America, this is why we can’t have nice health care. (via hunk-o-mass : n-e-way)
Film is the art of light - of vision - of what and how we see. Jacques Audiard opens Un Prophéte through an obstructed view of our protagonist - perhaps a Diving Bell And The Butterfly-esque through-the-eyelids shot, perhaps a close-shot past a number of people. He never answers the question, instead rushing headlong into a dense yet familiar narrative about a street rat French-Arab rising to Godfather heights. Audiard elevates his material with keen observations of French race relations, immigration, Islamic tensions, and the (de-?)evolution of mob culture from the old Italian mafiosos to the gangs of corner kids. If The Godfather found that you cannot escape your heritage, Un Prophéte concludes that the old world can fight for only so long against the inevitable tide of racial and cultural change.
The film gets its title, and thematic heft, from the vision of our main character Malik. Yes, he sees the ghost of the first man he has killed, a man who becomes a martyr for Malik’s survival and rise. And yes, he has a prophetic dream of hitting a deer, again saving his own life. But his real vision comes from understanding his unique place in the criminal hierarchy - French enough to serve as the Corsicans lapdog, learning at their feet, yet Arab enough to command power and respect from the rising class.
Malik starts out an illiterate common ne’er-do-well; he uses the prison system to better himself through the inmate education program and by watching the ruling Corsican, César. All of his power and knowledge comes from observation, seeing how others interact, how power works. He learns that all men, when stripped of the illusion of control, will “think with their balls” (in César’s words), no matter their ethnicity.
As he walks towards us at the end of the film, Malik has the power of sight, the ability to look behind him - at the brute force - and ahead - beyond the screen, at the family and criminal life awaiting - while everyone else (including us the audience) just looks at him.
Ian Malcolm discusses Alice in Wonderland 3D
Thankfully for us, nothing gets Craig’s juices flowing more than Tim Burton remaking another movie.
Sure When In Rome ranks as the most incompetent movie ever made, but Cop Out may be worse. The fleeting seconds of enjoyability (i.e. Tracy Morgan’s occasionally funny bits) make the surrounding two hours even more excruciating. Both movies are great testaments to the number of ways a movie can fail.
Honestly, replacing all the guns in Cop Out with bananas would have only helped the whole affair.
And Seann William Scott, stay in the body bag.
According to Edge of Darkness and Taken, grieving fathers dream of their daughters only in grainy DV.
Don’t Call It a Comeback
Aside from sharing a release date, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island bear a remarkable resemblance to one another. Paranoid thrillers adapted from popular books, both films open on shots from afar of a boat cutting through (Polanski’s) night and (Scorsese’s) fog (not to be confused with Night and Fog, though that film should be remembered during Shutter Island especially).
Polanski’s composition - the camera sitting on the waiting dock, framing the boat between two pillars as it slowly cuts through the dark waters and lightless night - and the length of the shot recall his great works. He sets mood, pace, and point of view with a strong image that also connotes his larger themes. Scorsese’s grey fog (pictured above) hangs menacingly until finally the boat carrying our protagonist begins to cut its way through. The dreamlike image (and the following cut to DiCaprio vomiting in the Hostel-like bathroom aboard the vessel) again sets mood, but the haze also visualizes the subjective, placing us in the mindset of DiCaprio’s Teddy before placing us with him, obscuring the truth and the horrors within.
Both films also have climactic shots of papers floating through the air, in both instances documents of truth sent flying to obfuscate what we have learned. The wind-blown papers create yet another haze of white blocking the audience’s view of the truth.
Polanski and Scorsese both use these genre pieces as lenses to play with point of view and knowledge, how we construct and determine both, how hard it is to change either. If the creation of the medium of film allowed us the audience to see - wars, faraway lands, each other - it also allowed others to obscure our vision. Polanski has toyed with this idea from his first film, Knife in the Water, and it continues with his delightful trademark wit in The Ghost Writer. The more Polanski’s protagonists see, the more they are seen by others. The search for truth always leads to paranoia, usually of the self-destructive variety.
A devoted cinephile, Scorsese toys with the conventions and definitions of the film lexicon, constantly pumping in adrenaline and a manic verve. Shutter Island sits apart from his gangster genre work though. Gone are the Rolling Stones, replaced with the hard (and incredible) menace of Robbie Robertson’s bass-heavy score. The overblown flashes of ’30s era bulbs are replaced by the flashes of DiCaprio’s migraines, the past searing his haggard face and disturbing his sleep. The harsh cutting style only further drives us into the island’s fractured psyche.
The fractured psyche originates, in some ways, from wars (both II and Cold). Strangely, Shutter Island is Scorsese’s Holocaust picture, an examination of the extreme depravities man can enact upon one another. If man can commit atrocities so extreme as to attempt the extermination of an entire race, what does killing one’s children or wife really matter? What guilt is too much to bear?
Neither film may crack the top echelon of either directors’ oeuvres, but both are high-water marks for the past decade (or two?). The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island are fun and play great in a packed house. Two directors (one returning to the genre of his heyday, the other playing in a new sandbox) expertly flex their muscles, almost nonchalantly succeeding where so many others would have made limp and staid “entertainments.”
But there’s darkness lingering under both, perhaps best voiced in the last line of Shutter Island: “Would you rather die a good man, or live a monster?”
Really, LA Times, that seems like a kicking a man when he’s down and can’t get up because he fell on his back and can’t roll over.
The new trailer for Toy Story 3 amazes for a lot of reasons. The film really looks to bring back the sense of fun and adventure that makes this such a classic franchise.
But look at the texture on that bear! That’s incredible. That anthropomorphized bear looks more lifelike than any blue alien. (via Dan)
