Dogtooth
In this contemporary yet arguably obtuse adaptation of Plato’s “The Myth of the Cave,” an allegory of the stubborn insularity of totalitarian regimes or a depiction of terrible parenting, Dogtooth is set on a large house on an exurb in Greece where a family man wants his wife and children, the latter in their twenties, never to leave the house and to know anything about the outside world. Why do I never get interested or hooked in the first part of the films I’ve been watching recently? Sometimes the camera doesn’t show the characters’ heads, frustratingly obscuring them in long takes. I wasn’t even fully interested when the father brings Christina, a security guard, to his house to have sex with her son without intimacy, their bodies connected but separate. Maybe I answered my question there.
The parents misinform their children of the definitions and functions of objects associated with the outside world. For example ‘sea‘ is an armchair, ‘excursion’ is a floor material and that airplanes fall out of the sky into their garden.
For some reason, model airplanes mark the relatively exciting parts of the film, as the older sister Bruce – she names herself – steals an airplane from her brother and throws it out towards the gate. The first airplane incident creates a chain of accusations and violence. She accuses him of stealing the plane. In the next scene, she slices her brother’s arm. Next scene, Father slaps her. Bruce becomes the least favourite, having the least stickers, being hit in the head again by the VHS tapes she has watched. He inflicts lesser forms of abuse to the other members of the family, telling them to walk and bark like dogs in case a dangerous cat intrudes their home.
ph. Cinemania
The father also hits Christina, who smuggles the tapes to Bruce, with a VCR player even if she’s an outsider. Violence in this film isn’t set up with intensity nor is spoonfed, happens surprisingly after calm dialogue, an animalistic release from the children who are raised by it. Other critics have assumed that the parents have secluded the children for protective purposes, but ironically, the most violent and sexually perverse encounters to ever occur to a child happens in their own home. That’s true in this film, and it would be less groundbreaking without showing this damaging effect of seclusion to both the children and parents.
In order to get the plane back, the son has to ask his father to drive the car outside the gate so that the latter can pick it off the ground. Here we have two different versions of maleness, the father obviously victorious over the son he has emasculated. The son’s practically a grown man but going outside is naturally verboten to him. He has the most stickers but he’s starting to lose contests. His arranged sexual encounters with Christina and Bruce – because eventually they can’t trust outsiders anymore – doesn’t have any intensity. He even has reservations on his second time having sex with Christina. It’s also arguable that the father is emasculated, carefully peeling off the labels of the water bottles he brings home, bloodying himself up when he discovers that a cat has intruded his home or mouthing words to his wife when they’re arguing. He’s so committed into his lies that he doesn’t break character both with or without his family’s presence.
Speaking of the differences between family members, the film includes a contest between the children on who gets a plane that falls out of the sky. The son almost gets it until Bruce trips him, grabs the toy and makes it to the finish line and doesn’t get punished for cheating. Bruce is the oddest out of these oddballs, and possibly the one who’s most experienced with the outside world. After having sex with her brother, she threatens him of killing his clan, as if quoting from a movie. The parents have also raised these children with competition, inevitably raising a child who years for freedom even if she’s never experienced it.
This film has been nominated for the Best Foreign Picture by the Academy in 2010. We’re going to win.
Related Articles
- Dogtooth: Disturbing dark comedy with a bite (theglobeandmail.com)
Animal Kingdom
J or Josh Cody’s (introducing James Frecheville) mother OD’s beside him. He calls maternal grandmother Janine (Jacki Weaver), her little, meek voice telling him to move in with her and her sons, family man Barry Brown (Joel Edgerton), ‘don’t call me uncle’ Darren Cody (Luke Ford) – only two years older than J, and fast-moving shirtless Craig. These men are bank robbers. No biggie.
I assumed toughness from these men, and they do exude that on scene and through grainy footage screenshots of them sporting balaclavas and guns. What destroys their bravado is the decline of the bank robbers, as it goes in many films of the same genre. J also confides that they have fear and feel a familial dread, and looking at the brothers supports that assessment. Barry for example looks like he’s holding in a sigh before talking to the detectives staking out near his front door. Or Craig struggling while play fighting on the couch. Or Darren unable to interfere while someone murders a girl in front of him. There is a little part of me that doubts that fear because the narration technically filters our understand of the characters. However, at least it directs into looking at these men’s eyes at quiet moments within the film.
ph. CinemaBlend
Then the big brother Andrew ‘Pope,’ (Ben Mendelsohn) pops out of hiding. Pervy and destructive even towards his family, he sets off the crucial events within the film. Pope’s to blame for making things worse – I see it, J sees it, but it’s never fully established whether the other characters do too.
In his misdeeds, the audience watches out for two characters. There’s Janine who seems complicit and J, whose estrangement from the family makes him wired differently from them. He can either be part of the fold or snitch to a detective (unrecognizable Guy Pearce). Their performances are underacted, naturalistic. Weaver as Janine surprises by ordering a hit, slyly dangling the reasons why that hit is beneficial to her henchmen while still keeping her motherly cool. Frecheville as J starts out as a silent wallflower but shines in a scene by himself and in another when he maturely wards off Janine’s empty promises of comfort.
However, what I like best about Animal Kingdom is how it treats these subjects and characters with deft and sympathy, while others could have seen them – watching game shows, smoking indoors, going at each other – as crass human beings.
Related Articles
- Movie review: ‘Animal Kingdom’ a wild thriller (sfgate.com)
- Dan Persons: Mighty Movie Podcast: David Michod on Animal Kingdom (huffingtonpost.com)
TIFF: Modra
Shot in digital and under natural light, Ingrid Veringer makes her directorial debut with MODRA. Protagonist Lina breaks up with her boyfriend Tyler. Her classmate Laco calls to invite her to a movie and she instead ends up inviting him to Modra, Slovakia, her family’s home town. It’s not the most original film in visual terms – a shot of the Toronto skyline indicating that the film begins in…Toronto, low angle shots looking up a tree indicating an idyllic summer afternoon. Yes, I’m nitpicking. What also distracts me are the portrait close-ups of Lina’s family members with sound from the scene they cut away from, taking away from the scenes’ continuity. I do like the way the film photographs Modra, a clump of red roofs in between a green field, in many scenes in the point of view of the summer couple.
ph. TIFF
The impressionistic performances of the characters redeems this film greatly, focusing on the two North American teenagers, nonchalant yet have envy-inducing independence. Lina’s a girl who wears unflattering empire waist dresses yet sings like Feist, Laco’s agile, awkward, not loquacious but a gentle soul. Like teenagers, the couple have unassuming exteriors and hidden anger and sadness that only comes out in economical taps. I also like how Lina is mature enough to deal with family secrets that involves her separation from her home country. Lina and Laco also accept that permanence can’t exist, and whatever happens, they see the trip as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 3/5.
Related Articles
- AUDIO: Modra’s family ties (cbc.ca)
TIFF: Peep World
The narrator (Lewis Black) talks about a large family sitting on a table to celebrate their paterfamilias’ (Ron Rifkin) seventieth birthday, describing every one of the father’s children as a series of mistakes. The civility and silence break when the unemployed singer/actress/dancer Cheri (Sarah Silverman) bellows at her younger, successful brother Nathan for writing a novel, also named Peep World, too accurate for her taste. This is best scene of the film, although the scene isn’t finished.
ph. TIFF
The body of the film is a flashback eighteen hours before this dinner, unsurprisingly revealing this fictional book’s secrets and more. Jack (Michael C. Hall) has a wife (Judy Greer) who faintly swears at him during her sleep, Joel’s (Rainn Wilson)’s big SUV breaks down in the middle of nowhere, Peep World the film is filming in front of Cheri’s home and Nathan is very condescending to his PR agent (Kate Mara). Every sibling has a sexual Achilles’ heel, all used for effective comic relief.
This film also has sincere moments, like the falling out when Jack’s wife finds out he frequents an adult theatre, a scene both well-shot and well blocked. The film eventually heads to the restaurant where cruelty, revelations of decades of hurt feelings and comic reliefs are the main dishes. The cast elevates this funny film, also including Taraji P. Henson who delivers the film’s best line and Geoffrey Arend, the luckiest man on earth. This is lowbrow entertainment at its classiest and best. Rating – 3/5.
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Laurel Canyon
ph. Focus
Laurel Canyon, the perfect boring couple, Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex (Kate Beckinsale) talk at each other and sometimes lie to each other. Sam has to move back to the titular Laurel Canyon to practice psychiatry in a great hospital there, and Alex comes with to finish her dissertation. temporary bunking with Sam’s mother Jane (Frances McDormand) and her lover Ian (Alessandro Nivola), the environment proves to hinder work and shake up relationships.
Hey! Catherine Hardwicke and Wally Pfister helped make this movie.
It’s funny that 60% of the major players in this film are British but make for more convincing Californians than Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska. And that bale and Nivola could have changed roles but the American Nivola does fit the hairy-chested, childlike Chris Martin-eqsue role better.
Alex is such a complex character that Cholodenko has to justify the script’s choices within and around her. When she gets invited to join Jane’s group, Jane explains that she can judge Jane’s work because common sense drives popular music, thus anyone can judge it. When Sam pours his heart out to Sara, it follows with a scene when Alex misunderstands everything he’s been saying to her. A question is often followed by an answer, thankfully those answers aren’t too expository.
And oh Lord, Kate Beckinsale. I’ll always love her for her deadpan fierceness, if that exists, in The Last Days of Disco. Her MUBI profile doesn’t show how derided she is after The Aviator. As the soft-spoken Alex, her retreat with Sam lets her go through a sexual awakening at the same time as Sam, but hers is more intense, later on explaining that she’s never experienced fucking up. Within the film, she goes from routine lovemaking to romantic desire. It’s sad that they didn’t go through the full experience together. And she smokes a joint like a true beginner. I miss this girl.
Would it be fair to say that Cholodenko almost perfectly encapsulates the white experience? She doesn’t have the Holofcener/Fey guilt thing, but Cholodenko puts the straight-laced and the wild ones within the same square inch, or in this case, the same family. Most of the movie shows Sam and Jane treat each other passive aggressively until the big explosive scene in the denouement, which air some raw emotions out.
And again, time to download me some Mercury Rev.
Despicable Me
ph. Universal
Before I talk about the likes and dislikes about the movie, I just wanna say that Despicable Me is in between good Avatar and headache-inducing Alice in Wonderland in the spectrum of 3D films. If there’s any part of a 3D movie when I take off my glasses and don’t see anything different from watching the movie with or without the glasses, we have a little problem. I do like he sleek designof some interior/exterior spaces of the film, however.
Here, however, is the structural conundrum about Despicable Me. The first scenes are boring. I didn’t really wanna see our anti-hero Gru (Steve Carell) freeze-ray his way into getting a latte. However, I can’t think of away to cut any of them because if I do, I won’t have enough background on the characters. Basically, Gru, a worn-down villain, adopts three girls to infiltrate another villain’s lair. These tedious introductions help make the children sympathetic and make Gru’s 180 much more surprising and delightful.
Gru’s Eastern bloc accent is stage-y yet not distracting. The children even make fun of it to show him how incompetent he is at being a villain. There are also flashbacks within the film showing Gru’s childhood when his mother (Julie Andrews) shrugs off his little achievements. Most people with terrible childhoods like Gru’s have shortsighted reasons for having or adopting kids and they treat their children as terribly as they have been treated. However, Gru turns out to become a perfect parent. Maybe it’s because Gru, like many adult protagonists in animated films, are children in adult bodies who is looking for playmates. Maybe it’s because the girls are kinda bratty and sarcastic and they’re not the kind of children you lie to or mess with.
Nonetheless, it’s also very funny. It takes a while for the movie to bring on the laughs, but it’s worth the wait. This movie also has the greatest Godfather parody scene in recent memory, and there are funnier parts of the film than that.
Marie Antoinette
ph. Pathe
In between watching movies from the Wright Stuff series and watching Scott Pilgrim, I watched another hipster romance movie – Marie Antoinette. Before I get to the meat of this post, I just wanna say that I have to discuss the traces of what I have read or heard about the woman whose life this movie is depicting, and how true this movie is to the life of said murdered queen – if I used the word executed it means she deserved it, which she partly didn’t. Some people believe that the dead are fair game, but then we’re talking about one of the most slandered women in history, so every time Coppola or the film trips, we deduct a point.
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I remember the pre-blogging glory days of trying to defend this movie while calling out the royalists who trolled the Marie Antoinette forum on iMDb. That was where I read someone who compared the movie to a series of paintings. And probably where I read someone mistake Marie Antoinette’s (Kirsten Dunst) alleged Swedish boy toy Count Axel von Fersen (Jamie Dornan) as Napoleon. And/or make a comparison between Madame du Barry (Asia Argento) as a Disney evil queen – she did NOT look like that nor act like she was depicted in the film, by the way. There are other directors who make a collage of pop culture references in their work. Those anonymous readings, however, show that Coppola isn’t able to mold those separate images and/or incorporate them into what should be a believable and seamless biopic. I don’t fully believe that it would have been a better decision to invent her own images of these people instead recycling old/different/inaccurate ones, but I’d imagine there’s some who watched this movie who would choose the former over the latter.The movie has always felt like ‘This is what I imagine her life to be,’ which has driven a lot of history nuts crazy.
Need to remind you guys that Coppola’s direction of the character Marie Antoinette evoked Paris Hilton. And being inundated by that comparison by the media, oh my God. Which leads us to Coppola’s apparent aim of turning Marie Antoinette’s story as a satire of the nepotism – biting the hand – and decadence of the government and celebrity culture of Bush-era US. Which is great, but why can’t Marie Antoinette simply be Marie Antoinette?
And, exhale.
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What is different between 18th century Versailles and 21st century America is the treatment of children’s sexuality. Adults both blue and red-blooded obsessed over Marie Antoinette as a sexual being. It’s tragic how her mother, Maria Theresa (Marianne Faithful) has fought for and keep the crown of the Holy Roman Empire as a woman and became the most powerful woman in Europe after Catherine the Great, only for her daughter to be trampled so easily. Coppola gets it right in this movie by actually showing the ‘people of France’s’ real problem with Marie Antoinette – that it dragged on before she was able to produce an heir. And how full the operating room was when Marie gave birth to, unfortunately, Therese. Also consider the hypocrisy of spying on adolescents’ bedroom action and the Christian notion of not talking about sex and not teaching the poor couple how to have sex.
Marie eventually becomes corrupted by this oversexualized society, having knowledge of her grandfather-in-law King Louis XIV’s (Rip Torn) affair with Du Barry. Marie then derides this fake aristocrat. In Coppola’s film, she unknowingly she becomes just like Du Barry, carrying out her own affair with the Swede.
Today, a 14 year old’s responsibility is his or her homework and some household chore. Marie, turning 14 when she did, has had a quick transition between childhood and adulthood, just like that insufficient carriage ride to the French border. At least two years into adulthood in that day’s standards, she has a responsibility that reminds her that she is still a second class citizen under Salic law. No wonder, as Coppola shows in the film, Marie regresses.
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Flaw – The scene when Marie walks with Austrian Ambassador Mercy (Steve Coogan) and Therese in the gardens. The Princess du Lamballe (Mary Nighy) runs to the three and informs them of the Austrian Empress’s death. How did the Austrian ambassador not know that first?
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In Roger Ebert‘s review of this film, his second point called Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette as ‘pitch-perfect casting.’ It’s not Interview with a Vampire, or to compare it to the other performances that year, she’s no Penelope Cruz. It’s wonderful watching Dunst’s face react to her husband King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) wolf down his food, or how her face reaches us through that infamous zoom out, saying a lot while standing still. Having to go across the palace to a private room where she could cry or fawn – a measured release of emotion from one place to another. Worn down after the deaths in her family. Her poised diplomatic voice as she talks to her husband’s cabinet and even to her own brother, the Holy Roman Emperor (Danny Huston). As some blog I used to read has said in defense of her performance, Dunst was obedient to Coppola’s vision.
Feminism and Autumn Sonata
ph. Criterion
If it was only as instinctual as Helene, a disabled young woman, calling out for her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman). But Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata is about Helene’s sister Eva (Liv Ullmann), who sees an opportunity in seeing Charlotte again and she has a lot to say. What drives Bergman’s characters are emotion and memory, and therefore the possible social and political ideologies behind them get more ambiguous.
In a scene where Eva takes Charlotte to her room, we find out that she is and can be beautiful, sorrowful, vain, demanding, impatient and cruel, and she is all those things throughout the film. Eva, however, takes on her mother’s attributes in parts of the film, especially when she feels in control of the situation.
What makes the film just as ambiguous, then is how similar they are despite their different appearances and chosen paths.
I wanted to discuss its political interpretation because of a certain shocker spoiler. We can’t fully talk about artistic intentions here, but when a movie, a script or a book brings up a learned woman’s stance supporting abortion, she ends up looking like a babbling shrew. I suppose my discomfort comes from the later texts that had a less complex interpretation of the issue. In this movie, its hard to map out what it means for Eva to rid of a child under Charlotte’s orders, that Charlotte’s taking away Eva’s right to become a mother, that it is never explicitly said whether Charlotte is pro-choice, when the operation is allegedly forced, or if the child is presumable conceived out-of-wedlock.
By the end of the film, Eva’s husband seems to have questioned his unadulterated worship towards her. Watching and listening in the hall whether Eva is alone or with Charlotte, he’s the stand-in for the movie’s audience. We’re asking questions too, which is another thing I love about this movie.
Eastern Promises
I know this Slavic girl in college whom I like making fun of behind her back. I don’t know if it’s more insulting that everyone thought she was stupid or that I didn’t see her as stupid but instead, a person with a tragically clinical view of academia. We had a conversation on the bus once about David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, a movie that just came out at the TIFF 2007 and the first movie from that crop to be released in theatres. She said the rapes made her uncomfortable, for reasons more basic than what I can deduce from other things I know about her. Once in a while she reveals a point of vulnerability and closes back up again, in a way telling me either that I’ll never find out her secret or that she doesn’t have a wound in the first place.
—
ph. Focus
Roger Ebert and Carina Chocano separately compared this movie to The Godfather, and they’re right in that both movies are about the second generation of gangsters and not the first, a typical focus point in post-classical gangster films. It’s been said about The Godfather that it’s about the sons or the daughters paying for their father’s sins, despite of how much the parents try to shield them, or how much the children try to legitimize themselves, and no matter how much the latter presents themselves as products of nurture, or society, instead of nature, of family. In Eastern Promises, however, the children ‘stray from the path I’ve set out for [them],’ as the patriarch Semyon says in dismay. The half-English Anna Ivanova (Naomi Watts) will not adopt her Uncle Stefan’s negrophobic, anti-miscegenation viewpoints. Semyon’s son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel) is a hotheaded SPOILER, closeted homosexual, doing away with those who whisper that truth. Kirill’s driver/undertaker Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) is a clawing his way to the top of the Russian mafia. The movie never lets us conclusively know how their different rebellions will help or hinder their characters, especially with Nikolai and his double life.
Speaking of double lives, the homoeroticism in the film, as shown specifically through Nikolai makes me think that Kirill couldn’t help it. Cronenberg depicts the gangster lifestyle itself as homoerotic. Kirill orders Nikolai to have sex with one of the prostitutes to prove his heterosexuality. The elders examine Nikolai and his symbolic tattoos, standing in front of them wearing only his underwear. The bathhouse death match. Kirill and Nikolai’s faces so close to each other, reminiscent of Viggo’s closeness to William Hurt in Cronenberg’s earlier work A History of Violence. I wonder if Nikolai is bisexual, or using himself to get to Kirill’s confidence, or if it’s compassion bursting through the hard surface he has to keep up for his job. It’s a fragmented interpretation of the character that doesn’t answer all the questions, and that actually makes him a more memorable character.
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Yes, the movie had rapes and babies and a death match at the bathhouse, but there’s something anticlimactic about the movie, especially in the film’s denouement. And most of this is gonna sound like I’m shitting on Kirill/Vincent Cassel here. As a character who’s behind Semyon’s shadow, he’d be resentful and would hesitate in acting out his father’s orders. What does it say about me if I’m unconvinced that Kirill wouldn’t readily do to the baby Christine what Semyon has told him to do, or that I expected Christine to have a harder time than she did? Or that the sexual tension between Nikolai and Anna should have been left alone where it was before the last scenes? Or that I expected absolute evil from Nikolai?
Sling Blade
ph. Miramax
The male characters in the Southern small-town setting of Sling Blade are different yet the same. Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) is a slow-witted man who’s out from the ‘nervous hospital’ after being there for twenty-five years. His friend Frank Wheatley (Lucas Black) is just a boy – he reads books but we never see him go to school in most of the film. Their friend Vaughn is an owner of a stable dollar store, his homosexuality an open secret to the small community that is ambivalent in accepting him. Frank’s mother’s boyfriend Doyle (Dwight Yoakam) is an abusive alcoholic who has aspirations in the music business.
Frank’s mother defends Doyle by saying that ‘he’s had a hard life,’ a statement that applies to all four guys. Specifically, in the first three examples, they have shitty father figures. With the ‘same difference’ that these four guys have, the film paints a social pattern. This movie is only a public service announcement for those who will see most movies that way. What separates this fictional community from lesser movies is that it doesn’t ask for outside help and takes care of its own problems.
Or that Thornton, also the movie’s director, didn’t choose to portray the plot points by changing the tone of the movie through non-diagetic music or heavy editing. What happens in the movie gets normalized through long takes, etc. It’s strange when Karl and Frank talk about something that is bound to happen again. I’m not sure if that prepares me as an audience. What happens, nonetheless, is still shocking when I finally see it.
The performances of the two leads, Thornton and Black, are an acquired taste, arguably dated, but I got used to them eventually. For Thornton’s Karl, there’s mannerisms, check. Catch phrase, check. And we’ve had a lot of ‘special’ male characters in that decade. Forrest Gump, Leo in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Geoffrey Rush in Shine. With any character like Karl, it takes a lot of commitment to be entrenched in a character like that and it’s hard to judge choices like his. And Black at first seems less animated for an abused child, but the one scene in the climax proved that I spoke against him too early. He was just getting warmed up.
Gone Baby Gone and Genre
ph. Miramax
Last Saturday, TCM was showing “The Searchers,” the king of all westerns that I can’t blog about for my own neurotic reasons. Fortunately I can tie it into a movie that was on Bravo Canada the night/morning after – Gone Baby Gone. It did come out in a year that overflowed with proper Western films. And both have missing children and gun-toting!
So is Gone Baby Gone a western? It’s not a noir because there are hardly if ever any child abductions in that genre. Noir’s a very adult genre, focusing on an underworld that only seeps into the domestic areas in one or two instances. Dorchester’s both an underbelly and a residential neighborhood, on the other than there’s a separation between those two worlds that the precedent in both genres show. And there’s not enough shadow in the movie. Conversely, There has been a school of thought that believes that the 1970’s urban landscape, particularly New York City, was the new frontier (There’s also a documentary about the post-1967 depiction of police in cinema which I can’t find that talks about this too. It was on AMC.). Our hero Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) introduces the film by narrating about what that the people of Dorchester believe in, patriotism and family values, just like the old West. Dorchester in the 2000’s is a multicultural environment that’s a bit like the West. The film also has two bar fight scenes that involve guns, another thing it has in common with the genre. Yet it doesn’t have the newness nor the relatively hospitable feel nor the desire for purgation that the Western genre evokes. “It’s the things that you don’t choose that make you who you are, ” Patrick says, and he continues with “I’ve lived in this block my whole life, most of these people have.” The neighborhood can either only not change or decay, and we can say the same about its inhabitants.
And it’s easy enough to compare the characters of Gone Baby Gone‘s with that of “The Searchers.” Patrick is the Martin Pawley, our dutiful moral compass. Both are hybrid characters – they are despised in one society and is a stranger to another. Both are men infiltrating a seedy environment, believe in an idealized world with order, and can pistol-whip their enemies even though they don’t look it. Patrick’s more level-headed than Martin, but both are equally capable of making tactical mistakes with dangerous strangers. And Patrick’s more hesitant in killing criminals than Martin is.
His girlfriend Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) is the domestic, moral yet brainwashed Laurie Jorgensen. Both represent the mainstream morality of their time. Both are equally prone to saying ruthlessly horrific things about the other characters and unhesitatingly condemn to those whom they think are beneath them. But obviously, Laurie will never jump into a quarry to try to save another woman’s child.
Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) is Ethan Edwards, both of whom are psychopaths who have suspicious origins and histories and are constantly abusing their powers under a badge. Both also have skewered worldviews – children might forgive, Mr. Bressant, but they don’t forget. Both also know their enemies like experts. Amanda MacCready is Debbie Edwards, both of whom fit better with those who have abducted them, who fit better in an idealized world that the protagonists are willing to destroy. Their return to their homes are open-ended, at least more so with Amanda’s. And Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman)? Spoiler, but he’s a dop-pel-gang-er!
Helene MacCready (Amy Ryan, nominated for an Academy Award for the role) is a different animal, or at least someone who belongs to the Noir tradition. The scene where she recalls her daughter’s supposed last words has revolting implications. She’s irredeemable. The most horrifying thing about her character is that she’s only capable of promising change in times of crisis. When Patrick restores order for her benefit, she can’t even fake joy for this reunion, not even for the cameras. She leaves her daughter like she does every day, returns to her old, drug addled ways.
Also, both “The Searchers” and Gone Baby Gone tend towards deluded ethics based on wobbly rhetoric. The denouement of Gone Baby Gone, when Patrick finally confronts Amanda’s real kidnapper, he prattles on with a speech about that what’s better for the child is not right for the child. Both Patrick and the kidnapper try to speak on the child’s behalf, a dangerous thing to do. Patrick even speaks like this in front of Angie. In most of the film, I felt that its grit outweighs it sentimentality, but this scene makes both influences present, for better or worse. Both the kidnapper’s words and delivery seem more sane that Patrick’s idealism, or maybe Affleck (director or star) might be misguided during this particular stage of the character.
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Lars just told me that Gone Baby Gone is the last of a series of four books in a series by pulp writer Dennis Lehane. Explains the speeches. And don’t mistake me, I like the movie. I would have loved it would those few scenes.
It’s Like That Friend Who’s…
ph. MGM/UA
…tha asshole. He’s our asshole.
After “How to Train Your Dragon,” last Friday, the Toronto Underground Cinema played “Hot Tub Time Machine.” And I saw it again. And I paid for it. I just wanna share my favourite moments this second time around, and this time I actually have proper screen caps.
Like When Nick Webber-Agnew (Craig Robinson) just word vomits in Russian.
Or Lou’s (Rob Corddry) calm demeanor when he looks up to the thundering sky, deciding that he’s not gonna go back to 2010. Blink and you miss it.
Jon’s (blogless, as far as I know) favourite moment is when Lou tells his son Jacob those three words he never did. As well as Jacob’s response to that.
Look, the lovable Lizzy Caplan joins the party! She plays the younger voice of sanity in “Mean Girls” and she does that here too. She has great chemistry with Adam (John Cusack) never looks too young nor too old in either parts of the space-time continuum.
And there’s been some talk that iMDb is fanboy centric. If that were true, “Hot Tub Time Machine” would have a higher mark.
Martina was talking on the phone with her mother. I joked at how her mother might be scared that she’s watching a movie with two boys. She said that her mother trusts her choice of friends, but retracted that statement after watching the movie. I told them that I spent a voucher to watch this movie the first time and they told me that I wasted that voucher. I hope you guys disagree with them. 😛
How To Train Your Dragon 2D
ph. Dreamworks
The first time I realized I was watching a great movie in “How To Train Your Dragon” is when Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) finally finds his captive dragon, Toothless, for the first time. Toothless is a Night Fury with sleek black surface like a car, puppy cute with large eyes, but skinny little Hiccup is afraid nonetheless. The film shows the dragon up close, its scales individually glinting from some imagined light source. The animators at Dreamworks really got texture and put that into the movie, specifically in the way it worked on the design of the anthropomorphic dragon as well as the fur and the hair that the Viking characters were wearing. To remind you guys, this is in 2D and is just as effective. If only they got fire and clouds and human skin just as perfectly, but you know, uncanny valley.
This ‘close-up’ of the dragon makes it seem like the movie uses not animation but a camera. The first scene breezily floats towards Berk, finds Hiccup, follows him until he runs into the muscular Stoick (Gerard Butler), whom we’ll find out as Hiccup’s father. Then we’re back at learning Hiccup trying to get away from his boss, Gobber (Craig Ferguson). He does and unintentionally makes more trouble for the small town. The films needles in and out of the town in sweeping strokes, in sync with the action happening onscreen. I tried to keep telling myself that it’s only animation, but it makes the audience feel like an expensive epic battle scene with ambitious long takes. The scene is a study of colour too, the peaceful blues of the evening sky and the ocean being fought off by the orange-coloured fire and the brown fur vests and hair.
It also has one of the most rousing musical scores I’ve heard in a while. The funny thing is that the music is a bit militaristic (thankfully with full violins, flutes and some choral work and minimal drums and percussion. I’m thinking I heard bagpipes too, but it might just be because of the distracting Scottish accents). John Powell (Shrek, The Bourne Series) uses the militaristic music in depicting a child, playing with pet dragon, feeling free, discovering something new and human within Toothless. The feelings that the score evokes, the turning point when both Hiccup and Toothless turn doubt into trust. It’s infectious.
Gerry Butler’s also good in this movie too. It’s like Clooney in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Butler immerses himself into the character and his looks don’t get into the way. I can’t wait for time to pass by and for him to get away from hot shitty romantic comedies and get more into parental roles. Baruchel’s voice needs to be less monotone monotone voice, but that’s a little gripe compared to the wonders of the rest of the movie.
And if Stoick asked for the well-being of his son instead of being mad at him for causing trouble and unintentionally releasing all the captive dragons. But not all movie parents are perfect, and letting the dragons go with the village’s food is a pretty bad thing to do. But at least it’s more succinct and more effective than “Avatar.”
p.s. I saw Martina. This is her review that actually explains the plot better than mine.
Reductive Reviews: White Ribbon
ph. SPC/Magnolia
Spoilers ahead.
Six million Jews had to die because a father sexually violated his own daughter? Because a twelve-year-old son of a preacher man had his hands tied to his bedpost for masturbating? Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” and his divisive worldview is putting me on the fence. (The Blu Ray and DVD of this movie just came out. Omar Moore came out with his review, it will be only a matter of time when Nathaniel Rogers’s DVD review will be out. I hope what I say will just be as good as theirs)
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An old man (Ernst Jacobi) narrates the story of a small German town where he used to teach. His rendition of the story, in unproven fragments, might ‘clarify some things that happened in this country.’ I might as well put the bit of historical context that I know that may give to this review. Since the movie brings up national metaphor, the movie, therefore, can’t just stand for itself now.
Germany isn’t a small town. I’m reading Steven Bach’s biography of Leni Riefenstahl, and he paints Germany as this nation of pluralism and there’s an impression that it’s been like that ten years before the time frame of the movie. The country’s a literate, Protestant nation, so anyone had access to any information and opinion in the spectrum. It would possibly be more conservative in the rural areas, but they couldn’t have had a bigger influence on urban politics. What ‘happened in this country,’ in my understanding, was that somebody eliminated diversity and unified the national voice. I feel as if Michael Haneke’s film doesn’t really allow for this difference and therefore misses the bigger picture. If you don’t agree with me on that, at least agree with me that dictatorships don’t all happen because of a country’s citizens. The movie certainly gives that notion that everyone willingly lets someone pull their strings that makes them do horrific crimes.
Besides, Western critics and audiences overuse ‘film as national metaphor’ as the measuring stick in watching foreign films that it’s a bit infuriating that Haneke will actually take that bait and make a movie for that purpose.
However, I can’t say that Haneke’s worldview is totally wrong. No matter what you think of it, he makes his argument as effective in first screening. Individuals have awful pasts, and the contemporary understanding of what’s ‘good’ is to not let past injuries affect us and be nice to other people. Besides, a criminal gets more derision as he reveals either say, a bad upbringing or racial persecution. However, ironically, we’re human.
Cruelty is a virus, in the words of David Edelstein, and its effects can manifest in different ways. First, that the victim will treat their parents’ cruelty as a badge of discipline, proudly handed down like an heirloom. I get the ‘you kids get it easy’ thing, those adults dissociate themselves with the abuse they received. We see that in the movie too, with the typical ‘this hurts me more than it hurts you’ punishments.
The second possibility is that some of the younger characters might forget about what’s been down to them and will do acts of cruelty without knowing its source. The children don’t know what they’re capable of and they’re bettering their parents in the worst way possible. This period piece shows the horrific and hints at its effect. “Code Inconnu,” set in contemporary Europe, shows the same soupcons of cruelty inflicted from one person to the other. “Funny Games” and “Cache” prove how terrible acts are already being performed in the contemporary era. But if the children 1910’s Germany would bring what they brought decades later, who knows what our generation is capable of?
Lastly, why is the teacher as a young man (Christian Friedel) not in on what’s going on?
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I’m probably one of the few people who likes the pacing and narrative arc of the film. Plot point, another plot point, then nothing happens, then another plot point. Coming into the film I was expecting a big denouement but Haneke didn’t give that to his audience. It’s the same thing with history. We, I believe, try to shape a series of events into narrative. The books teach us of a big war and the peace that’s supposed to come after. However, events in any given time are just as horrific, climactic or anticlimactic as the next. Look at the 1970’s, 9/11, G20. In a time of gimmicky endings, the most shocking and refreshing ending is revealing that the movie is simply a documentation of certain events that happen to a person or group. The best narrative arc is no arc.
The acting in the film is marvelous. When the doctor confronts Frau Wagner (Sussana Lothar), she fights back. Any other actress would have said her speech with a tinge of meanness, or would even bellow it out. Haneke’s always been a man of simplicity and lets the actions and words out as fast as it needs to. Lothar, in her performance, tells the truth. The Academy isn’t creative enough to give her an Oscar nomination. If there’s gonna be that abortion of a remake for “Wizard of Oz,” Lothar is a dead-on lookalike of Margaret Hamilton and she should play the Wicked Witch of the West.
Of course, is the cinematography. Roger Ebert suggested that colour would have ruined the movie. I disagreed at first, but then the titular white ribbons wouldn’t have been as menacing. And B-roll has never been so beautiful.
Lastly, I see the same anemic Christmas tree in every German movie I’ve seen (“I Shot My Love“). I don’t know if it’s my decadent superstitious hypocritical Spanish Catholicism is creating this culture clash, but next time, pick a leafy tree. You Germans gotta stop punishing yourselves, that’s the problem all along.
Okinawa Assault 
