released on DVD. I’ll try to get them, but there are sure to be some that I can’t.

(Filmbo/Eric, I know you mentioned you didn’t agree with a lot of the list; do you disagree with what’s included or the order? Or both? I’m just curious.)

October 2007 Reading/Watching Recap

By Jandy

On November 13, 2007

In Books and Reading, Film, Reviews

My movie-viewing stats have gone way down this month, due to school (to a small degree), but mostly television and becoming addicted to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Guitar Hero II. But this means I’m all caught up on posting these! Yay. After the jump, reactions to Black Book, L’Avventura, Blood Diamond, Across the Universe, Gone Baby Gone, Away from Her, The Road, and others.