Canadian Movie: Owning Mahowny
ph. Alliance
Owning Mahowny is austere minimalist cleanliness in cinema. This approach is surprising since it tackles gambling addiction, and addiction of any kind is usually portrayed with either evil, grit or glamour. The titular Dan Mahowny (Philip Seymour Hoffman) walks around in beige-painted halls of banks, hotel rooms and airports or visit Atlantic City casinos that aren’t as loud nor distractingly colourful as other gambling places in other films. There’s also spectatorship at work here, as casino employees and patrons both feel greed and pity towards him. Hoffmann’s performance, accordingly, is unsettlingly stoic either when he’s working or sitting on the blackjack tables, losing millions of dollars in one sitting. He barely blinks nor breaks a sweat, his only way to know how to stopp is to endure a spectacular loss. With him is a great supporting cast including Minnie Driver and John Hurt, encapsulating Ontario and New Jersey cadences.
Not a Transformers 3 Review
Michael Bay‘s Transformers: Dark of the Moon or Transformers 3, starring Carey Mulligan’s shit cheater boyfriend, several Coen’s alumni including someone halfway through an EGOT and the aristocratic Rosie Huntington Whiteley, opened the prestigious Moscow International Film Festival and is out today. I present a conversation between me and a critic friend who, as his job requires, saw it before all of us little people!
– I’ve actually heard of Rosie Huntington Whiteley.
– And hopefully after this, Paolo, no one will ever hear of her again.
– The reason I like hearing of her is at least she’s not ‘model-actress’ Brooklyn fucking Decker, like model-actress is some tramp stamp you apply to the movie’s token hot girl I’ve never seen walk a runway, even if it is a Victoria’s Secret one.
– It doesn’t change the fact that she is one of the worst actresses of any type in the history of forever. See it and see what I mean. Or better yet, don’t see it. That would be even better.
– Worse than Andie McDowell or Kelly Preston? Also, I like rooting for model-actresses. Jane Fonda won two Oscars, for the lulz.
– Worst than the fucking worst worst you can imagine. Incomparably worst.
– Like Ryan Gosling’s blow up doll would have seemed like Liv Ullmann compared to her worst?
– As I said before, incomparable.
Context: 1. My life long dream right now is to be a film critic, and I hope that my future employers don’t see my procrastination, cowardice and lack of professionalism as a hindrance. Seriously, I should be working on a 1600-er on another McDormand film, Almost Famous, instead of this shit. 2. I was into fashion once. 3. The original version of this post contained a Steven Spielberg erection joke but alas, I’m too classy for that. 4. I’ve had lots of unprotected gay sex, I haven’t been tested for HIV since college, and I don’t want to. Being HIV-positive is obviously bad, but if I learn that I’m negative, I might consider this knowledge of relatively perfect health as a reason to consider watching Transformers 3.
Criticize This’ Andrew Parker’s reviews Transformers 3 in his personal blog.
Related articles
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Shout Outs
This post probably exists so that I can spread the comment love to the websites I write for.
I watched Joe Wright‘s Pride and Prejudice a long ass time ago and write at Yourkloset about it. I talked, or more appropriately, rambled on about a lot of things about the film, including Keira/Brenda Blethyn type casting, the camera movement, and a little about the costumes. I regrettably forget to talk about the sister casting and the reverse Bechdel Test.
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‘You’re a serial killer.’ This is the greatest screen shot you will ever see in your entire life. It seems like the last few films I’ve written about are British films, but for Castor Troy of Anomalous Material, I fast forwarded a century or so to Richard Ayoade‘s Submarine, a movie that feels like its protagonist, Oliver Tate, is telling your his secrets without making it seem like purgation.
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I’ve also been reading Charles Frazier‘s Cold Mountain after accidentally rewatching the film adaptation in French. I’m not being pretentious because I’ve lost all the French I’ve studied in Grade 9. I bought the book a long time ago after seeing a store closing shop, and I thought that reading it might add to what I might write about the film. The lyrical prose is a positive influence to the four unwritten movie reviews dancing inside my head but not on this post, sadly. I’m at page 49 now which is actually good but also means that I won’t get to write about it ’till next week and that I’m procrastinating.
Related articles
- SUBMARINE Review (collider.com)
Indefensible: The Butterfly Effect
ph. New Line
Ashton Kutcher was once ‘Ashton Christopher,’ model. If you’re rich or in your first month of getting your Rogers Digital cable box, you’re not feeding starving children in Africa and instead watching old footage of ‘Christopher’ in Fashion Television Channel. You’d be watching a Donna Karan fashion show or something in the 90’s wrap up, they interview Janice Dickinson, then ‘Christopher,’ who just walked the show. Best Week Ever alleges that he and Josh Duhamel are the inspiration for Derek and Hansel. Dan Savage also takes credit for discovering him and introducing him to America, and with the former’s stroke of luck, he decides that he’s the soothsayer of future hot famous men and picks Trent Ford, whom you’ve never heard of and will never hear about again. Maybe it’s the foresight, but there’s a glimmer in ‘Christopher’s’ eye and this weird mouth thing that seems like he’s wanting to burst out from this image of the preppy, well composed young man into becoming the turn of the 21st century goofball. A few years later, he decides to show America that he is a serious actor as well with his star vehicle The Butterfly Effect, a critical failure, a relatively box office success, cult favourite. Cue Demi Moore, Twitter, “Two and a Half Men.”
I’ve only seen the first twenty minutes of it. Kutcher is almost absent and looks like ass, Eric Stoltz is terrible, the child counselor from Freddy Got Fingered is in it, shout outs to Dumb and Dumber and Se7en, I will never have children. Tonight at 7PM at the Toronto Underground Cinema, Criticize This’ Andrew Parker is showing The Butterfly effect as part of his Defending the Indefensible Series. Adam Nayman and Norman Wilner will be discussing the (de)merits of the film. And of course, the series continues because when you pay to watch these potentially terrible movies, you’re donating to charity. This month’s charity, appropriately enough, is the Red Door, sheltering women and children fleeing from domestic abuse.
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3 Idiots
Three men look for their mysteriously estranged college mate, Ranchoddas or Rancho (Aamir Khan), and coming along later in the journey is his on-and-off girlfriend Pia (Kareena Kapoor), their ex-headmaster’s daughter. Rancho is so memorable to these characters because of the joy he has brought to their younger selves, since most of these other characters are prone to suicidal thoughts, mental breakdowns and quarter life crises brought on by the general competitiveness of middle class, college life. ‘Life is a race,’ but Rancho thinks that a musical number is decent cardio too. Standing between the binaries that this film and its context present, he’s Western because of his idealistic view on education and love, Eastern because of his altruism and anti-materialism. What’s also admirable about this film is that it lets Rancho be wrong sometimes, its most heartfelt moment is when the headmaster, teary-eyed, tells him that he can’t be right all the time.
There’s also Pia, who, by learning how to stand up against her former fiancée as well as her father, is a woman more feminist than a Deepa Mehta protagonist. And since we’re comparing movies about India, the film also echoes the triumphalism of Slumdog Millionaire, the but the ride is wilder this time, taking characters to opposite emotional cliffs and back.
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The Lovers: Midnight in Paris
Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), visiting Paris for unknown length of time, is so taken by the city that he considers moving in, be a perpetual tourist and write his novel. His fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) thinks that he should go back to Southern California and stay on as the moderately successful screenwriter that he is. His romanticized view of Paris gets intermittently interrupted by his fiancée’s parents, her older friend Paul (Michael Sheen) and the latter’s yes-woman of a fiancée. After a wine tasting party, Gil takes a rain check when Inez and Paul want to go out dancing. He wants to ingest the city and gets lost. While sitting on some steps, the bells ring midnight, a vintage car stops in front of him and inside are people dressed up for a 1920’s themes costume party. They wave him in, he follows, and they take a ride from one charming, drunken party to another in for real 1920’s Paris.
In his review of Woody Allen‘s new film Midnight in Paris for The New York Times, A.O. Scott says ‘critics…complain when he repeats himself and also when he experiments.’ The same can be said in his version of 1920’s France, the historical characters from that bygone era depicted like Coles Notes. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates, because who else?) saying something quotable and eloquent! Ernest Hemingway saying something equally quotable eloquent on an awesome musky drunken haze! Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill) and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) saying something coarse and/or surreal that no one rightfully bothered to write down! It’s a damned if he does or doesn’t scenario. The latter might have made history buffs and literati take their own nails out. But choosing the former makes history seem like pushing a button to reassure Gil, as he tells Inez, that the people in the past are exactly what he thought they would be, and that he might not learn anything new despite going into this different world.
Thankfully, history gets a different narrative through Ariana (Marion Cotilliard), a fashion designer originally from a smaller French city. Conventionally, no one in her time would write about her, the thankless muse and objectified trophy to many artists. She’s smitten by Gil’s writing and befriends him. Instead of the gilded tourist-y, antique shop present day France that Gil experiences in daylight, shot marvellously by Darius Khondji, his midnight strolls in 1920’s Paris with Ariana are gray, mahogany and smoke. She leads him to avenues with a whopping four prostitutes in one block. Four! She tells him about her relatively hard life and her encounters with sleazy people of that time.
Through Cotilliard’s commendable performance, Ariana talks about being these artists’ and writers’ lovers or working under revered couturiers as a measly job or a mere stop to a drifter’s journey instead of an honour that Gil thinks it is. Kindred spirits with differences attract, and it’s very convincing that instead of hanging out and being a sponge to ideas from these great writers, he is more fascinated with ‘some girl.’ Ariana is just one of the film’s female characters who are counter-subversive to Gil’s subversion, being able to see the cracks within his nostalgia. Gertrude Stein criticizes a painting that would end up in a gallery that Gil revisits in the present day. Inez’ mother questions his lack of taste in furniture.
Woody Allen’s previous takes on the past are more magical, an element greatly missed in this film. Sure, there’s that bit of dust touching the vintage car as they’re going to Cole Porter’s party, but instead of fully embracing the world where Gil finds himself, we instead see his eyes get bigger, the characters introducing themselves with names of people who have been dead for years. But at least he replaces magic with self-awareness.
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Malick’s “The Tree of Life”
The Tree of Life is a film more expansive than director Terrence Malick‘s previous work. A quote from the Book of Job. A nebulous entity with an adult Jack O’Brien’s (Sean Penn) voice. The O’Briens losing their 19-year-old middle son R.L. to an unnamed war. Jack’s voice accompanying fast, neon lights. Urbanite Jack living his architect life, having a tense phone conversation with his father, lighting a candle to commemorate his brother’s death. Jack and his mother’s (Jessica Chastain) voices on a quest for answers as we see the world’s biological prehistory. Short moments of Jack’s mother as a child. Jack’s mother becoming Mrs. O’Brien because of a dashing man in a white navy uniform (Brad Pitt) and starting a family in Waco, Texas. Giving birth and being there as Jack, as a toddler, learns and experiences things for the first time.
I do stand by one thing about this movie – Jack’s father is an asshole, for some reason the scenes that feature him having more personal importance than others. Given the film’s length, it’s generous enough to show its audience a diverse set of moments including Mr. O’Brien’s, starting us off with his seemingly innocent sternness. But he inadvertently indoctrinates them in this world of machismo and class angst, strangely enough since it looks like they have nothing to complain about property-wise. The film also uses one scene for its audience to distrust and hate that character, to show that his relationship with his family might never be mended, despite keeping up appearances.
Mr. O’Brien is a monster but thanks to Pitt building a great character, he is not a violent caricature. Eventually, young Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) anger towards his father surfaces, and the latter’s reactions vary. It’s his human moments that make Mr. O’Brien more fearsome. We see Jack’s father through his eldest son’s flashbacks, a strong balance of a detailed, mature understanding and a childlike/adolescent fear. It’s more difficult for someone to be hurt a few times by someone who they love, knowing that a person is inseparable from the ones who cause them pain.
Mr. O’Brien isn’t the only character subjected through this impressionistic depiction. Mrs. O’Brien, her disgusted face at her mother(-in-law?)’s (Fiona Shaw) terrible advice showing us that she would blossom more if she was born ten years later and/or read Simone de Beauvoir. To her sons, she’s a playmate, and especially to Jack, she’s a teacher, an inadvertent target of Freudian tension, disciplinarian, a Saint Veronica and a terrible cook. Or young, cherubic R.L. (Laramie Eppler), trusting of Jack and doesn’t treat his older brother as a competitor. The two, with the neighourhood boys, play like they want to win Darwin Awards. They add subtle humour to the film’s spiritual and philosophical film, mixed with both a childhood and an inarticulate yet poetically working-class experience.
This voluminous film turns its audience into lucid viewers, observant of its every detail as well as making us ask why Jack doesn’t talk to his wife or father about these issues, why in such a big house would the three sons room together or why the youngest son is treated like a prop. Devoid of obvious musical cues or other director tricks, these stories are intertwined, devastating moments seamlessly mixed in with more idyllic ones, letting its audience judge what Jack’s life and inner thoughts are like, if the part about the world’s biological prehistory influences the way we look at the O’Briens as they love and hurt each other, and if the ending provides closure or not. 4.5/5
Related articles
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The Lovers: Malick’s “Badlands”
ph. Warner
My dad thinks he’s cool. He’d tell me about how his dad was too cheap to buy him the disco suits all the other teenagers wore so he had to settle with and rock the white T-shirt and jeans like Martin Sheen in the 1970’s. They showed a Martin Sheen movie on TV in the Philippines, the actor strutting down a back street, squinting his way into nonchalant cool. His working-class anti-fashion fitting his body properly like it only does with the young. I didn’t know back then that Dad was introducing me to one of the most revered auteurs of all time, tackling a subject I shouldn’t be watching. I’m not sure he knew neither. His hair’s as long and parts the same way like my dad too.
Matt Zoller Seitz, in a video essay about Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven, said that it was ‘like the greatest novel James M. Cain never wrote.’ Those words seem more fitting with his earlier film Badlands, with Kit as a good old boy who has his own set of ethics that makes sense even in its contradictions. Sheen, harking back to James Dean, presents a different, naturalistic version of old-school. He’s masculine in his rebellion while childlike in thinking over the rules and consequences of his crimes. He arbitrarily knows when to stop playing and doesn’t feel remorse about being caught.
If Kit, in his simplicity, is consistent, Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) is the opposite and constantly changes. Although she’s never convinced me as an infantile 15-year-old, she’ not so mature nor womanly neither. We’d think that by the time they run away, she’d ditch her Southern princess behaviour, but instead of a linear evolution, her outlook has different waves. Sometimes she’d be like his female counterpart or wear a bandanna on her head, looking like a 1950’s housewife. At other times she’s a stubborn doll, enacting her unrefined yet legitimate rebellion against Kit.
I didn’t realize that a Malick film was used as sartorial inspiration, but it’s genius. This is also his most narrative film so far. There’s the traditional landscape imagery, using more textures and colour palettes than his other, later films do. But nonetheless the two young rebels stand out within the backgrounds as well the exciting shoot-up scenes that most crime films would have. Badlands is showing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox at June 14 at 9:30 PM as part of the venue’s retrospective on the director.
Related articles
- Opening Shots: Badlands (blogs.suntimes.com)
The Lovers “The New World”
ph. Warner
Mother, where do you live? In the sky, the clouds, the sea. Give me a sign.
We rise, we rise. I’m afraid of myself. A god he seems to me.
What else is life but being near you? Do they suspect? Oh, to be given to you into me.
I will be faithful to you. True. Two no more. One. One. I am. I am.
Age of Innocence: “Super 8”
This post is not really about Super 8 – my review will be coming out on Anomalous Material this weekend. This is more about its well-crafted first full length trailer. I’d argue that it’s one of the two best trailers of the year because it obfuscates the plot so well. Brad Brevet posted the second trailer for the film yesterday, but I still like the first one better. And somebody probably already did what I’m doing now, but what the hey. Above is an image of the good old days, recorded, imagined, not fully realized.
This movie is about a group of children and as these movies go, these children will have to lose their innocence in the course of this story. But those gears are starting to turn already, the symbiosis of adulthood around them. The kids are making a film using a titular super 8, and in it they’re dressed like adults, talking like adults. They think their stories are boring and thus are working on this movie with a conceived notion that fiction is the land of grown-ups. Above is the film’s protagonist, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), dressed up as an Air Force cadet.
And this is where I wonder what decade we’re in, although I guess I can read a synopsis, right? Nonetheless, first time actress Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), looking like a child version of Grace Kelly, still throws me off, making me think that this movie was set in the Roswell years. These hordes of people dress like they’re a generation younger. And are they coming in or going out?
Joe has an unbelievable faith in strangers.
Speaking of this horde, the groovy woman in the centre is one half of Aly & AJ and the long-haired guy on the right is “7th Heaven” alum David Gallagher. Like their younger counterparts, these former child singers/actors grow up so fast.
Another cameo, that microscopic woman behind Joe’s father Jackson (Kyle Chandler) is played by Dale Dickey.
A symbolic destruction of an American institution.
Shattering innocence.
Destruction inadvertently makes people cross borders.
The film’s main plot point happens in the fringes.
A close-up of a black man, the most difficult screen cap to get.
The handwriting is mostly childlike, as expected.
An American family is portrayed.
A broken family comes together.
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Help Me I’m Poor: Bridesmaids
Despite protagonist Annie’s (Kristen Wiig) misfortunes, Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids, however, gets us to crush on Chris O’Dowd, who plays Officer Rhodes, the guy who stops Annie on the highway because she’s talking to herself while driving. Eventually warming up romantically to Annie, he has a few things going against him. First, he’s ‘schlub perfect,’ but we won’t take that against him. Second, he tries to fix her. He wants her to bake again even if she’s not ready to, and it’s totally his fault why she runs away. Lastly, his competition is Jon Hamm, playing Annie’s eff buddy Ted, an irresistible figure despite the funny sex faces and the rich boy narcissism.
Bridesmaids also shows how the longest relationships are the ones that are hardest to keep. Annie has a picture of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) when they were still younger and more awkward but now they’re older, more beautiful and changing too quickly for the former. It’s always the childhood friend who moves to a different, ‘better’ city – Lillian moves from Milwaukee to Chicago, closer to her fiancée’s work, which means oh my god she’s getting married and Annie’s the de facto maid of honour! Lillian also or gets richer, better friends. And of course, when the screenwriter gods (Wiig and Annie Mumolo) giveth they also taketh away, the fortunate new best friend becoming a target of jealousy by Annie whose relationships etc. start slipping away. Which make it, especially the pacing, feel like the first scenes of Kingpin, one misery dryly piled on top of another, but it’s a bit depressing this time around.
Critics have compared Bridesmaids to producer Judd Apatow‘s work, but there are closer similarities to recent Saturday Night Live sketches, those scenes making Anne question her long friendship with Lillian. Annie and Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s new rich best friend, have a contest on who gets the last, most heartfelt word in Lillian’s engagement party like that sketch that spawned Will Forte’s racist character. Annie and Helen playing tennis together reminds me of the women’s sports events sketch. Their competition and enmity also reminded me of the Wiig-Poehler sketch with the little hats. The girls literally messing up Lillian’s Lady Juju dress? Jamie Lee Curtis. For some reason, Wiig’s changing voice at certain times within the movie is more digestible than when she does in on her show. It made me and everyone else in the theatre laugh. Maybe it’s the costumes, or how she acts human for 51% of the time. And it’s actually a relief to hear her say the f-word or the c-word that really get Annie in trouble, as it would if it came out of anyone.
There’s also a lot of implied money talk in the film. Unless you do it in a courthouse, marriages are never cheap, and the disasters that occur in Lillian’s wedding have some gravity because the things that her dad pays for might get gloriously ruined mostly by Annie. She takes the bridesmaids to a hole in the wall Brazilian joint before the dress fittings. She gets drunk and drugged on the women’s way to a planned bachelorette party in Vegas. Helen’s lavish, Parisian-themed real bachelorette party for Lillian intimidates Annie, in which we all become her, screaming our lungs out especially because everyone else encourages and praises Helen’s excesses. ‘This is the best bridal shower I’ve ever been to.’ Really?
Which is strange because I don’t recall what the main female characters do for a living. Three of the bridesmaids (Byrne, Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey) are housewives suffering under husbands and mostly male children, Lillian on her way to becoming the fourth housewife in that new circle of friends. Annie open a bake shop and goes bankrupt – her shop ‘Cake Baby’ repeatedly vandalised as ‘C-ke Baby’ and ‘C-ck Baby’ as a male rape of female-initiated capitalism, and I’m the douche who though about and wrote that. And for scenes in the movie, she’s stuck behind the jewellery counter, a precarious job for her because her cynicism scares couples and teenagers away. The bridesmaids (Melissa McCarthy) look at this wedding as a way to escape, while Annie disagrees with this viewpoint. It’s one of the latent disconnects that she finds between her and Lillian. As comedies go, she has to patch up things with Helen first before fixing things with Lillian, which includes the latter’s wedding, even if the characters themselves aren’t fully mended.
All in all, a great supporting cast including Matt Lucas as Annie’s one of annoying roommates. 3.5/5
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Black Masks: Lee’s Malcolm X
ph. Warner
Disgusting Muslim terrorist Malcolm X (Denzel Washington) was once Malcolm ‘Red’ Little, actor. He was Bogart to Shorty’s (Spike Lee) Cagney, the two occasionally switching roles. He’s also Burt Lancaster to a pure woman’s Deborah Kerr.
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“Have you ever met one white man who wasn’t evil?” Yes, Sophia (Kate Vernon) was bitchy to Molly Ringwald, but evil? I’ve gone both ways on whether Malcolm X depicts white people as evil. Sophia loves Malcolm because he gives her freedom, but yes, she does treat him like a pet while he waits for their relationship to self-destruct. Although, in lame-evoking Frantz Fanon, we look at the outer ugliness of the ‘black man’ instead of the inner ugliness of the ‘white woman’ seducing him, intentionally or otherwise. ‘Inhuman’ as a word fits better, the child services officer behaving out of hearsay, but with no desire to see Malcolm and his siblings stay together or have a decent home. Speaking of decent home, Sophia marries a white man for money, these white persons as much slaves as their black counterparts.
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This scene is everything, their anger beautifully clashing like the third act of a Puccini opera.
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I first saw this for the Islam section of our Grade 11 World Religions class. The film, Lee’s direction and Washington’ performance to me was the Angry Black Man, pushing eggs in front on the white sailor’s face on the train (in his mind anyway), reciting inflammatory sermons against the white devil, insulting the white beatnik in the university he is giving a speech to. That scene, by the way, can be a subtle and possibly inadvertent reference to “King Lear,” the beatnik’s question as Lear’s search for validation while Malcolm, as a dissenting Cordelia, gives her the painful answer she needs. Nonetheless he changes with his separation from the Nation of Islam, removing racism from his mind.
Many things have happened between then and now, including a “Mad Men” episode where those characters don’t even bat an eye at this influential man’s death. This rewatch gives the man, the film and those behind it more dimension. We’re not supposed to like him in those ugly moments, pondering, say, that young woman whom Malcolm brushes aside, her face lingering towards the camera for one more second to see the slow emotional damage he might have done to her. But there’s also Washington’s youthful grin while he’s around Sophia, working the train or when he’s learning something new. His narration like a man reaching enlightenment even when remembering Malcolm’s painful memories. Hesitating to raise his voice in times of conflict. That’s also Lee’s purpose in the epilogue. Yes, the director is comparing himself with his subject, showing the world that he, just like Mr. X, isn’t always angry. Lee shows Mr. X smiling, laughing and becoming, to more people around him, a compassionate person.
Stupid Post! Monster-in-Law
ph. New Line
Girl (Jennifer Lopez) meets guy, guy’s mother Viola (Jane Fonda) hates girl, Fonda plays a character less human than the one she played in Barbarella, piece of crap. At least Lopez has enough sense of humour to let the other characters make fun of her figure. And the slapstick wasn’t that bad. I don’t know what I had in me to watch Monster-in-Law, but I blame Fonda, wanting to be a latent best actress completist and all. No, obviously this movie didn’t have awards I’ve heard of, but it’s…fulfilling to see how the mighty have fallen. Although the film has competent cinematography, despite Fonda being mercilessly lit. I do want to pitch a Fonda movie where she, Gloria Steinem and Stephen Colbert cook for feminists. Ninety minutes of it.
Oh hai, Duck Philips, playing the most self-aware asshole in this film. And yes, that title is arbitrary. Also, Will Arnett is in this movie, his character apparently into college age chicks.
My real purpose for writing this post is o upload a picture of Adam Scott wearing women’s clothing. He’s one half of the only family she has in a film full of estranged characters. He doesn’t play his gay character stereotypically, as expected of the versatile character actor. In the first scene, Lopez’ character tells him that he’s allowed to rummage through her drawers while she’s away. If any of my real female friends tells that same joke, I will cut them. The end!
Cold Hot: Constant Gardener
‘How’s…Gloria?’
ph. Focus
He says Gloria’s fine then asks Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) about Tessa (Rachel Weisz), which means he’s nervous but we won’t find that out why yet.
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‘That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. You have to take responsibility. You are being paid to apologise for this pathetic country of Britain, and he can explain to us why we burned our diplomatic credentials and why, why we’re killing, you know, thousands of innocent people…just for-just for some barrels of oil…and a photo opportunity on the White House lawn. Why?’ And more journalists walk out.
Not to take away from Weisz’ Oscar winning performance, but if this was the audition piece, Kate Winslet would have gotten a closer chance in becoming Tessa. I also wanna find out how her campaign went, seeing that one of Weisz’ competitors is Michelle Williams for Brokeback Mountain, another Focus Features release. Yes I’m the last gay person to see the latter film so of course I can’t compare the two performances, but I wonder if Focus went full engine on Brokeback or if they focused on getting acting wins in their other movies while paying more attention to getting picture and directing wins for Ang Lee.
And no matter, Tessa and Justin will make up eventually.
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I love you.
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Every other movie reminds me of every other movie. Like how Fernando Meirelles‘ The Constant Gardener differentiates some of the Britain scenes and the African scenes by showing the former with a grayish blue tint and the latter with yellow, just like Traffic did. But this movie does it better, more crisp, despite the shaky cam. And it doesn’t do the colours too often.
Or how the paid assassins riding into the village like apocalyptic horsemen, like the raid scene in The Searchers, but this time the focus is on the victims and not the horsemen. Like the John Ford film, white characters are mixed in with the natives but this time it’s paid African militia men killing their own kind, hoping to get Justin with them.
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Okinawa Assault 