Category: Reviews

It’s harder reviewing the really, really good movies. What more are you going to say about There Will Be Blood? Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis was awesome, and Paul Dano was too. The soundtrack was terribly cool — I didn’t read it as a horror movie soundtrack so much as I took it to be a parallel narrative of the industrialization of the United States. It groaned and crashed and squealed like machinery. Lovely.

The movie is the awesome achievement everyone’s saying it is. 2007 was an insanely good year for Americana movies, what with this plus No Country for Old Men. P. T. Anderson has pretty much come into his own.

Hm, one interesting aspect of the movie, which is not exactly a surprise if you’ve seen anything else Anderson’s made: there’s about zero narrative thrust. Most of the big pivotal events aren’t foreshadowed, and have no build up. There’s a distinct arc of degradation as Daniel Plainview descends into the depths of misanthropy, but there’s not exactly a story there. It’s simply people being people.

See it. Love it.

I’ve seen a few critics recommending minimal knowledge of Cloverfield going into the movie, and I think that’s right. It’s also a sign that it’s a gimmick movie. That’s not a pejorative, since there’s nothing wrong with gimmick movies, but you always have to ask: does the gimmick contribute to the story?

In this case, since the story’s more about how people react to the giant monster eating New York City than it is about the monster, I think the answer’s yes. To the degree that Cloverfield doesn’t succeed, it’s not any fault of the found footage conceit. Rather, it’s that the characters aren’t all that interesting, excepting our primary cameraman Hud. They aren’t boring, per se. I cheered for them. I just wouldn’t have been cheering if it hadn’t been a monster movie.

No question but that it was enjoyable, however. The craft of the movie is superb; what this gains over The Blair Witch Project is choice. A good cinematographer thought about what he could get out of the camera and executed really well. There’s some cute stuff with earlier recorded material that also works nearly perfectly.

And damn, it’s a scary monster. Great design; it’s menacing and terrifying and unstoppable in the correct measure. The 9/11 parallels are pretty clear, in that we’re going to inevitably draw them, but the movie acknowledges them deliberately in the opening scenes and I think that pulls any fangs there might be.

Well worth the movie ticket. Bring Dramamine if you get sick easily.

Everyone except Susan, who discovered Blackpool, is fired. Completely fired. A BBC mystery miniseries in which the actors periodically burst into popular song? Or, more exactly, popular song bursts onto the soundtrack and the actors sing along, like demented British karaoke? This sits right smack on my sweet spot and whispers sweet nothings into my ears. It’s the love child of Dennis Potter and, I dunno, something a lot more lighthearted than Dennis Potter.

Also, David Tennant.

Here’s David Tennant with “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” For walking! Here he is singing “Walk Tall”, along with Sarah Parrish. And David Morrissey singing “You Can Get It If You Really Want”.

This is entertainment. I have ordered the DVDs from Amazon UK.

Spoilers ahead.

I’m unclear as to whether Stranger Than Fiction is a comedy or a tragedy. I guess strictly speaking it’s a romantic comedy, but really, that’s not the story of the movie; the story of the movie is about how something dies. Does a great person have a downfall? Yep. So I think I have to read it as a bittersweet tragedy, albeit one with an ending which could be seen as rather happy.

Then again, it perhaps betrays my bibliophiliac nature that I think the death of a novel is a tragedy. But — no, I think I’m on target. A classic tragedy is inevitable. In Stranger Than Fiction, everyone makes the right decisions; ethics prevail throughout. It just so happens that the result of these decisions is that Karen Eiffel doesn’t complete her greatest novel.

But the alternative would have been worse. It’s to the movie’s credit that there’s a bit of uncertainty there, though. Around fifteen minutes before the end, I thought Harold was going to die, and that would have been an impressive choice. Then I thought we were going to have a saccharine ending; then it was redeemed, because it was clear that the choice made was a painful one. Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson pretty much pulled this off with their final scene; perfect portrayal of two people who know a sacrifice has been made.

The two of them more or less made the movie work all along, actually. Will Ferrell was good; the role wasn’t deeply demanding, but he did avoid hamming it up and he was perfectly decent as a mostly blank cipher. I’m guessing he’ll do one of these every few years to maintain cred, and if he’s this good every time he’ll deserve whatever cred he gets. But really, it was Thompson and Hoffman deserve the credit for creating the context in which he could work.

So I liked it. As elliptical Wes Andersonesque movies go, it was no Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it beat the crap out of I Heart Huckabees.

I don’t really care about the Oscars anymore, thanks to Forrest Gump. However, I’m still capable of getting curious about the winners, and if Best Foreign Picture didn’t go to Pan’s Labyrinth, a small part of me wants to know why.

In this case, The Lives of Others just happened to be a better movie. Not by a huge margin, but I have no complaints about the Academy’s decision in this case.

It’s about two intertwining lives; that of Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent, and that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright. One watches the other; the other performs, unknowingly, for the one. The third actor in the drama, Christa-Maria Sieland, is a pivot point for everyone else in the movie. Her choices create the context in which the others…

Fail to meet, because they don’t ever really. But it’s her actions which bring Wiesler to reconsider his life as a watcher, and which bring Dreyman to idealism and subversion.

Despite the humanistic, nearly redemptive ending, I have to think of this movie as a tragedy. You have — well, five interlocking wheels of motivation, albeit the three mentioned are the major ones, which drive inevitably towards a tragic ending. There’s a coda, after the Wall falls, but it isn’t anything other than bittersweet.