Stories We Tell

After watching this film, I’m surprised that the critical praise for it is so pronounced. It looks good and the use of archival footage/re-enactment is done well, but the story is just not that compelling. In it Sarah Polley interviews different friends and family members about her late mother. During this process, she starts to ask questions about a longstanding rumor that the man who raised her is not actually her biological father. Overlaid with this is a philosophical discussion of narrative and the discrepancies that exist when we tell stories. My basic problem with the film is that the story at the heart of it is just not very interesting. There are some moving moments and some interesting aspects of the lives of the subjects of the film, but it doesn’t really seem like it warrants a film.

The discussion about the search for truth is poorly done in my opinion. The way Polley gets here is by pointing out discrepancies in the stories people are telling about her mother. The problem is that there are surprisingly few discrepancies in their stories. It almost seems like this was added as an afterthought to make up for the fact that the story itself is not that compelling. It seems to me that if the story was better, it wouldn’t need this. Similarly, a film about narrative inconsistency could be based on stories about any event. All the stories would require is significant difference.

The film doesn’t do a good job of explaining who is talking and what their relationships are to Diane Polley. At the end of the film, there is as sequence where it runs through all the people who talked about her throughout the film. I didn’t know who several of these people were.

I like the interviews with Michael Polley. That guy is interesting. I also like the idea of using him as a narrator. At one point, he reads an email he wrote to his daughter about the film. He too seems suspicious of the theme of truth-telling vs. storytelling.

Gut reaction: 2.5/5

One film I liked more: Capturing the Friedmans

One film I liked less: The Aristocrats

Hannah Arendt

I really enjoy this movie. It’s weird how much I like it considering a lot of the acting is pretty terrible, to the point of being really distracting. The lead characters are all believable but nearly every minor character seems like they’re in a high school play.

This is another one of those sorta biopics like Lincoln. Except for three or four flashbacks, the whole film focuses on no more than a year in the life of Arendt. While I much prefer this format to the traditional biopic, I hate the titles of these movies. This movie should have been called something else. The movie is really talky. It would have been easy to pull a line and make it a fitting title. Or it could have just been called The Banality of Evil. That’s a pretty good title.

Gut reaction: 4/5

One film I liked more: Hannah and Her Sisters

One film I liked less: Hanna

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Anxiety, nightmares and a nervous breakdown, there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.

We were going to see The Grandmaster last night as part of our Wong Kar Wai exploration. It didn’t start until almost 11pm so we decided to check out Blue Jasmine at the Sundance Cinema instead.

This is one of my favorite films of the year. Cate Blanchett is ridiculous. She is incredibly good in this role. It’s hard for me to imagine any other actor pulling off the breakdown scenes where she is talking to herself as believably as Blanchett. If anything, her performance is so strong that it makes the other performances appear weak.

There has been a tremendous amount of critical praise for this film. I think it’s well deserved. I expect Blanchett to at least get a nomination. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew Dice Clay gets a supporting nod.

The music in this film is great. The title is also very fitting.

Gut reaction: 4/5

One film I liked more: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

One film I liked less: The Queen of Versailles

It’s a Disaster

It’s your gig, bro.

This is a movie about dirty bombs going off while a group of friends and acquaintances are having a couples brunch together. In the aftermath of the bombs, they are trapped in the house.

I like the idea of this movie, but I don’t like the execution. A few of the characters were written in really silly ways. If those characters were removed, I think the script could have been salvaged and maybe we would have a good film.

The ending is kinda good though…

Gut reaction: 2/5

One film I liked more: Melancholia

One film I liked less: Armageddon

Fruitvale Station

I got a daughter.

This is a great film. It’s heart-breaking to watch, especially as a father.

A few things about the performances bothered me in the first 20 minutes, but after that I was captivated. Michael B. Jordan (Wallace from The Wire season one) gives a great performance. I would be surprised if he doesn’t get a Best Actor nomination. I think he deserves it.

Writer/Director Ryan Coogler has done a lot of press for this film. I found his appearance on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell to be particularly interesting.

Wikipedia has a long file on the Oscar Grant killing.

Rumor has it that Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan are teaming up again to make a film called Creed. A spin-off of the Rocky franchise, Jordan would play the grandson of Apollo Creed who was killed by Drago in Rocky IV. According to Coogler, Rocky is one of his father’s favorite movies. I’m sure that played a role in his decision to make this film.

Gut reaction: 4/5

Only God Forgives

Did you miss me? I missed you so much.

The film definitely looks cool. The camera work is awesome and some of the staging is intriguing. Despite the stunning visuals, there are a lot of scenes that don’t do much in terms of the story. Some of it just seems like it’s thrown in to be shocking. For example, the scene where Kristen Scott Thomas is talking about the relative sizes of her sons’ penises and the scene where Gosling makes the woman remove her dress in the alley. I guess this is developing character, but I don’t really get it.

I love the music. There are also some scenes that use silence in suspenseful ways. I can appreciate that.

The gore is totally over the top. There is a scene where a man gets slashed from his stomach up to his chest. That is probably the worst in my opinion.

What it really comes down to is boredom. I got bored in this movie. All of the scenes are super long and, while they look cool, not a whole lot is happening. That’s weird in an 89 minute film. Despite my issues with it, I still like Only God Forgives more than Drive. That movie really bothered me. I loved the opening scene, but beyond that I thought it was silly.

Gut reaction: 2/5

One film I liked more: Bloodsport

One film I liked less: Drive

To the Wonder

I want to keep your name.

I saw this film on campus last night. It is the second film in the Cinematheque series: ROGER EBERT: THE GREAT MOVIES, OVERLOOKED FILMS & GUILTY PLEASURES. The first film was The Third Man.

This is a strange movie. It’s in this film series because Terrence Malick’s work has held a prominent place in Ebert’s writing on film and his review of To the Wonder was the last piece of film criticism that he filed with the Chicago Sun-Times on April 6th, 2013. This selection also makes sense because our university tries to bring films that are more difficult to see to the big screen.

I enjoyed this film. The camera work is beautiful and the music is perfect. It feels a little bit like an experiment. It’s an experiment in non-narrative filmmaking. I was going to say story-telling in that last sentence, but I don’t think that really captures what is happening. It seems like Malick is more concerned about the viewer’s engagement with the images and the sound than with the story itself. It reminds me of phenomenological research. The research question would be something like What is the essence of the experience of falling in and out of love? The ASC has a good interview with Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, the cinematographer on Malick’s last three films. In the interview he talks about the crispness they strive for in their shots. He says that Malick doesn’t want the focus to train the viewer’s eye on one thing in the frame. The audience can decide for themselves how they want to engage. Ebert describes it as a film “that would rather evoke than supply.”

My only major hang-up with this film is the casting. It’s not that I don’t think the players did a fine job. I just think they look too much like Calvin Klein models. I wish they would have cast more normal looking people in these roles. For some reason, Olga Kurylenko and Ben Affleck just don’t fit in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Do beautifully sad love affairs not also happen to people with pockmarked faces and flabby arms?

On the whole, this film is a success. I would be interested to see a film shot in a similar way but playing with different feelings and experiences. It’s almost a cliche’ for this to be about love. I want to see this experiment replicated but with themes like urban living, addiction or sports.

Gut reaction: 3.5/5

One film I liked more: The Bridges of Madison County

One film I liked less: Before Sunrise

How to Make Money Selling Drugs

This is another current limited-release that is also available on iTunes. I’ve recently complained about documentaries that follow the same old vanilla formula to tell their story. This movie doesn’t fall into that trap. It uses a video game motif to explain the different levels of involvement in the drug trade (mostly cocaine and marijuana).  It’s informative and engaging. Worth a viewing.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks

I like crushing bastards.

This film is in limited release right now. I usually see releases like this at the Sundance Cinema in Madison, WI but I’m in rural Georgia doing my doctoral research right now. Fortunately, it is available to rent via iTunes currently for less than the price of a movie ticket. I did about nine hours of observational research and interviewing yesterday, so I decided to watch it in bed before falling asleep.