Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel

The balance in biography movies between putting in what the person was famous for and treating them like a human being that has lived and breathed at one point or anther in history is precarious. If not handled correctly, then the viewer either does not understand why they should be paying attention to the subject’s life (i.e. it is too boring) or it becomes a roll call of the famous sayings and deeds that the person did. This becomes particularly hard if you are dramatizing something between two famous people who may or may not have actually happened. This is issue that comes up again and again in Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel from 2009.

I picked this movie off of my Netflix queue for a couple of reasons. One: I love Mads Mikkelsen. I think he is quite honestly amazing in everything he does and he is the best Hannibal Lector ever. He is able to transform so completely into a character, that sometimes it is hard for me to believe that the same actor played the distant yet emotional father in After the Wedding and the idealistic doctor in A Royal Affair. I wanted to see how well he could pull off someone as closed off as Igor Stravinsky. Two: I have been reading and studying about the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and its first performance by the Ballets Russes. I was interested in how this dramatic moment in ballet and classical music history (The legend goes that when the Rite of Spring was first performed, the French audience members rioted at the blasphemy of such a strange performance. Atonal notes, strange movements and crazy costumes were not what a high-class French audience were used to. However, rioting may have been a little bit of an exaggeration.) would be depicted on film. Three: In the same class that I have been studying the Rite of Spring, I had the privilege of learning from a professor who just recently published a biography on Coco Chanel. Chanel was a shrewd businesswoman who led a cold and distant life. She took advantage of people and exploited her workers. And yet she was still a woman who made extraordinary strides in the world of fashion at a time when most women were not doing so. My professor found certain aspects of Chanel’s life repugnant and yet found her compelling enough to study her for six years and produce a well-rounded biography. To delete certain aspects of Chanel’s personality would be doing an injustice to who she was yet to make a love story with a woman who is not that sympathetic would be hard to do. I wanted to see how the filmmakers accomplished this dilemma. Each of these three reasons was not enough for me to like the film enough to recommend it to anyone.

Stravinsky’s work and Chanel’s work are both combined here and yet it felt like at no moment did I get true insight on how they influenced each other, or how they came up with the ideas they did. It felt like at several moments in the film that the filmmaker and screenwriter took the famous person in a certain direction only because at this time in history that is what they were doing, whether or not it related to the plot. At one point in the movie, Chanel goes to a perfumery in order to make her iconic Chanel no. 5. The entire sequence does not show any character development, any forward plot movement or anything beyond that she picks the fifth perfume concoction thus coming up with the name Chanel no. 5. It is the most obvious of these digressions and the one I groaned at the most and yet the movie is littered with these terrible allusions to the aspects of their characters that made them famous.

Chanel was a cold person. She was not a typical romantic lead. In this movie, they tried so hard to stay true to the person as she was in real life, that she became a cardboard cut out of a character. Yes, Chanel was beautiful. Yes, she wore the best clothes and was obsessed with her shop and creating her own brand. But that was about all that you learn about her here. At no point do we understand why Chanel decides that Stravinsky was the perfect person to have an affair with, nor do we understand anything about her attraction to him other than she likes his music. At no point is there any insight into the internal character of Chanel. She does not grow or become any more life-like. There is no understanding her.

This is in contrast to Igor Stravinsky. Clearly the filmmaker and screenwriter liked Stravinsky more than Chanel. We sympathize with him at certain moments in the movie when it makes the least sense to do so. For instance, his wife finds out that he is having an affair with Chanel. She confronts him in their bedroom in the least confrontational way possible. She says several things to him that allude to the affair. However, she finishes her speech by saying that she doesn’t want to die. She is very sick and she feels she is rotting away which is why Stravinsky goes to Chanel instead of staying with his wife. This is a diabolical action and should be treated as such, and yet the filmmaker seems to be saying what a weight this sickness has produced for Stravinsky. He has not other choice than to go to Chanel and make love to her. Mikkelsen tries his hardest to convey the conflicting emotions that the man must have felt at this moment, if this indeed did happen, but he is not helped by the writing or even the following scenes. There is a way to show a toxic love affair, but this film does not do that. Instead it is content with just showing us long sequences of Chanel and Stravinsky having sex in the least romantic way possible. There is no attraction between the two people and therefore there is no spark in these love scenes. They are just using each other.

This is a cold movie that disappointed me to no end. This could be a compelling story if handled correctly, but it unfortunately was not. Both Stravinsky and Chanel deserve better treatment than this. One cannot become someone else by merely surrounding themselves with the accomplishments that person made.

Life Itself

My life would have been different if Roger Ebert had never existed. To say that I wouldn’t have had the same passion for movies that I do would be overstating it, but I definitely would not have the same motivation to write about movies that I do now. Ebert gave a very public face to film criticism and this opinion was like some sort of religion, especially when I started this blog. After I watched a movie, I would look on his page to see if he had written about it. If he did, I would immediately read the review. If I agreed, I would examine why I agreed and try to form my own ideas. If I didn’t agree, I would already be starting my review as a direct response to what he said.  This is all to say that the subject of Life Itself, Roger Ebert, is too close and personal to me to give a completely unbiased review. All I can do is record my ideas and my thoughts about him and about the treatment he gets in this film.

The structure of the film echoes his memoir and for those of us who have already read the memoir, a lot of the observations may seem a bit like rehashing old territory. If you have not read his memoir, which is titled the same as this documentary, I would suggest you do right away. It gives much more insight into the way Ebert thought than a two hour movie ever could. However what the memoir could not get across is the daily struggle and the awkward moments his condition brought on him and his wife. There is one scene in particular where he struggles to walk after getting a hairline fracture in his hip that I found so painful to watch. The camera does not shy away from looking directly at his mangled face or from showing his daily suction procedure which I assume is how he gets nutrients or how his wounds are cleaning. To watch someone waste away like that is extremely hard and I know it must have taken a lot out of his wife, Chaz. And yet she is so strong and never once gives up hope. When they are in the hospital after they hear yet another terrible diagnosis, Chaz exhibits an inner strength that is heart wrenching. She is hopeful and she allows herself to laugh at Roger’s terrible jokes that he makes on the computer. To me this movie is just as much about her as it is about Roger. Her love for him makes her capable of soldiering on, even after his death.

Just like in other documentaries, this one is littered with famous people talking about their experiences with the subject. While most of the time these famous people talking about how much they love x y or z seem mainly just a marketing ploy to get an unfamiliar spectator interested in the subject, here it felt organic. Through his show and his newspaper column, he was able to promote so many different kinds of directors and movies that they almost became his children or they were at least colleagues at the movies. So when Scorsese said that Ebert and Siskel helped him reinvigorate his career, I believed him. Or when Errol Morris said that he probably wouldn’t have a film career because of him, I believed him. Or when Herzog went on and on about something that was quite frankly amazing and incomprehensible, I believed him. They didn’t seem forced, like they usually are in other films.

In all that I do related to film, I aim to be like Roger Ebert (and a couple of other people, but those are posts for another day). Although this film could never replace Ebert and my emotional connection to him, I am glad it exists.

Two-Lane Blacktop

This semester I am enrolled in an American films of the seventies course at my school. The class is basically about how and why this strange time in American cinema came about and the landmark films that came out of it. However the professor wanted to forgo all of the big seventies movies that most people have already seen like Star Wars, Jaws, The Godfather, etc. Instead he wanted to concentrate on films that might not have been as big at the time but have produced a lasting effect on the film landscape. Which brought us to watching Two-Lane Blacktop in class last week. Most of my classmates I would say are obsessed with film in one way or another. Some of them make it, some of them write it, some of them produce it, and others, like me, love to write about it. Being this in love with film helps people to develop taste that might not be seen as mainstream. There is a lot of emphasis on classic movies for instance by my classmates when they talk about film with me. However, when this movie came up in our coursework, I was surprised to learn that I was the only one to have seen this movie before class (some other movies that we have watched so far are more familiar: Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie and Clyde, Deliverance) and that after seeing the movie I was one of the few people who actually liked it. This got me thinking as to why I liked this movie so much and why so many people, who are used to European and classic cinema, did not.

Before I give explanation of my opinion on this movie, let me back up a bit and explain why my professor might have chosen this movie to watch in class. Two-Lane Blacktop is a road movie that got made purely because Easy Rider did so well three years before. Each major studio was looking for their version of Easy Rider. For Universal, this was supposed to be their youth oriented, counterculture, rock n roll music, free love and drugs road movie which would help commodify the younger generations. However they got more than they bargained for when they chose Monte Hellman, a director who worked previously with Roger Corman. Hellman wanted to borrow the European aesthetic of the French New Wave and implant it on iconic American images. This resulted in a movie that was slow-moving, where the plot didn’t really matter, and the characters were mere vessels for their hobbies. It of course bombed at the box office, because most people responded at the time much in the same way that my classmates did. They were bored.

Hellman chose to emphasize the atmosphere of what it was like to be a car fanatic during this time in America. The alienation and the nihilism inherent during this time is made obvious on the screen. All of the characters are known purely by generic terms: The Driver, the Mechanic, GTO, and the Girl. No one cares to even know each other’s proper names. While I would argue that the Driver is the main protagonist, to say that he goes on a journey of self discovery would be pushing it. His only lasting relationship is with his car, a customized 1955 Chevy. To illustrate the nihilism even further, Hellman completely abandons the main thrust of the film, a cross-country race, about half way through the film. GTO and the people in the Driver’s car just end up journeying with each other until something better comes along. This pervasive atmosphere of alienation and nihilism is what makes this one of the most European influenced films of the decade. More than jump cuts, strange music cues, and call backs to classic cinema, this movie embodies what Resnais and Godard were trying to accomplish in their own movies but applied to a genre film.

This atmosphere is made apparent in the many racing scenes seen throughout the film. In a conventional Hollywood movie, the car chases would be shot to have their own mini-dramatic moment in themselves. However here, Hellman chooses to cut away almost every time before we see them finish. He shoots these races from the side and at a distance which is different from how they would be shot anywhere else. They would usually be shot head on so that you can see the good guy as he eyes the bad guy. But you don’t get this dramatic release at any point. Hellman is constantly telling the audience member that you are watching a film. He wants to distance the image from the spectator as much as possible. He also achieves this by dropping you in the middle of a scene, letting dialogue that has been misspoken lie and make it into the final film and by choosing to let the engine roar as loud as possible on the soundtrack in lieu of actual dialogue.

The meaningful relationships these men (not the woman who is a hitchhiker that hops into the car at the beginning of the movie) have is not with themselves. It is with their cars. These physical and mechanic things are what makes sense to them. So the emphasis here is not on the relationships between each other, their outside world or with the counterculture. It is with the cars. You see the film several times from the Driver’s perspective as he shifts gears on a long stretch of American highway. The fluttering of the cover to the exhaust is an image that sticks with you after seeing the film. The engine rips through rock n roll songs that are partially played. This gets back to the nihilism of American culture. These men who care more about their cars than the Girl, who seems like nothing but a passing fancy for everyone except maybe the Driver, suggests the intense value that Americans place on material things. Why should they care that the Girl seems to be running away from someone, that she drifts aimlessly, and that she is desperately seeking some kind of connection with a man, if they have a car that they can easily fix the problems of with a tweak here or there?

I liked this movie because it gave me beautiful images of small town gas stations, diners, and long stretches of barren landscape. I liked this movie because of GTO’s wet bar in the back of the car and his penchant for wearing the same thing but always managing to change the color of his sweater. I liked this movie because it had no plot. I liked this movie because I got to look at a beautiful Pontiac GTO, one of the best seventies muscle cars ever produced. I liked this movie because the ending was perfect. I liked this movie because it reminded me of other car fanatics I have met in the past and the types of conversations they have. I liked this movie because sometimes I want to aimlessly wander around America with no purpose just for the hell of it and race a car for pinks. I liked this movie for a multitude of reasons. Maybe you will too…

TV Special: Black Mirror

I usually don’t write about television much on here, because although I watch a good deal of it, I don’t have anything worth saying about the shows other than Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers is awesome. Not really shining television criticism, but that is about the end of my opinion on most things that relate to television. So I decided early on that this would be a mostly film blog about my opinions about things that only last two and a half hours instead of several weeks. It makes things simple on me and I really didn’t have to dive into the whole Breaking Bad craze that was just starting when I started this blog. (Good show, not great)

However I break this iron clad rule today to talk about a series that just went up on Netflix Watch Instant a few weeks ago called Black Mirror. Black Mirror is different from most other shows that we get imported from the Brits here in the Colonies. It has no awkward comedy, no melodramatic science-fiction plots and there are no impossibly hot guys that go around just being British (Cough Matt Smith Cough) and doing very little else (cough Benedict Cumberbatch cough). Black Mirror is an anthology series so the situations and the content are different every time. It is like the Twilight Zone in that way. It also like Twilight Zone in that it has science fiction overtones but is really about how a human reacts if put within a science fiction high concept like situation. While each episode is great, I have some personal favorites that I would like to highlight here.

The National Anthem is the first episode in the series. It can be summed up by a simple log line: the Prime Minister must fuck a pig on national television or a member of the royal family will be killed. While that may induce chuckles in you, like it did in me when first heard the description, the concept is actually taken very seriously. It goes through a step by step process of how the prime minister would actually be induced to fucking a pig. A live pig. The abduction and the rules for getting this royal family member back is posted on youtube so when the news breaks in the morning most people have already seen the video. The general population is aghast that something like this could happen and that the government would never give in to the demands. However, as the day progresses and the government is found out to be cheating by creating a CGI figure of the Prime Minister over another man who is actually going to do the deed, the tide turns and the public demands that he go through with the it himself. The royal family and his party also demand it. Then he actually does and it is not nearly as funny or as absurd as it should be. It is actually really sad and heartbreaking. He is crying the whole time and it goes on for a painful amount of time. What is fascinating about this episode is given the absurd concept just how heartbreaking it ends up becoming. While the prime minister ends up saving the royal family member, keeping his job and his popularity soars, his personal relationship with his wife deteriorates into nothing. Rory Kinnear who plays the prime minister in the episode does a fantastic job of externalizing the internal debate that must go through a person’s head when faced with such a damning and humiliating decision. If he decides that he can’t do it, then the royal family member is dead and so is his career. However if he does do it, then his marriage is essentially over. Plus there is the humiliation of fucking a pig over a national broadcast. It is a fascinating insight into how a political figure can be pushed into decisions he does want to make via the pressure he receives through many outlets, media, political party, and even the general public. What seems to be the right and moral decision (not fucking the pig) becomes outlawed by the pressure to do what the “public” demands. He ends up sacrificing love for the ability to keep his office.

The other episode I want to highlight is actually the first episode of the second series. It is titled Be Right Back. This episode is why I really like this series. I will give you a brief synopsis real quick and then I will dive into why this episode stands out from the rest of them, at least to me. A couple is seen in a small smart car together. They have a silly conversation that consists of whether or not the BeeGees is a good band. Once they get to their destination, we realize that this is a couple and this is a house that they have inherited. The girl chastises the boy for being on his phone too much and they have a conversation about the fakeness of a photo taken by his mother when he was young. After that they have a failed sexual encounter. In the morning they wake up. She has to do some work, so he is forced to return something by himself. After a whole day waiting for him, she starts to get scared and calls her sister. While on the phone with her, police show up at her door. He was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, a friend of hers signs her up for a new service that allows you to message your dead loved one. It culls material from comments on social media websites that the person said while they were still alive and forms a virtual identity of that person. At first she hates the idea, but eventually when she finds out she is pregnant, she decides to give it a try. At first it is just texting, then it is voice chatting and it finally evolves into a robot that has the same features and the same mannerisms as her dead husband. She gets wrapped up in the process and shuts everyone else out. However this robot is not her husband. It is a mere resemblance which makes her hate it. Despite all the information that we put on the internet, it is just a shadow of our real selves. Through my posts on this blog, you might get a sense of who I am, but you would never truly understand me and my mannerisms until you meet me in person. This is why this episode is so great. At every turn, the woman who has lost the one person who was dearest to her wants him back but knows deep within herself that this robot can never be him. Technology no matter how advanced, no matter how life-like and no matter how perfect it may seem can never replace human interaction. It will never give you the nuances of seeing someone else react to something like a kiss or a hug or even something as monumental as a snowstorm. You can read about reactions, but unless you really truly understand that person you still cannot get the actual reality of the situation. Once you have known love it is hard for it to be faked by a robot. This is what the woman learns in this story and yet she cannot destroy the robot that has her dead husband’s face. Instead it becomes like a pet to her and her daughter, something that her daughter can play with. But it will never be her husband. Ever.

This was easily the saddest story in the entire run of episodes because it was acted so well and it was structured perfectly. I have seem to be on a role with Domhnall Gleeson these days. He of course is in this episode as well. He plays the husband that gets killed and the robot that replaces him. His turn from altogether human into a robot is fascinating to watch, but I think he is really helped here by a fantastic script. Especially at the beginning when we get a glimpse of how cute their relationship is. He does seem to have the hardest job out of the two people involved with the story, but I will be remiss if I don’t mention Hayley Atwell. She quite surprised me. I have to admit that I watched the first episode of Agent Carter (she plays Agent Carter) and was vastly underwhelmed by her performance. I thought she was nothing more than a pretty face in period clothing. However, here she shines. Her devastation at losing someone so dear to her is so complete and so heartbreaking that I was balling almost immediately upon it happening. There was one scene in particular where she is extremely good. She has just heard the heartbeat of her daughter for the first time. She is walking out of the doctor’s office and has called this robot voice who sounds just like her husband. While she is talking to him, overjoyed with hearing this monumental thing for the first time, she fumbles with her phone and drops it, breaking it into a couple of different pieces. Her horror-stricken face spoke volumes for the emotions that she needed to convey at that moment. Here was her one connection to her dead husband and it was completely useless. It was great and made me burst out crying. Haha.

Each episode of Black Mirror is fantastic. I wish that I could have something original and cute to say about each one, but alas I do not. If you haven’t already watched it and you have some free time, why not give it a chance? At least you see someone fake fucking a pig. That seems pretty entertaining doesn’t it?

Frank

An artist, no matter what the kind, has a complex balance that must be maintained in order to be successful. They must harness their creativity and their talents in order to create an original piece of art but they also must eat. So being able to sell their art, if it be a painting, an idea, a song or a piece of writing, is usually on an artist’s mind. And yet making something commercial and sellable might hamper that creativity and not make it flow as easily as it should. Frank, about a strange artist who wears a big cartoon plastic head over his real one, grapples with this paradox in a refreshing yet subtle way.

Frank is a very gifted musician. He is also strange, complex and sporting a plastic head at all times. A young wannabe artist enters into his unpronounceable band’s line up and tries to change the artist and the art he is creating. He wants to be able to share the weird and beautiful music that is being created here in order for some taste of fame. He films Frank and his bandmates being weird and creates an semi-big online sensation. He takes this leverage and gets them into SXSW, a platform for emerging bands to get seen by new fans. However, Frank finds this type of pressure unnerving and is thrown into a panic that the wannabe artist is left to deal with after the rest of the band disappears. The wannabe realizes that by trying to make this band commercial, he strips everything that was unique and fascinating about them out.

The performances by the main actors in this film is what makes this film as interesting as it is. Almost every review I have read praises Michael Fassbender for being able to make a character believable while being impeded by a big plastic head. He is great as he is in everything he is ever done. He is our generation’s Robert de Niro. I do not say that lightly. Literally every performance I have ever seen of his, even in Shame, I have loved and realized just how great he is. However, I wanted to point out someone else who should have had a tougher time of making something interesting out of the character given to them but pulled it off with ease: Domhnall Gleeson, who plays Jon the wannabe artist. In a movie such as this he is the boring straight man who just doesn’t get it… man. He wants to be an insider but is pushed by all crazy freaks (i.e. more interesting parts) out of the circle. He then whimpers and is becomes the central wet blanket of the group. Gleeson tries a variation on this wet blanket routine that makes him feel more like a lived in character. His ambitions to be seen as much of a genius as Frank is constantly getting trampled on by everyone in the band but his belief in himself is unhampered. He continues to write music and tries his best to be exactly like Frank and yet he is missing something. While he bumbles through everything and is neglected by the band mates, he still sees himself as essential to the group. In other words he is conceited. He is not aware that he is the wet blanket, bland man of the group. He is not aware that he has no talent and true vision. Therefore when he fucks everything up, he does it because he believes that this is the right path to take, even when it obviously is not. In fact at a certain point, Gleeson is able to give this annoying and conceited person a sense of humanity that makes you feel for his wrong thinking. And it makes him even more gross when he rejects Frank after the disaster in the third act. Gleeson is perfect as he mugs his way through each uncomfortable situation after another all the while thinking that what he is doing is right and justified. He gives an interesting performance in a mostly conventional role.

Goodbye to Language 3D

When I first started this blog, I used it as a platform to dive deeper into certain sections of film history that I wanted to know more about. I created blogathons that people (very few of them) could follow along with me in some sort of logical pattern. One of my first blogathons and the only one that was true to my rigorous standard was the auteurs of the French New Wave. Every week I systematically went through Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol (I stopped there because I became less interested in the project) filmographies and watched how they evolved from these scrappy young innovators into serious and developed directors. Godard was the first director I did and the one that has stuck with me the most. To see how evolved is to also see how art and philosophy can evolve within an artist. When he was first starting out, he used innovations to tell a simple story, but as he proceeded from one movie to the next the plot lines became more obscure and the innovations were placed at the center of the art piece. He started distancing himself from standard filmmaking that made him become one of the most difficult directors to understand. And yet his innovations and his art are still vital and still worth seeing. He is one of the few original French New Wavers that are still alive and working today and he still produces work that is strange yet innovative. Goodbye to Language is his latest effort. It stays true to his reputation as a crazy European art house director.

There is a dog. There is a couple who are mostly nude arguing about equality. There are cell phones juxtaposed with books. There is a boat that keeps sailing into the sea. There is a running commentary about war, technology and obscure philosophical concepts. But most importantly there are images. Images of flowers, women drinking out of water fountains, a dog wandering around in the forest and getting stuck in a river, words that overplay each other and classic film scenes of movies no one has ever heard of. A plot of any sort never enters the mind of Godard and nor should it for the audience. He is not creating a linear narrative.

He is creating a thinking and moving image using one of the most commercial technologies that has ever been invented: 3D. Art movies do not use 3D. It is too expensive. No. Only super hero movies, sleazy horror movies and terrible movies wanting to cash in use 3D technology. They use it not immerse you in any complex emotion, but to throw things at you from the screen. Nothing jumps out at you from the screen, there are no hands grabbing for things in front of your face or snowflakes falling. And yet the 3D is the most striking concept about this movie. He uses it to enhance a ginger’s bright and curly hair, to emphasize the mundane situation of a boat coming into shore like it has a million times before, the fullness of a bush of flowers or see the never-ending motion of the waves falling around a dog. While he is talking about the philosophy of a dog as the ultimate sign of naiveté, we see a dog playing dirty snow. This is not a typical image of commercial 3D and yet his using 3D gives us the ability to notice the strangeness and the intellectual possibilities of what he is saying.

Godard is famous for his collages. He collages here like there is no tomorrow. He cuts, he splices and he realign everything that we have seen before. At the beginning of the film we are following one couple that all but disappear and evolve into another couple who we see at their most intimate moments. But then again while we are just recovering from this shift, he brings us back to the dog who plays such a monumental yet silent role in this film. He layers on music only to cut it off at an awkward time. He gives us an image that is beautifully composed but does not seem to follow the following image. All of this he does in order to dislodge the comforts of watching a film. He wants the viewer to be constantly aware that this is in fact a film that they are watching and not some escapist drivel. He wants the viewer to pay attention to what is being said, if only what is being said that equality is like pooping.

His main idea is about the break down and destruction of language. This is obvious from even the title. But what he explores is deeper. He seems to say (at least this is how I interpret it now. I may change my mind at different time and if you have seen this movie you may disagree with me. This is a complex film and there are no easy interpretations.) that language as it relates to relationships is evolving to the point where one must have a translator in order to understand them. That the moment something is said and it is put into words that emotion or idea can be misinterpreted. We see this in the conversation between the naked couple throughout the film. She is saying one thing and he is always saying something else. She is naked and he is trying to cover her up with her jacket. It isn’t necessarily that they are talking of love. They talk about anything and it is misunderstood. The most classic example of this is one of the first speeches the couple has where the woman is talking about wanting to be equal with him and he talks about pooping as the ultimate sign of equality. He gives no justification for this idea and she dismisses it and yet it seems to illustrate what is wrong with their relationship. As the film goes on, we see the dog evolve from being this curious and wild creature in the forest to being a domesticated and depressed thing on a couch. He is bombarded by noises, shouting and other noises that can only be heard by him. The dog seems to be us as we become more civilized. When we were once happy just out in the wild not naming anything or caring for anyone besides new sensations and experiences, we were fulfilled. However now that we are stuck indoors, creating words and barriers against the outside world, our inner selves have become depressed.

All of these ideas that I have may be wrong about this movie. However what is great about this movie and other Godard films is that they can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways. What one viewer sees is not necessarily what another one sees. This is why Godard is still interesting even in his old age.

For a Good Time, Call…

I have this issue with reviews that I read on websites that I trust. There are just too many movies out there for me to watch, so I trust very good writers that have never steered me wrong when to see a movie and when not to. In the case of For a Good Time, Call… I thought that premise sounded pretty great, but I was dismayed by the lackluster and generally unenthusiastic reviews that came out, so I let this one go by unseen until I was sitting alone late at night in my parents’ basement looking for something to watch. I figured that it wouldn’t be as bad as the chance I took on Divergent a couple of days previously (review where I rip that movie a new one to come shortly) so I watched the entire thing from beginning to end and I have one thing to say to those reviewers that are inevitably reading this right now because I am super important and everyone who is anyone is reading this blog with bated breath: you are awesome but were wrong when it comes to this movie.

Lauren moves in with Katie after she gets dumped for being too boring by her boyfriend. Katie and Lauren have a grudge against each other that involved puking in a car. Katie is a loose cannon always willing to put her sexuality out on display for everyone to see. Lauren is an uptight woman is scared of sex. When Lauren is let go from her job, she decides to take over Katie’s job as a phone sex operator and turn it into an independent business. As a result, the two become tighter and they forget their long standing grudge in order to make their business lucrative. Katie teaches Lauren how to loosen up with her sexuality and Lauren teaches Katie that it is okay to be like someone and not be emotionally detached.

For a Good Time, Call… is essentially about two women starting a phone sex hotline. But the movie evolves into more than just a joke filled way to pass some time and talk about sex. It becomes a study on how friendship between women evolves. The best friendships that I have ever had have been with women. There is more passion and understanding there than I could ever get with a person of my opposite sex. However the fiercest rivalries, such as they are, have also been with women, because they understand just how vulnerable you can be with certain aspects of yourself because they are vulnerable in the exact same ways. For a Good Time, Call… is best when it explores just how wonderful a friendship between women can be and how terrible it also can be at the same time. Katie and Lauren become so close that each one knows where their insecurities are and knows exactly how to push them. So when one perceives a hurt from the other, that insecurity button gets pushed so hard that it gets stuck down for some time. What makes this movie unique and worth watching is that these women are able to reconcile and find their love for each other again through their own actions and not through men. They realize that they love each other in a pure and sisterly way.

About halfway through the film, Lauren gets the idea to become a phone sex operator herself. She is interested in the power that it holds for the anonymous men on the other end of the line. Katie trains her and shows her just how to get a man off using only her voice. In a following scene, Lauren emerges from her room after fielding a call with her hair messed up and a sex look in her eyes. She had obviously just been masturbating while on the line with a man. At this moment, Lauren’s transition from prude to a sexual being is complete. What I find interesting about this scene is not the place within the plot that it functions, but the unabashed acknowledgement that women can derive pleasure within themselves. We do not see the act itself, but we can see just how calm and empowered the act has on her. The two women joke about it, but never once say anything against a woman masturbating. I find this scene to be refreshing and fundamental to my enjoyment of the movie as a whole.

This movie is not perfect. It lacks stakes at certain points and the plot machinations are sometimes forced unnaturally in to the story in order to find the way to the ending. Even with these flaws in place, I can still find something worth watching here that fascinates me and makes me want to return to it again.

Snowpiercer

A break in schooling means only one thing for me: movies! I recently went on a Netflix bender, so I am dispensing of my normal (and very rigid) structure of a certain genre or type of film per day to just tell you exactly what I watched and why, at least in this case, it is so freaking awesome. Spoiler alert: Snowpiercer is as cool as everyone else says it is. Just stop reading and go watch it on Netflix already. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

Well if you are still with me, I guess I will have to make my case a little bit more clear. Snowpiercer is set in a future where the world’s governments in their infinite wisdom decided to fix global warming by shooting something into space that would cool the Earth’s temperature. Well just like the massive ice block dumped into the ocean by the Futurama crew lead to disastrous results like Bender almost getting killed, this idea froze the entire world. Only the people who were on this super train were saved from utter destruction. But this train is not the savior that all mankind wants. It is instead a caste system with the people who are nearest to the engine are the wealthiest and the ones that closest to the back are the degenerates. They are fed protein blocks that look like jelly blocks and are forces to live literally on top of each other. When they get out of line, a woman named Mason (played very well by Tilda Swinton) comes to the back to tell them of their place and punish the offender by sticking their arm out in the cold so that it will be frozen off. One man, Curtis (played by Chris Pine), cannot abide by this treatment any longer. He organizes an assault on the front half of the train in order to take over the engine therefore controlling the entire train. His journey through each train car becomes more and more deadly to the people who surround him.

What makes this movie so fascinating and ultimately worth watching is the complete world that Bong Joon-Ho commits to in this movie. With so other many dystopia, the plot gets bogged down in telling us the details of the world that the main characters live in. However, here Bong Joon-ho trusts his audience enough to understand what is happening and why, and he wants us to something meaningful in the plot, he lets the character discover it instead of telling us outright. For instance when Curtis finds out is really inside of the protein blocks, he looks inside the machine that makes them and is horrified to see what it really is. But he refuses to tell anyone else that hadn’t seen it for themselves. He doesn’t even reveal the secret when he forces Mason to eat one when she is captured by his crew in lieu of some magnificent sushi. He also makes each train car that we see in the movie as distinct from the one that comes before it. Each one serves a purpose that is evident from the moment they enter it, but they all have a grotesque texture to it that reminds me of Delicatessen (1991). Part of the tension lies in not just seeing Curtis succeed but also what lies behind the doors that are being opened by the security expert. It is not always to Curtis’ liking and in fact many times what lies beyond is nothing to be looked forward to.

This movie isn’t very subtle. The environment theme is laid bare for everyone to see. The critiques on religion, tyranny, and caste systems are also easy to read. But Bong Joon-ho doesn’t deal in subtlety. He takes these clichéd moments and does them best and twists them in order to subvert your expectations. In a typical Hollywood movie, each person that was introduced at the beginning would have made it to the end or had died in a way that was heroic, but SPOILER ALERT::: only the ones you least expect end up surviving. In a typical Hollywood movie, when the requisite hero monologue that explains his actions happens, I never expect to hear such violent and truly terrible things that Curtis did before he turned into a good person. And finally in a typical Hollywood movie, the ending wouldn’t have been as cynical and lack as much hope as it does here. Each surprise and subversion is what makes this movie worth watching and commenting on.

Unbroken

Incredible true life stories during war time can often make riveting movies. Watching a man struggle against immense hardship and obstacles in order to overcome adversity is made all the more impactful because it happened in real life. To just name a few off the top of my head, I would say Rescue Dawn, Schindler’s List, and The Pianist all achieve this tinge of realism while also making the struggles of the men in them cinematic. However this is a tricky thing to pull off. Sometimes a movie can get bogged down in certain biographical details and loose the ability to make a compelling story. I think this is what happened with Unbroken.

Unbroken tells the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Italian American Olympic athlete who became an officer in the Air Force during World War II. On a rescue mission over the Pacific, his plane is shot down and only him and two others survive. Survive is a loose term given the fact that they drift on a life boat for over a month with very little to eat. When they finally get rescued, it is by the opposition, the Japanese, who put them in POW camps with overly sadistic rulers. Zamperini becomes a target for one of the men in charge and is forced to do several embarrassing and terrible things. The movie then turns into a never ending slog of watching this man get brutally beaten down by this commander. But he will never be broken! He will in fact emerge UNBROKEN!… Ugh.

My main issue with this movie is that I never got emotionally attached to Zamperini. His motives are never quite clear and his resilience is therefore groundless. I never understood what is going on in his head when he gets punched repeatedly by his fellow prisoners in order to save the life of another prisoner or when he must hold a beam over his head for several hours after he is caught faltering in his long work in the coal mine. The movie throws at the audience cliched sayings and events (he was a troublesome boy that gets saved by his passion for running) that fall on deaf ears because they seem to never have been uttered by a real human before. “If you can take it, you can make it.” is one saying that gets repeated again and again but it becomes a hollow rallying cry that doesn’t get to heart of his motivations. In fact the most riveting part of the story isn’t the climax that is depicted on every poster and highlighted in every trailer (the beam), but when he is trapped on a life boat with two other men. His motivations become quite clear. He wants to live and he wants everyone else that he is on that boat with to survive as well. So their efforts to catch fish, to dodge bullets from enemy planes, and to keep the spirits up of one man who is having a particularly rough time of it by describing how his mother makes gnocchi seem to be rooted in a reality that I can believe. Their natural villains: the sun and the sharks that surround them need no motivation because they are indifferent. They are nature at its base level. The relationship that he forms with one of the other men becomes touching because they are enduring this hardship together. I would have loved to see the movie end here where they board a ship that has rescued them. It would have been a very good film. Unfortunately it did not.

Once Zamperini gets to the POW camp and we are introduced to different characters, his motivations become hidden and the iciness that surrounds this character at the beginning reemerges. However it isn’t just his motivations that remain hidden. It is also the Japanese commander’s motivations. Why he decides to single this man out for an almost insane amount of punishment is never quite clear. The movie then just devolves into a simplistic Japanese: bad, American: good duality that is overplayed and a cheat. An audience member shouldn’t hate a person purely because he is Japanese, they should hate him because they have cause to do so. The movie becomes lazy, content with just showing you overlong torture scenes that seem to be strung together by the thinnest of threads. At a certain point I got numb to the violence and tuned it out. This made the beam scene, which is supposed to be the moment of emotional catharsis for the audience, less than impactful. It was just another scene of him getting tortured unfairly.

Gravity

Before I talk to you about my very ingenious ideas about Gravity, I must offer an apology. I have been neglecting this blog for the past couple of months because of certain issues that slowed down my movie watching and robbed me of my free time. I posted on here several months back saying that I have returned to school to pursue my furthering education, but I also made a promise that I wouldn’t neglect my “duty” here, such as it is. Well, surprise surprise graduate school is very hard and all-consuming. Between my massive amounts of homework, trying to come up with original research ideas, an internship and the weekends that were full of trying to earn a wage so I wasn’t completely dependent on money that I have borrowed, this blog has taken to the back burner. Well, no more sir! I am back with a freaking vengeance. Expect this blog to get more lively over the next month and hopefully to continue to be lively for several months after that… but I make no promises. Now on to amazing musings on a movie so many other people have watched and spilled virtual ink on before me.

I decided in my infinite wisdom to watch Gravity, a 3D film that was designed to be in IMAX, on a 20 inch television. I also decided to watch this downbeat movie with a woman, my mother, who doesn’t care for anything that doesn’t have humor or at least a good love story to it. Both of these were huge mistakes that would have impacted my viewing of this movie if it had not been as engrossing and beautiful as it was.

As just a refresher course for anyone who doesn’t have a good movie: Gravity is about a scientist, Ryan Stone, who is working on a device that will make a space shuttle… I don’t know, more spacey? That doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she is a novice astronaut in space accompanied by a very talkative veteran astronaut, played by George Clooney. While they are working on something in the wild atmosphere of space a meteor shower interrupts their progress and sends Stone and Kowalski (Clooney) into infinite danger that they both strive to get out of throughout the rest of the film.

The plot line is simple. It is really just an excuse to see what the filmmaker can throw at Stone to hinder her progress towards safety. What isn’t simple is the impressive performance by Sandra Bullock, who plays Ryan Stone. For at least half of it’s running time, Bullock is hindered from the space suit she dons and the laws of space that the movie sets up. She floats, she spins and she grabs all with this cumbersome suit that hides most of her body movements. Thus she must rely on her face to do almost all of the reaction. Her cool, collected persona that she gives off to Kowalski and her other co-workers is nothing more than a front that hides her deep pain at past issues. The plot doesn’t just function as a how far can we push this woman without her cracking up, it also functions as a way to dig past the layers of rigid complacency and self-reliance her character feels she needs. So when she finally cracks up it is all the more painful and heart wrenching. But her ability to get away from that break down of spirits and push towards fighting for her life with all of the energy she has left is what makes this a strong character. I was quite frankly surprised that Bullock could pull this type of character off. I had sort of given up on her as an actress that could produce anything more that was worth watching. I struggle with her as an actress. I have seen several of her movies (my mother is a big fan of hers) and she always seems to be putting in an effort that draws the watcher towards her and roots for her but her abilities to choose the worst material (All About Steve, anyone?) relegated her to the cash grabbing hack category that is embodied by Nicholas Cage. I first realized how incredibly terrible her decisions were for suitable material when I watched her in The Proposal. By the time this movie came out, 2009, I knew enough to avoid her other disaster movies, but when my mother is watching something that is strange and off-putting, I must give in to my temptation and take no responsibility for it afterwards. (In this way, I watched two absolutely wretched Hallmark Original movies. In one movie the couple are pulled apart by a false accusation of stolen faberge egg. But it was all resolved when it was revealed that the dog of the house really stole it…. Groan)I watched with my mouth wide open as Bullock trounced around being this insane whack-a-doo character that was not based on any reality at all. I was convinced that some alien inhabited her body and tried their best to act as all humans do, but couldn’t quite pull it off. It was appalling to watch. When I heard that she was in Gravity, I was dubious. Many a great director can pull out a riveting performance from an actor or actress that aren’t really known for them but could Cuaron? He is a director that could get great performances out of already great actors, but could he get someone who has so debased herself that she has become a caricature and a punch line? I think that Cuaron proved himself to be a great director, not just by creating a riveting atmosphere, but by extracting a performance out of Bullock that got her a deserved (as opposed to the Blind Side) Oscar nomination and gave us a great strong woman performance.