Cloverfield is not bad, but nor is it particularly good. As stupid genre exercises go, it’s a reasonably entertaining one. Its strengths are similar to Sunshine‘s: energy, sensory overload, and a reasonably pacy set of genre thrills. Its weaknesses are also parallel: kind of dumb, when you step back and think on it.
Charlie Wilson’s War has the brilliant P. S. Hoffman in a great role, with some excellent screenwriting by Sorkin in the first hour, but it loses its way in the second half, forgoing snappy snarky dialogue for montages of rockets and more emotion. Now, Sorkin can do the sentimental laced with bite as well as anyone, but the film really seemed unsure of its footing, its outrage blunted by some patriotic enthusiasm, its venom diluted in sap, its thesis blurred so that it wouldn’t really offend anyone. Still, it lays out a reasonably smart backstory which does indict the historical blindness of the recent years’ foreign policy… but the film could have been so much better. Hanks is pretty good, as usual; Roberts is kind of irrelevant, and distracts more than sells the role.
Into the Wild is such a sloppy, inclusive film — every whim Sean Penn had while filming seems to have been tossed in to the final cut. That often works, as in a great scene where McCandless (Emile Hirsch) talks to while eating an apple; it seems like we get four different takes, each quite funny, and closes with Hirsch making googly eyes at the camera. That sloppy enthusiasm also often fails, with a mind-numbingly portentous and purple narration, many cliched shots of creatures and protagonist and Nature. There’s a quasi-romantic subplot with a hippie girl that made me want to punch the Sixties. Still, there are some great performances — Hirsch is good, Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook are quite strong, and Keener’s hippie love interest Rainey (Brian Dierker) is fucking great. The energy of the film really carries you along, catches you up, despite its flaws. (I’ll steer clear of debating the central romanticized image of the poor-angsty-rich-boy finding himself. The film kind of buys into that Vision, even as it does put his foolishness into some perspective. Not as well-done as Krakauer’s book, but… still.)
The critical response to Cloverfield (not to mention the hyped-up marketing) is far more interesting than the film itself. I must admit I felt every minute of my forty-five years while watching. I found the film annoying, sophomoric and pandering in its direct, nearly licentious appeal to the MySpace/YouTube crowd. Still, Reynolds’ initial enthusiasm (I so hoped we were on the same page as I walked out of the theatre . . . alas) kept me pondering what I had missed. David Bordwell gives it his best here and it’s not such a bad reading. I also liked Cynthia Fuchs’ critique over at PopMatters. Her work is far smarter than the film itself. I can only take solace in the fact that YouTubers were not entirely punked. Moviegoers polled by CinemaScore gave the film an appropriately mediocre C (and those scores tend to reward just about anything commercial). And the 68% drop in attendence from first weekend to second (the second being a non-football weekend) suggests the hype was far larger and more appealing than the actual movie.
since we don’t have a thread titled “not as bad as i was led to expect” i’m going to park a brief note on the invasion here. it is competently made and for the first 45 minutes or so quite interesting. the problem is that it lets metaphor overcome genre requirements. really, movies about body-snatching don’t really need much metaphor. a good joke is the casting of nicole kidman and daniel craig as the lead resistance to the new hordes of automatons, given the general lack of affect in both their personas. i assume that surviving tom cruise was part of kidman’s method here.
an acceptable way to pass some time. now i must go and find out why it was critically reviled (unless, of course, it wasn’t).
I can’t say that I entirely liked it, but Romance and Cigarettes is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s an odd hybrid: part Elia Kazan, part Baz Luhrmann–a working-class musical (well, financially these characters are probably middle-class but I bet they’d define themselves otherwise) in which James Gandolfini is married to Susan Sarandon and having an affair with Kate Winslet (with a bad dye job and a truck driver’s vernacular). Now that’s Hollywood folks!
we own the night. well-made, well-acted, but as i said to tallulah bankhead while reading mike’s dissertation, there’s less in this than meets the eye.
I was really taken with Romance and Cigarettes, a sloppy wet kiss of a film. I might add to Jeff’s hybrid ancestry Dennis Potter, and certainly some Coen brothers’ influence creeps in. Fellini. There’s a lot of influence stitched next to the big heart on its sleeves. It’s operatically emotional yet self-consciously silly and yet sincere and yet… ah, it tries to wrap its arms around being everything a Movie about love and life could be. Plus it’s got Christopher Walken dancing around, and Sarandon who is just wonderful (and not just because I’ve had a crush for years on her). Way better than eh.
Kris and I saw In Bruges tonight, and both really loved it–but I’m gonna give that its own post, some time later….
Yeah, I kinda liked We Own the Night as well, particularly the first two/thirds. The third act is, well, silly. But there are two set pieces (one in a drug house and another on the city streets) that are very well filmed.
Oh, by the way, is there anything you and Kris don’t like that comes equipped with a Celtic tattoo and a green beer. I want to hear more about Irish cultural products that suck!
Irish cultural product that sucks: Colin Farrell.
I was surprised myself, but … Farrell is very good in In Bruges.
waitress. eh.
i seem to remember someone mentioning they’d seen ted and quite enjoyed it. must be chris, as he’s english and consequently does not understand comedy. luckily, i am here to tell you all that while there are a few extremely funny bits in this film, for most of its running time you will sit on your couch with no expression at all on your face. it’s too bad as there’s something genuinely weird about the premise that a better director and writer could have done so much more with. giovanni ribisi does a lot with his hips–a better director would have done more with them too.
there’s one gratuitously racist bit in the middle and a brief gratuitously homophobic bit at the very end which sort of underline what a hack macfarlane is.
also: i have no memory of the invasion which i apparently thought was acceptable some 5 years ago.