Chronicle – Even thinking about this movie, I start
to cry. It's got to be in my top five of all time, and I think it's the best
film released since The Fountain. It's about kids who gain mysterious
telekinetic powers, but it's really about school shootings. Replace the
paranormal stuff with guns and you have a heartbreaking story about what
happens when you put the power of life and death in the hands of tortured,
unstable teenagers (read: all teenagers). It's so stunningly beautiful and
awful that I can hardly bear to watch it. I think it's not only one of the best
films ever made (by a 27-year-old first-time director... fuck me), it's
simply one of the best things ever made.
Inside Llewyn Davis – This is another one that ripped
my heart out. It's the best Coen brothers film since No Country for Old Men (which
– can you believe – was released seven years ago). It feels like a “classic”
Coen film: an understated character study of a guy who doesn't quite fit with
the world around him. A lot of people dislike it because they find the
protagonist surly and unpleasant, and he is; but he's also a wonderfully
talented artist who believes unwaveringly in a higher meaning to life. Life
often lets him down in both hilarious and tragic ways, but he sabotages himself
just as often. Ironically, the heartless record exec (F. Murray Abraham) who
tells him he's got no potential because he just doesn't connect with people is
right about him. Llewyn cares too much about his art and not enough about his
friends – a mistake too many artists make. The film is also the most realistic
portrait of a musician I've seen: it doesn't show the rise to fame and eventual
fall of a musician (actually very rare in real life), it shows a man who never
actually gets anywhere despite his enormous talent and love for music. I would
say that at least 90% of people who try to “make it” live this disappointing
reality. Anyone who's ever tried to find success in a creative field will be
able to identify with Llewyn Davis no matter how much of a sad, frustrated
misanthrope he is.
Cosmopolis – Based on a postmodern novel by Don
DeLillo, this one frustrated and confused a lot of viewers, and I don't blame
them. I don't fully understand what it's about either, but I love it to death.
The dialogue is intentionally stilted and strange, and the setting is bizarre
and otherworldly. Almost anything about this film can be taken on several
levels: reality, metaphor, dream, hallucination. Robert Pattinson acts the hell
out of his role as a careless billionaire riding the peculiar tides of global
finance and politics (proving he's way more than just a pretty teen
heartthrob). He's haunted and hunted by something he can't put his finger on
until it finds him in a very specific and troubling way. David Cronenberg never
fails to deliver fascinating and challenging material, and this is some of his
most challenging. It's a mandala of obscurity filled with
humanity-as-insect-hive strangeness – more of a tone poem than a clear-cut
narrative.
The Cabin in the Woods – For fans of horror movies,
this is the Rosetta Stone that deconstructs the language and history of
cinematic horror fiction while itself being far more disturbing than the
majority of recent lukewarm entries into the genre. It begins with two baffling
parallel plots that create an unsettling mystery as to how they fit together.
It injects quite a bit of smart and effective humor into the story before
taking a sudden left turn into one of the most viscerally terrifying final
sequences I've ever witnessed. It's bloodier than Saw, more
phantasmagoric than Paranormal Activity, smarter than Scream, and
more fun than A Nightmare on Elm Street. It'll be hard to top this as
the ultimate statement on scary movies.
Prometheus – Another film that met with popular and critical derision, I thought this was a beautifully nightmarish vision of humanity's place in the universe. Dan O'Bannon – the screenwriter of the original Alien – said that Alien was the closest he'd ever come to bringing H.P. Lovecraft's fiction to the screen. Alongside Poe, Lovecraft is one of the fathers of modern horror fiction. He embraced the developing ideas of new science, altering the landscape of the genre from human-centric tales of earthly monsters to cosmic vistas of overwhelming mystery we could never hope to understand. I think Prometheus should be taken this way: less as a coherent narrative and more as an unfathomable nightmare. Many people complained that the story was badly written and the characters were stupid; however, as this in-depth video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpEx7pdp2-Q) carefully explains, most of these complaints can be easily and satisfactorily answered. Expecting the film to make perfect sense misses the point, though. It's more rewarding as a hallucinatory parable for the futility of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Lincoln – I'm sure there are any number of un-P.C.
problems with this version of history. Lots of liberties were probably taken
and lots of important details omitted. But I don't care because Daniel Day
Lewis' portrayal of the great man is so utterly captivating. He's funny,
profound, melancholy, intimidating, hopeful, and tragic all at once. More than
almost any other film I've seen, Lincoln delivers a real, tangible
feeling of history. It focuses less on the dramatic, romantic sweep of events
and more on the intimate interpersonal details of people's lives. There's a lot
of legislative machination, but I love courtroom dramas, so I'm not too
bothered about that. In fact, I really like the focus on the back-door politics
that truly won the war against slavery. That's not to say there isn't a sense
of the fierce catastrophe of the physical War, but the people who decided what
the end of the War would mean did so in congressional chambers and
paneled rooms lit only by sun- or candlelight. The film doesn't show [SPOILER
ALERT] Lincoln's assassination; instead it opts to show him walking humbly away
into the haze of myth. Here's a suggestion: after you watch Lincoln,
watch the excellent film The Conspirator that picks up immediately after
his murder and details the unpleasant and morally questionable fallout from
that event.
No comments:
Post a Comment