Category: Film Page 96 of 101

Good Thoughts on Film Watching…

A couple of weeks ago, Andy Horbal ran a Film Criticism blog-a-thon, basically encouraging other film bloggers to post their thoughts on film criticism and then posting all the links in his blog. I haven’t had time to read all the posts yet, but this one caught my eye. These are Matt Riviera’s Thoughts on Watching and Appreciation Film.

1. Every film is a masterpiece.

I try to give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt until the end credits roll, or at least as long as his or her film can withstand it. If I assume the film is a masterpiece, then I am forced to find out why as I’m watching it, meaning I can’t be complacent or dismissive. If it’s not clever, then I’m not getting the reference. If it’s not funny, then I’m not getting the joke. If it’s not thought-provoking, then I’m not getting the point. Etc, etc.

If I assume the film is a masterpiece and my first impressions while watching it is that it isn’t, then that’s the impetus I need to think harder about what I’m watching, to work harder at identifying and understanding the filmmaker’s intentions and methods.

Of course some films are duds, and sometimes you might even know they’re duds from the first minutes. But there’s something fascinating about pretending you’re wrong and the filmmaker is a genius, about the process of questioning all preconceived notions of what makes a good film and why. I may not change my mind about the film, but I perhaps won’t feel like I’ve wasted two hours of my life watching it.

I like this. It’s sort of the opposite of my usual “go in with low expectations so I’ll be pleasantly surprised” stance, but it’s also a good way to think about film or books, or anything, especially the part about working harder to see what we might be missing. It’s so easy to be negative on purpose–it’s more fun in a perverse way to tear down than to praise, it’s satisfying to nitpick, and we have a tendency to think a negative review is more “honest.” I consciously try to avoid this (which isn’t difficult, because I really do enjoy the vast amount of films I watch, even if I end up deciding they aren’t very good), but it is fun to denigrate and mock, I have to admit.

I often have two critical appreciations of every film co-existing in my mind, a cold critical judgement which is what’s left when I’ve removed my emotional self from the equation, and a fuller, more holistic appraisal which takes into account what I’ve brought to the viewing experience.

This is true, as well. “I liked it” does not necessarily mean “it was good”–critical judgment does not always coincide with emotional response. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two. Sometimes I don’t think they need to be completely separated…there are so many film critics out there now that perhaps we can afford to be more subjective. In the aggregate, a more objective view appears.

Recut trailers

Recutting movie trailers seems to be all the rage these days. Here’s a few of my current favorites (I’m not really choosing all the ones that take comedies and romances and turn them into thrillers and horror films…that what most everyone is making):

Office Space as a psychothriller:

Sleepless in Seattle with Meg Ryan as desperate obsessive:

And my favorite: The Sound of Music as a tense, yep, you guessed it, thriller.

The strain of music at the very end totally makes it.

Just to reverse the trend, here’s the one that I think started it all (at least, it was the first recut trailer to make the blogosphere rounds that I saw):

The Shining as a feel-good family film.

I haven’t seen The Shining, so I don’t really get as much out of this one as the other three, but I know it’s a horror film, and you definitely don’t get that from this trailer!

And you thought trailers actually gave you a good idea of what to expect from the film! Heh.

Casino Royale

I have been highly anticipating Casino Royale since I heard about Daniel Craig’s casting. I loved him in Layer Cake and Munich (ooh, and he was in Road to Perdition as well) and just knew he’d make a great James Bond, especially since the intention was for this film to return to the more rugged Bond of the early Connery days and the Ian Fleming novels. And I was not one whit disappointed, in either Craig or the film.

After a long run of Bond films getting progressively more reliant on gadgets, elaborate chase scenes, and a suave and debonair 007, it was extremely refreshing to have a brawling Bond who’d rather beat up his adversary with his fists than shoot him. Casino Royale posits a Bond who has just been given 00 status–and celebrates by shooting up an African embassy. He’s raw and unpredictable (Bond is always somewhat unpredictable, but Craig gives him an edge that he hasn’t had for at least the last few films…intriguingly, GoldenEye was the last really good one, and it was also directed by Casino Royale director Martin Campbell).

The interplay between Bond and Vesper Lynd, the main Bond girl of the film, was also nice…people have worried about Eva Green playing a Bond girl, a role which is often the kiss of death to an actress’s career, but they needn’t. Her Lynd is every bit a match for Bond, and they play off each other well. The intertext between Casino Royale and the previous Bond films was fun to see, as well. He returns to an Aston Martin after several films in BMWs (and has the shortest car chase ever in it, which is a nice reversal of expectations), he receives a vodka martini (the bartender asks “shaken, not stirred?” and he responds “Do I look like I give a damn?”), and ends the film with his trademark “Bond–James Bond,” which is particularly appropriate because it is only then, in the final few minutes, that he truly becomes the Bond that the other movies portray. There are no fancy gadgets beyond your basic spy cellphone and laptop; Q (or R) is not even a character. Some Bond fans may cry foul, but remember, Q did not appear in Dr. No, either. Casino Royale is about returning to the roots and revitalizing a franchise that has become bloated and unwieldy. It has done that.

Granted, it’s not without its faults. It is a bit too long, for one thing, and becomes a bit “and then this happened” in the last half. The opening scene was very effective–black and white, in Prague, showing Bond’s first real mission after being secretly made a 007 by M–yet, rather misleading. Its intent, I believe, was to underscore the fact that we’re returning to the beginning of Bond here…there’s a Cold War film atmosphere to it, and it would fit right in alongside the 1965 film of John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Yet, the film isn’t set during the Cold War, it’s set today, and takes full advantage of innovations in wireless technology over the past few years. So in a sense, we’re returning to the beginning of Bond’s career only because the film says we are…keeping Judi Dench as M continues to muddle the time-sense. I mean, of course it’s a nitpick you can brush off and enjoy the film anyway, since we’re used to having the actor playing Bond change every few films anyway–but explicitly changing the point in Bond’s career without changing his temporal surroundings struck me as a little off. I wish they’d actually set it back in the Cold War period…that would have been more interesting to me.

But really, that’s all I got. I really enjoyed it, even the half-hour of it that should’ve been cut for length. It both acknowledged and modified all of the stereotypical Bond elements, and Daniel Craig can stay around in the role as long as he pleases, and I hope it’s for at least a few more films. But Daniel? Do other stuff in between. You’re too good an actor to be typecast as Bond, as much as I enjoyed you in the role.

Modernism and the Nouvelle Vague…

To ponder…

The French New Wave is to cinema what the Modernist Novel is to fiction.

“In the novel, writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce tried to evoke ‘inner speech’ or ‘stream of consciousness,’ through associative and fragmented forms, omitting verbs, pronouns, connectives, and articles, and leaving sentences uncompleted. A number of filmmakers, interestingly, have shown interest in cinematically rendering inner speech. [Literary theorist and linguist Mikhail] Bakhtin’s contemporary [filmmaker and film theorist Sergei] Eisenstein repeatedly expressed a desire to render the stream-of-consciousness monologues of Joyce’s Ulysses, and [New Wave director and film critic Jean-Luc] Godard, in both Une femme mariée (1964) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), approximates inner speech through discontinuous and fragmentary voice-over commentaries” (Robert Stam, “The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” 2005).

Modernism and post-modernism hit film nearly the same time, in the 1960s-1970s. Golden-Age-Hollywood-era film (1930s-1950s) is equivalent to 19th-century fiction. Modernism in fiction hit in the 1920s, but was disrupted by WWII and post-war concerns, resurfacing as post-modernism in the 1960s. Postmodernism in literature is not a reaction against modernism, but a continuation and extension of it.

October recap

And you thought September was pathetic. Truly, my visual media time has been more focused on television than movies, due to a desire to keep my DVR from filling up. And I have been reading a ton, just not complete books–articles or individual essays, or sections of books relevant to whatever I’m writing. And unfortunately for my book count, I refuse to count partially-read books. (However, if you’re interested in adaptation theory, Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, is an excellent set of essays and I recommend it highly.)

Movies

White Heat
One of Jimmy Cagney’s last great crime films. I was about to say “gangster films,” but it’s not really a gangster film, not in the same sense that The Public Enemy or Scarface are gangster films. He plays Cody Jarrett, the leader of a group of hoods who knock over a government train, killing the conductors in the process. They hide out for a while, but soon it becomes more expedient for Cody to confess to a less serious crime and serve out a short sentence to provide an alibi for the train crime. Suspicious but unable to prove anything, the police assign their top undercover guy to join Cody in jail and try to find out from him where the money is from the train job. Meanwhile, Cody’s second-in-command is making a play both for Cody’s wife and his gang. What starts out as a simple crime caper becomes increasingly complex, no less so by Cody’s own mental instability. As 1940s crime movies go, I’d have to put this near the top. It doesn’t have too much of a noir sensibility, and Virginia Mayo is Cody’s wife is frustratingly flat, but Cagney carries the film with his over-the-top portrayal of a bigger-than-life criminal. The complexity of reactions it evokes is welcome, too–especially since by the end, we both want Cody to win out over his scheming subordinate and also want the undercover cop to catch Cody.
Well Above Average
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Now, this is a film for film buffs. :) Robert Downey Jr. is a petty thief who accidentally stumbles into a casting call/audition as he’s trying to escape from the police. The producers send him to Hollywood to hang out with a detective for a while and study up for the detective part he’s going to be playing. Before long, there’s femme fatales, bodies, murders, corruption, intrigue, etc.–it’s a parody that hits all the film noir angles. It is broadly humorous, though, so there’s never any doubt that it’s a send-up. In fact, the idea “let’s make a film that throws in every single film noir cliche and then make it funny” is the presiding factor in the film; hence, it’s not as coherent as is could be, and it’s a bit uneven in pacing and style. Still, it’s plenty fun. (Aside from the fact that it shares a name with one of Pauline Kael’s books of criticism, which is an unwelcome connection to me, since I heartily dislike her criticism.)
Above Average
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The Departed
Scorsese and DiCaprio do it again! That makes three in a row if you liked Gangs of New York (I didn’t, particularly, so I only count it two in a row, with The Aviator and The Departed). I can’t imagine you haven’t heard about The Departed–it monopolized hype for several weeks–but it’s a gangster film, basically, with an Irish mob instead of an Italian one, which confused me at first, since my stereotype for movie-Irish is cop, not gangster. Well, here they’re both. Jack Nicholson is the crime boss, Leonardo diCaprio is the cop working undercover to infiltrate his gang, and Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are also cops. It’s violent, it’s twisty and turny, it’s intense, and it’s very good. DiCaprio especially turns in another fine performance. Honestly, Nicholson is the only thing that brings it down from a great movie to a very good one. I don’t doubt that the man’s a legend, but by this point in his career, all he’s doing is chewing the scenery and distracting us from the younger, better actors.
Well Above Average
IMDb

Heh–I just realized that all three films I saw in October were crime films! Wonder what that means…

Books

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My professor suggested that we read this in one sitting if possible. Sounds daunting to read a 250-page novel all at once, but he’s really right. It flows together so well that it’s all but impossible to find a stopping place, even if you wanted to, which you don’t. Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses (which I haven’t yet been brave enough to attempt) are THE Modernist novels, and Woolf really solidifies her stream-of-consciousness style here. The most brilliant thing is the way she uses third-person stream of consciousness in order to explore the thoughts and feelings of multiple people in the novel, whereas you’d expect for stream of consciousness to be in first person and stick with one person’s thoughts. But Woolf moves between people so smoothly and so perfectly, and then out again to get a wider picture of the whole thing–it’s really masterful in terms of narrative and point of view. Oh, story. Right. See, it sounds mundane. Clarissa Dalloway is giving a dinner party, and as she’s preparing for it, she reminisces about her youth, especially about one Peter who she nearly married before she chose to marry the steadier but less charismatic Richard Dalloway. Peter is returning from India that very day, and visits her–we also spend some time in his head, and get his reminiscences about their youth. Meanwhile, elsewhere, a lower-class war veteran is struggling against the doctors who want to put him away because of his shell-shock, rather than figure out how to treat him. Very few things actually happen–it all takes place on one day, but by the end, there’s an almost operatic intensity made up of the interweaving motifs from these three people. Virginia Woolf=genius.
Superior
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Utopia by Sir Thomas More
This was an “additional reading” assignment for Early Modern English…I of course knew of it, but I hadn’t read it. It’s really quite interesting. Basically, it’s the 16th-century work from which the idea of Utopia comes. More presents Utopia as a real place, discovered by travelers to the New World. One of the travelers returns to England, sees the state of affairs (he’s particularly concerned about the laws which hang thieves after, he says, social conditions force them into thievery), laments that England can’t be more like Utopia, and proceeds to explain the narrator (also named Thomas More, but probably a persona) how the governmental and social system works in Utopia. There are too many parts to it to go through them here, but it’s fascinating, because so many of the issues that are brought up are issues that are still hotly debated. More anticipates socialism, communism, fascism, most of the isms of the twentieth century, in fact…Utopia is a combination of them all, oddly enough. There are a lot of good observations in here, but overall, More’s Utopia requires so much governmental control to make sure that everyone stays equal and happy (of course, the people also happen to be perfect, so they don’t mind the governmental control, which is also perfect, since it’s made up of perfect people) that it creeped me out a little. It’s easy to see it turn into 1984 with just a touch of misuse.
Above Average
buy at Amazon | Read or download free etext from Project Gutenberg

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