the Albany/Boston movie_blogg

I came home from work to my small one-bedroom apartment and cooked a mid-priced porterhouse steak. I coupled it with a handful of Mediterranean salad from a large Tupperware in my fridge, and topped it off with large glass of water. I took my meal into my uncluttered living room and then sat down to watch a movie about people who spontaneously combust due to their humdrum lives.

Visioneers is a dark indy comedy. It stars Zach Galifianakis as George Washington Winsterhammerman, a man who has dreams where he is namesake and is battling the British. In reality George is a level three worker in the Jefferies Corporation, a national conglomerate that appears to run America. He sits in a gray office and with paperwork that comes from a retro-futuristic pneumatic tube. He lives in a mini-mansion with his wife and son, the former of whom religiously follows a happiness talk-show, and the latter we never see. He is supposedly happy.

Galifianakis is fantastic as George. All of his acting comes from how fully he inhabits this character, from the expressiveness of his silent emoting, and he has to be expressive since this is a very quiet character, and entire scenes pass by without him saying a word. The few times he bursts with emotion it's not with the wild recklessness we've come to expect from actors, but of a man whose still struggling to free himself. Galifianakis's job here is even more impressive when you consider that this is the same actor from The Hangover.

Visioneers takes place in a dystopian world where dreams have almost entirely disappeared, literally and figuratively. The Jefferies Corporation manages people from birth to death, allowing them to live idle suburban lives filled with nine-to-five jobs and minivans. The pervasive banality of the Jefferies Corporation has started to cause a peculiar problem: people have started to spontaneously combust. We eventually learn the reason why: these are people who dream, and they can't reconcile their dreams with reality. George the dreamer is worried.

Jared and Brandon Drake are the director and writer, respectively, and this is their first movie outing. The movie is well-made, although it does show it's low price tag at times. With a larger budget we could've seen a more coherent world, one in which we see the full insidious reach of a company capable of producing an office as Brazil-like as the one George works in.

The writing is top-notch, the story takes us to a place that dystopian fantasies rarely bring us. In these kinds of stories the corporation/government is typical too entrenched to be toppled, it has become permanent. In Visioneers, the Jefferies Corporation is truly threatened by this outbreak of spontaneous combustion. They react to the growing number of exploded dissatisfied citizens as if it were a plague or a war, and their counter-measures grow in urgency and desperation. George accidentally harbors a possible revolution, really a group of bliss-seeking men and women who are as drone-like as the corporate workers, a plot branch that openly mocks the hippies of the sixties. Instead of a hopeless cog, George becomes important.

Visioneers is an excellent movie for anyone who likes their indy dark. It marries a high-concept dystopian world with a suburban-family-in-crisis story. The movie takes pieces from Brazil, American Beauty, and More, and comes out greater than the sum of its parts.

Half-way through the movie I opened up my yogurt cup with fruit on the bottom, and discovered that the fruit was missing from the bottom. Concerning the poor dreamers in Visioneers, a bare moment before they explode, have a sudden knowledge of what is about to happen. I don't know if that's a boon or a curse.

5/5

In sum: Jerry and Mike erase every video in Mr. Fletcher's video store, a local landmark that is close to being torn down, and have to re-film them before Mr. Fletcher returns. They do so by re-filming requested films as no budget, 20 minute spoofs.

Jack Black plays Jerry as Jack Black. Mos Def, whose name I love, plays Mike, and mostly succeeds as the real actor of the duo. Crispin Glover plays what older men play in Hollywood, a non-intrusive, kindly old man--but in a surprising turn of events, not a sagacious one.

On one hand, Be Kind Rewind is a conventional comedy: a funny movie (two people re-film popular films with no budget) built around a typical, emotionally resonant core (save a small business and a local landmark).

On the other hand, it is entirely unconventional in its ending, simply in that it does not let up the emotional weight. Common comedies let the protagonists cleverly solve all their problems at the end to their own ultimate victory, great comedies let the endings stand alone and force the characters to live with the consequences of their misbegotten selves. It is what separates PCU from Animal House. Be Kind Rewind might not be the next Animal House, but the movie lets the ending stand alone, and I thank writer and director Michel Gondry for that.

Be Kind Rewind shows sparks of comedy genius, but sporadically so. There is a nearly-random subplot involving a Jack Black turning radioactive, which is what causes the VHS tapes to get erased. This plot thread could have been funnier. Or briefer. Or replaced entirely with something else. It is irrelevant to the rest of the movie, and disappears without another thought in the middle of the second act, when Jack Black pees it out of him. There is no typo in that last sentence. He pees it out of him. If that made you giggle, just know that it is funnier typing that than it was watching it.

This movie is at it's funniest when our unstoppable duo are filming their new versions of movies, it's at it's most heartfelt when Crispen Glover is on the screen, and it's most blasé during most of the rest, which accounts for an unfortunately amount of time. It could have risen higher.

Nonetheless, Be Kind Rewind is the only good testament to the legacy of VHS format I have ever seen. Low budget films have come to be associated with million-dollar marketing blitzes by Miramax, and ultra-low budget now means a two thousand dollar Apple computer and a similarly priced DV handheld. Be Kind Rewind presents the kind of low budget filmmaking that only exists with VHS: no budget. DVDs do make an appearance in this film, as a cameo that nearly derails the dreams of our protagonists.

The VHS format died for good reasons, and much like the end of Be Kind Rewind, its destruction was inevitable. However it also introduced a few generation of film lovers to film, and it will always be looked upon fondly because of that, and this is the heart of the film, this is what Be Kind Rewind captures. I only wish that it were consistently hilarious throughout, instead of just in scattered moments.

3/5

The competent Vantage Point can be boiled down to a complicated kidnapping plot, one that requires a lot of misdirection on the part kidnappers. In fact, I don't think all the misdirection was strictly necessary. But then, unnecessary misdirection is a staple of the middling thriller genre.

This movie features a conspiracy of radical Muslims attempting to cause harm to the America. Vantage Point is an apolitical movie in that the Muslim radicals are simply the required villains; they could have been from any culture or creed, and, barring one explosion, the movie still would have worked just as well. Since Vantage Point doesn't have new or anything significant to say about terrorism, this will be the last I'll talk about it.

The movie is set in Spain, which features gorgeous architecture and small cars. It begins by showing the viewpoints of one character at a time. Each viewpoints ends on a cliffhanger right before it rewinds time to the beginning of the next viewpoint. We begin with the new point of view of a news crew, which nicely sets up the movie's theme by showing the action through a dozen different cameras. Then we follow a Secret Service agent, a Spanish cop, an American tourist, and the President. Finally, we see the combined viewpoints of the rest of the motley assortment of characters who round out this tale, and at this point it's just a normal movie.

I will say that the car chase scenes are fun and well done. Nothing terribly original, but competent. This actually sums up my feelings of the entire movie: well done, not terribly original, but competent.

Vantage Point is the first major film for virgin director Pete Travis and virgin writer Barry Levy. I have to give Travis credit for a job well done, and credit to Levy for balancing the pieces of this quirky movie. Even though it's fluff, it's competent fluff.

I've been using the word competent a lot this review. I can't think of another word to describe it. Maybe "adequate." It shows smooth techniques, but certainly not much more. Vantage Point was ultimately entertaining in the way that a quirky adequate thriller can be entertaining--don't think, enjoy the car chases, and it'll be just okay.

I left Atonement hurt. Atonement is a story of requited but unfulfilled love that seemed designed to break my heart.

A stunning Keira Knightly plays Cecilia Tallis, a woman who falls hard for the sensitive and blue-eyed gardener, Robbie Turner, played by James McAvoy. Her sister, Briony Tallis, is a 13-year-old girl who has a 13-year-old girl's crush on Robbie. A girl of Briony’s age doesn't understand lust, so her feelings for Robert is filled with notions of platonic love that one can finds in Disney films. This naivety of lust leads Briony to the central act and sin of the movie, when she misunderstands a series of passionate encounters between Robbie and Cecilia, tells one well-intentioned lie, and destroys her family.

Briony never forgives herself, once she is old enough to realize the consequences of her actions--and this is definitely a movie of consequences. Robert chooses to fight in a war rather than waste himself in a horrific prison, and Cecilia abandons her gentry family completely to become a nurse, a choice Briony soon imitates.

I can't think of the word atonement without preceding it with seeking. To me, "seeking atonement" is inseparably paired and I suspect this is also true for Ian McEwan, the author of the original novel. In the coda, we learn that the movie is being narrated by an elderly and dying Briony, who is seeking forgiveness for her first sin.

Atonement is a tragedy, and it gives away nothing new to say that hearts aren't broken with pleasant endings. But regardless, Atonement ends with the ending we want while still giving us the ending it needs. I left the theater in near tears, and wondering the same question Briony was ultimately left with. Does it matter that these are fictional characters? Would I feel any differently if these people were historical, if Briony was real?

I don’t think it matters. A beautiful tragedy.

5/5

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" begins by putting us straight into the head of Jean-Dominique Bauby. The movie opens and Bauby open his (and our) eyes. He can barely see, or even focus. He can't move, and although he keeps talking to the hovering doctors, they can't hear him. Soon he learns that he's had a stroke and is almost completely paralyzed.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" initially limits itself to first-person POV, using very shallow and roving focus, making us nearly as confused as Bauby is. He also narrates the movie as a voice in his head. Mathieu Amalric plays our disabled point-of-view, affectionately called Jean-Do by his friends and family. Amalric is immobile for most of the film, acting largely with just the motions of his left eye, but through flashbacks we are afforded glimpses into his pre-stoke lifestyle as a hedonistic and fully mobile fashion editor for Elle.

They kept the narrative grounded by never letting Jean-Do become a more-than-human character. When he is first groggily leaving his coma, and is lying immobilized in bed, and sees two beautiful, blonde, female doctors hovering over him, he (and I) can only think of one thing, and the camera follows his thoughts appropriately.

The story progresses straightforwardly from here, from the moment he wakes up in the hospital to his end soon after the book gets published. It is punctuated with flashbacks and memories of Jean-Do's life, both real and imaginary.

Marie-Josée Croze plays Henriette, his speech therapist, one of the two beauties Jean-Do originally sees when he wakes up. Henriette begins with a fascination for her unique patient, but that slowly turns to a form of love called devotion. She teaches him to communicate using the one instrument left to him, his left eye. She reads off letters of the alphabet, and he blinks when she says the letter he wants. A laborious process.

Emmanuelle Seigner is Céline, his former girlfriend and mother of his kids. We eventually learn that Jean-Do left her for another woman, one whom we never see, and hear speak but once in one tragic scene where he has Céline communicate his continued love for this woman that he left her for. In short, Jean-Do is still, in some ways, callous. And again, wonderfully human.

In the third act we finally see Jean-Do narrating the beginning of his book, "through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day," a passage that was translated perfectly in the opening scenes of this very movie.

We know the book deviates from the movie in one important aspect, we see the book published, and hear of the first laudatory reviews. The movie concludes with a flashback to the stroke that immediately preceded the film. The touching ending comes a few scenes after that.

One part of the film that director Julian Schnabel was certainly not aiming for is the affect the subtitles had on the cinematography. The film is very unfocused and floating, representing how Jean-Do looks at the world, both through his one good eye and his imagination. The subtitles anchored the floating camera and giving us a stable port to rest our eyes on. Normally subtitles aren't thought of as part of the cinematic art, but here they dramatically alter the film, and although it may not be intentional, I can't say it's for the worse.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is absolute gorgeous. There are few other words for it. Emotionally, I cannot call it heartbreaking, because it is about a man who achieves what he sets out to achieve, and there is nothing tragic in that. Jean-Do's immobile life is a stunning success, and although it ended early, it ended on a note of deserved beatitude.

5/5.

It's overcast. I'm sitting at my cubicle on the 16th story of a 30 story building, looking out a window into other 16th stories of other 30 story buildings. So when we first meet Wendy Savage in her gray cubicle, secretly applying for a grant from various artistic foundations to let her quit her job and write for a living, I can relate.

"The Savages" is about two siblings who live middling and unfulfilling lives. Wendy is played fantastically by Laura Linney, and Jon Savage is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the middle of his 2007 hat trick. They come together to help the dying father they're estranged from, who has a growing case of dementia and is soon to be homeless.

Dr. Jon Savage holds a steady job as a college professor teaching what Wendy calls "the theatre of social unrest," but obviously isn't a whiz kid on the academic scene. Wendy has an MFA and holds temp jobs around the city. Neither has accomplished the dreams that came with the promise of their high education, and both make poor decisions in their personal lives, seemingly to punish themselves. Cinematographer Matt Hupfell isn't afraid of unusual lighting strategies to support this, and uses darkness to give weight to Jon's poor personal choices. Twice we see him as a near-silhouette in darkness, both times coinciding with him talking to or about his live-in Polish girlfriend whom he is letting slip away.

The father is Lenny Savage, played by Philip Bosco, who spends most of the movie acting with stumbling silences. Lenny is a man who has engendered no one's love by the end of his life, and when his girlfriend dies, he is evicted from her house by her children. Later, Wendy and Jon are driving him to the nursing home and screaming at each other over past arguments, and Lenny calmly turns off his hearing aid and rides in bliss. Even approaching death, the man's a bastard who cares not.

I was wholy unsurprised to find that one person was both the writer and director. Tamara Jenkins has crafted a deeply personal film, that reminds me of nothing less than the 2007's "The Squid and the Whale," making this the second time I've been (not unpleasantly) reminded of that film this month. However where this film fails is in giving the story any raison d'être. Jon and Wendy get together, fight, Lenny drifts in and out of the picture, and then it ends, and I cannot say that any of them are better for it.

The Savages has two deaths, but no funerals. The Savages wants us to think about life and the ones left behind. We end with brother and sister accomplishing the artistic goals they had already begun when the film opened, and they are obviously happier for it, but not due to anything we saw happen in this movie.

3/5 stars.

"Michael Clayton" is a movie of three lawyers who lack any connections to the world outside their jobs, and in four days, each are forced to make the familiar choice of wealth or soul.

Arthur Eden, played by Tom Wilkinson, opens the movie with a monologue on his sudden awakening to the essential sum of his life, which in his reckoning is very little. He spends the rest of the movie looking to save his soul from bankruptcy, and upheaving the lives of those around him in the process. He is ultimately seeking forgiveness for his years spent defending uNorth in court, an agribusiness with a poisoned product. It's not an accident that his name is Eden.

Karen Crowder, played by Tilda Swinton, was recently appointed to the 80-hour week job of chief counsel for uNorth, when her predecessor left for the greener pastures of a 4-hour week job on the board of directors. Her predecessor also left her with a messy, billion-dollar lawsuit that was about to fall apart from his own mistake.

We first meet Crowder in a press interview on her new position. When asked if she's prepared for responsibilities of the job, she replies with all the conviction of someone who absolutely isn't. We later see this when she makes two soul-destroying decisions on how to have her problems solved.

Then there is Michael Clayton, played to a tee by George Clooney. Clayton describes himself as a janitor, a guy who cleans up other people's messy problems. It's a job without glamour, without an career track, and without any good purpose. We find him working in a beautifully appointed office, but when the camera pulls back to outside his window, where we see that he's just a another corner office in just another dingy skyscraper. He's a slump-shouldered cog, and he's very good at it.

The movie follows a very traditional hero-story. Michael Clayton is our reluctant, working man hero. He has the divorce and the ignored child that all lawyers have, and I imagine he owns nothing of substance beyond seven identical suits; even his car is leased. He is a hero because when it is thrust upon him, he chooses to step up.

Tony Gilroy wrote and directed, having previously written such films as "The Devil's Advocate" and "Armageddon." Gilroy writes films for scenery chewing, and I have to give credit to Clooney for not going down that route, instead giving us a solidly subdued performance. The chewing on the scenery performance went to Wilkinson, who had a role that necessitated it.

The movie has a couple weak spots, and the first is Clayton's boss, Marty Bach, played Sydney Pollack. Bach has an inordinate amount of screen time for a role that contributes almost nothing to the story; I imagine that this occurred just to give Pollack more screen time. Regardless of his talents, Pollack could have been eliminated from the film entirely with no loss of story fidelity. There is also dialog that is written to be quoted and repeated across hundreds of reviews. When a cop angrily tells Michael, "You got all these cops thinking you're a lawyer. Then you got all these lawyers thinking you're some kind of cop. You know exactly what you are," it comes across as begging for pithiness. A normal cop would express that sentiment with a simple four letter expletive, but that wouldn't be as clever as Gilroy demands of his script.

The ending is a perfect mirror to the rest of the movie, when we see Clayton facing the same decision Crowder made earlier: weighing his soul against wealth and a career. With a last scene reminiscent of The Graduate, we are never positive that he believes he made the right choice.

Michael Clayton a well put-together film with few flaws through its morally unambiguous storytelling.

4/5 stars.

"Cloverfield" opens with some text on the screen implying that the following footage was recovered from an SD camera in the area formerly known as Central Park. This gives us plenty of information to set the stage, that NY was at least partially destroyed, implying a terrific battle, that the cameraman does not hand the camera to the authorities on his own, implying death, and the military, after destroying NY, had enough time to later comb through the wreckage, implying an ultimate, if costly, victory.

All this is in the first minute, which sets the stage for a great story. I am thankful for this especially strong opening, because the next 15 minutes of this movie represents the most brutally boring time I have ever spent with a movie. I am including the long opening scene of "Solaris" in this comparison, since that at least made me curious and made me think. I am also including the "Sunrise Earth" show on the Discovery Channel, which is simply a sunrise recorded in real time.

Both of those are more exciting that these 15 minutes at the beginning of Cloverfield. The opening shots of are simply home movies. There does not exist interesting home movies. In this sense, I can give credit to director Matt Reeves for successfully imitating the most boring use of moving pictures ever created.

The movie is begins with LA-looking people partying in a NY loft that only exists in the wet bohemian dreams of set designers. Here we are introduced to our constant cameraman and narrator, Hud, played by T. J. Miller. The only appropriate one-word description for Hud is douchbag, the kind that would scream things like "don't tase me, bro!"

We also have our hero of the piece played by Michael Stahl-David, his largely unrequited love interest played by Odette Yustman, and the completely unrequited love interest of Hud played by Lizzy Caplan. None of the characters evoked any real interest or sympathy from me, since they exist only as one dimensional stand-ins to give the camera a reason to move forward.

Cloverfield betrays its form/content balance by matching realistic home movie camerawork with a very schmaltzy narrative. The hero in the piece decides to risk his life to adventure off and rescue a beloved girl; friends, military, and logic be damned. However melodramatic this is, I appreciate that it gives hope to a story that will inevitably end with a lot death.

Tim White, an artist who does phenomenal covers for H.P Lovecraft, wrote that a truly scary monster is designed to be scary in full-bright lights, and only after you've reached that point do you add shading and environmental effects. This rule of thumb is the great failing of most horror creatures in film, but a great success here. The slow reveal of the Cloverfield monster is done with the deft skill of a director who knows he has something truly scary to show.

The Cloverfield monster is sinewy, horrific, and alien, but still exhibits some startling human qualities. It gets angry, is fearfullof pain, and judging by the way it roams nearly randomly around the city, appears to be as confused as our protagonists are. But then, it may just be hungry. By the end, we will see the creature in both an aerial shot and an extremely close-up shot.

Cloverfield is akin to The Blair Witch Project but with a traditional structure and higher production values. In this sense it loses its realism as a poorly edited home movie, but gains much in realm of entertainment that Blair Witch lacked. The creature is horrific, the chaos is delirious, the characters are dead men walking, and the result works enough to keep the movie tense. At least after the first 15 minutes.

4/5.

Oh dear.

One of the years most anticipated films, and I hated it.

No, wait...I didn't just hate it, I it.


From the very beginning, this movie was an epic fail. I wanted to put this review under a cut so people who didn't want to get spoiled, wouldn't. But in all honesty, if you spend 0 dollars watching the previews for it, you've basically seen everything you will ever see, just in 5 minutes not 90.

Now, I know people keep saying, "Oh the people who hate this movie are the people who hate movies without a beginning, middle and an end. They need some sort of absolution. They need to know "why" and "what happened"

False! False, I say!

I don't need to know that at all. I have seen many movies in which nothing made sense, there was so real explanation, but yet I still managed to sit through it and enjoy it. 'The Golden Compass' being one of them.

Oh, wait...I hated that one too, didn't I? Hmmm...

But in all seriousness, this movie was a poor attempt at making the unreal seem real, by using first person viewpoint filming. Exactly how they did The Blair Witch Project. However, this movie was painstakingly unbelievable. And I have made a mathematical diagram to show why this is:



People lived when they clearly would have died, people did things that would not have been able to have been done if the city was in such disarray, and there was a love scene. OH GOD WHY A LOVE SCENE? If I am about to get tentacle raped to death, the last thing I want to do is hug and kiss and profess my love. Id rather run screaming in hopes that perhaps I could survive. At least for a little longer.

Lets talk about the filming in itself for a minute. Motion Sickness People Beware! I went to see this film with a pregnant person who had to leave to throw up, then spent the rest of the movie holding her ice cold lemonade to her head, with her eyes shut tight. This woman loved The Blair Witch Project. But this was just over the top. You couldn;t even tell what you were looking at a lot of the time. Let me show you:


My other issue is the Tentacle monster. It was sort of creepy when you couldn't really see it. Just a flash far away through the blur of the shitty camera work. But then they showed it!!! Too much CG. They should have kept it a mystery. It would have been scarier in my opinion. (And even then, only if the movie had been made better)

Put all of the above together with a camera man  you are ready to murder and pray that the tentacle monster gets him, because he can;t stop trying to be hilarious, and also more characters who have no common sense. I'm sorry, but if I was about to get tentacle raped, the last thing I would do is go to save a girl who has another boyfriend and clearly doesn't really love me at all. Especially when I just saw my brother get slaughtered. IDK just saying.

Oh! And the whole city is in darkness. So please tell me how the lights on top of the Empire State Building are still on? DUM DUM DUMMMMM

Perhaps thats the biggest mystery of all!!

Final Verdict: 2/5 (I say two because the guy that got killed was nice to look at. And that part when you couldnt really tell what the monster was was sort of fun)

At 114 minutes long, "La Vie En Rose" is an good film. Unfortunately the total running time is 140 minutes. I know it should have been 114 minutes because that's the first time I checked my watch.

This film is a non-linear movie about the life of France's musical soul, Edith Pilaf, played by the excellent Marion Cotillard. Pilaf begins life as the daughter of a poor mother and an absentee father. Soon the father returns and moves his daughter to a brothel, and later returns for her once again to take her traveling with his circus. Edith soon discovers her talent in singing, and her singing career, life, and love slowly takes off, from performing on street corners to performing in concert halls across America.

The movie almost has non-linear narrative, by "almost" I mean that we follow Edith from childhood to death in order, but there are several scenes that are given out of order. And here is my major problem with the film. The disjointed narrative allows the storytellers, director and screenwriter Olivier Dahan and novice screenwriter Isabelle Sobelman, to simply repeat themselves. Instead of showing us once how Edith has aged less-than-gracefully, we are treated to the same information a few times. Instead of showing her relationship with certain people in her life once, we are treated to this information repeatedly, without it substantially adding to our knowledge.

All this added up to a movie where, by the 114 minute mark, I was left with few surprises. Instead of using a non-linear narrative to enhance the movie, it simply pads it.

There are three highlights to this movie. The first is Cotillard's performance, which alone would elevate this movie beyond the 1-star sphere that it would normally inhabit. Cotillard humanized Pilaf without toning down her selfish and self-destructive nature, and was very effective in playing her slightly different attachments to various father-figures in her life.

The second highlight La Vie En Rose offers is the is the music. The filmmakers use Edith Pilaf's real voice for the songs, since they rightly assumed that it was irreproducible.

The third is that it presents a peasants view of early-century France, a topic which I'm just not familiar with and excited to see on screen. Cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata does a wonderful job with a color pallet that reminds me of "City of Lost Children." (And where that film was inspired by, I have no idea.)

Ultimately, "La Vie En Rose" is a nice film that follows a regular rock biopic formula. It attempts to differentiate itself with non-linear storytelling, but results in a film that is finished by the time it reaches it's third act.

2/5.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

I've discovered the key to French music. Accordions.

I mistakenly called the movie 100 minutes long, it's actually 140 minutes. The review was corrected.