watched last night. doubtless some threshold in animation has been crossed but after the “sin city” backlash i am hesitant to praise technical innovation and cartoony violence (even if it is cool when the dad rams two hover-craft with men in them together, causing them to explode, in front of his adoring kids). the underlying premise seems to be to attack the cult of mediocrity/self-esteem pandemic in the u.s: the superheroes have to pretend not to have powers and not show that they are really special, because now everyone is special (which, one of them grumbles, means “no one is”). the problem with the film is that it hasn’t really thought this through in the social context it is placing its characters in: the everyday. the superheroes have done nothing to earn their powers, which are entirely physical. against these lucky freaks is a young man who is spurned by the naturally powerful and responds by applying his brain and becoming a technological whiz. the jocks vs. the nerd–but it turns out we’re supposed to root for the jocks. perhaps it is my long conditioning as a nerd that makes this a problem for me
Category: overrated
Guarded Stare
Garden State A FILM ABOUT TROUBLED YOUNG PEOPLE… WITH NO TROUBLES.
Is Zach Braff just not good enough – or confident enough – to let certain things remain unsaid? Or is the audience that dense that we need to have every little thing spelled out for us? Braff lets his cast off very easy in this film, particularly himself and Portman. Blinding headaches? Oh, they just go away halfway through the film. Been on lithium, Zoloft, Paxil for ten years and decide to take yourself off all at once? Well, the worst thing that will happen to you is that you’ll joyously shout while standing in the rain! Continue reading Guarded Stare
russian ark
we watched this last night. that is to say, i watched it all, while sunhee fell asleep at about the 50 minute mark. i don’t really know what to make of this. i found the opening 20 minutes or so to be very absorbing but then it sort of fizzled out. perhaps one needs to be much more familiar with russian history to get what the film is doing with it. but in the absence of that knowledge it felt more and more like a celebration of pomp and circumstance for its own sake. doing it one take was apparently the director’s attempt at a filmic version of doing something in “one breath”. i suppose, but i don’t know if a colder approach a la kubrick in “barry lyndon” might not have suited his purposes better. then again maybe it works really well on a large screen. anyone else seen this? amy, if you’re still reading, i think you’d recommended this–what am i missing?
ray
we watched this last night. i found it to be curiously uninvolving. the parts that worked best were the musical performances (with ray charles singing). the rest was mostly trite psychologizing, shuffling around questions of history, and the occasional quincy jones sighting (which i think was supposed to stand in for charles’ relationship with 50s/60s jazz). and apparently there is nothing to say about ray charles after the 60s. there’s been a lot of talk about foxx’s performance; it is mostly a series of very good ray charles impressions mixed in with some scenes of very good acting–but i thought the impressions distracted (though the big-time critics disagree). too bad belushi died before getting to do a joe cocker biopic.
since this has been nominated for a best picture oscar i am forced to rate it “overrated”.
House of Flying Daggers
House of Flying Cliches, laboriously presented. Only a self-consciously retro and “pretty” chinese film could get away with some of this creaky stuff. a couple of exciting sequences, especially a fight and chase in a bamboo forest. but perhaps it’s time to ask the same question of Chinese filmmakers like Yimou that the popularity of Kurosawa in the 1970s/80s raised: How much do these costume dramas, calculated to wow western audiences with their scenery, scope, art direction, etc., prevent other more daring and significant films from receiving distribution and reaching larger audiences. I remember the first time I saw the Japanese film “Pigs and Battleships” about Japan immediately after the war—I was amazed because I thought Japanese film was all samourai’s and emperors. Of course, very few people have seen films by either Imamura or Kurosawa, but is it entirely cynical to wonder why Kurosawa in particular was chosen as a “global” film darling?