Reviews
Noah (2014)
I WISH it were a second rate bible story flick
It was no "Ten Commandments." It was no "The Passion of the Christ." It was no "50 First Dates." I'm not offended that he told a bible story like this; I'm offended that he told ANY story like this. Perhaps Darren Aronfsky should join James Cameron in remedial screen writing class or HIRE A SCREENWRITER!!! Production design and art direction--Academy Award for Bottom of the Barrel with clunky mismatched styles that said little other than "eyesore." Thematically obvious and banal, it violates the original dramatic sin of giving more answers than questions, and does so by taking us on a painfully meandering and lurching journey. Only redeeming factor: Top performance by Anthony Hopkins is too little to be of any real help. Hard to believe this is the same director who brought us "Pi" "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan."
A Serious Man (2009)
So nu? Who understands this "Schroedinger's Cat"?
****SPOILER ALERT******
Several reviewers have commented on physics representing logical certainty. In this movie, the opposite is true, and I believe that is the fulcrum upon which this modern story of Job rests. Modern physics strikes at the very heart of faith, mystery and law
The dybbuk! The husband is caught in the world of the material and cannot believe that the rabbi before him is a spirit, but his wife...she is not fooled! She believes that the world is filled with mysteries, and her faith in this leads to decisive action--saving them??
"Schroedinger's Cat" is a modern mystery, and it is the single subject that Larry is teaching in his physics class. "Bracket k bracket and it is equal," he says with finality, thinking that he has demonstrated the order of the world neatly. But "Schroedinger's Cat" is the ultimate expression of the rules of order, or G-d's work, leading off the cliff into the abyss of mystery.
In the example Schroedinger published in 1935, a cat is in a box with a "diabolical apparatus" which kills the cat if a random subatomic particle decays. Modern physics, being invented at the time, made the absurd prediction that until you opened the lid to check, the cat was in some sort of blurred probability space of being alive/dead, and it only became actually dead (or alive) when you opened the lid to check. Observation changed reality. The cat is in a mysterious state, beyond our comprehension or belief until we look. Do we have faith? Einstein didn't. He countered stating that "G-d doesn't play dice with the universe!" Schroedinger was doubtful, but insisted that the mystery was simply inescapable. This is the foundation for a rich allegory, indeed.
"I don't understand the mathematics, but I understand the stories," Larry's Korean student insists. "No, if you don't understand the math, you don't understand the physics. Even I sometimes don't understand the stories," Larry shoots back.
And in this lies the nub of the tale. Larry understands the rules--and follows them. His life is dreary and takes a seeming nose dive. Plague after plague arise and he is perplexed. One rabbi says "We all question the existence of hashem ("his name" = G-d) and then we see the wonder in...the parking lot." HE GETS IT!! For him it is faith. Even the friggin' parking lot is a divine miracle! The next rabbi weaves a deeply mystical tale with a banal ending. Larry is outraged. "What does it mean?" "How do I know. G-d does't owe us an explanation. The responsibility is the other way around," the rabbi responds. They each have their own understanding and advise. The young rabbi is not yet wise and advises faith. The next rabbi acknowledges mystery, but says it is beyond us to understand, so be a good person, "or a better person." "God doesn't owe us an explanation. The responsibility runs the other way."
It soon becomes clear that the Korean student and his father have a razor-sharp understanding of the "Schroedinger's Cat" story and thrust the paradox into Larry's life with a vengeance. If only Larry understood the paradox.
But he understands logic and rules. His faith is shaky, but he follows the rules. Sy doesn't believe a G-d is watching him, steals his friends wife, and G-d strikes him down in his path.
Even Larry's brother, believes in a crazy half-physics, half-Kaballah mystery and he actually wins card games with it, but he breaks the rules and is a pariah.
The last rabbi will not even talk to him. The most direct response of G- d being questioned by a doubting subject.
At the end, Larry feels he is through his trial and "opens the box" to check to see if there is a G-d there. Surprise! There is! He opened the box by breaking the rules. The cat is dead. All his plagues had only been in some sort of blurred probability space of having happened/not happened; his marriage, his tenure the whole chain of events. It was not until he tested G-d by breaking a rule that the very real G-d of the bible smote him and his eldest son down.
The original Job had actual punishments and kept his faith. Our modern Job has existential punishments and ends with a lack of faith. We must have faith, recognize the mysteries or obey the law according to our capacity, but to do none of these is an abomination.
Klimt (2006)
"This film wasn't released, it escaped"--Catskills Folk Saying
"I want to wash out my brain." "Did I miss something or did this film stink?" Comments heard on exiting the screening of "Klimt" at the Siskel Film Center, Chicago July 4, 2007
Hunter S. Thompson blew the journalistic world away by openly reporting events through the prism of his own drug-soaked experience. Terry Gilliam's cinematic portrayal of this in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" conveyed this brilliantly.
So far as I know, Gustav Klimt did not portray his artistic vision in an ether-soaked stupor or in a state of syphilitic delirium. My problem with Mr. Ruiz portraying him as though he did is that Klimt actually led an exuberant revolutionary artistic movement in a city and continent exploding with creative energy, and this portrayal could hardly be farther from the truth. Even a non-linear poetic portrayal of the creative process should shed some truth on its essence.
The tone of the movie was static, suffocating, semi-conscious and joyless. Klimt's life was full of color, sexual experimentation and living life to its fullest, so it additionally seems odd that John Malkovich sleepwalks through his performance with less joy than Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker."
If Mr. Ruiz wanted to make a film about a fever-dream (Klimt died of pneumonia following a stroke, not of tertiary syphilis as suggested in the film), perhaps he should have entitled it "Fever-Dream: with a whimsical guest appearance by my fantasy of Gustav Klimt."
This film may be of use to film students to prove that images and sound do not automatically add up to a movie.
Inland Empire (2006)
See it in a theater and depart Awake!
"Inland Empire" introduces a new character to Lynchian cinema--the audience. I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this elephant in the living room--especially since it's so obvious in the rabbit's living room. "A woman in trouble" is an archetype. We came to see a woman in trouble and, clever wag that he is, David Lynch has shown us ourselves watching a woman in trouble.
After "Mulholland Drive", the astute viewer is on the lookout to ask--"Who is the dreamer?" David Lynch suggests that this movie is about transcendental meditation and that we approach the whole film as a dream. We are the dreamer, even if we are led through a Lynchian artistic representation of our dream. As may be expected, it does not resonate with everybody's unconscious--sorry. We (the unseen seer) appear early, the elephant in the rabbit's living room. Who's trip down the rabbit hole is it--not Nikki's--ours! We are he viewer towards whom the characters in the Polish apartment turn their chairs.
At the end Nikki "awakes" to be in the movie, but in the theater (in the audience) she sees herself on the screen and is back in a dream. At the end, the cast speaks directly to us-"It's OK! It was only a movie! We hope you had fun!"-Then the lights come on and there we are in the audience. The movie hasn't ended; we must awake and be enlightened.
Stephen R. Cann
Robot Stories (2003)
Asimov would be proud!
As a young teen, I was lifted to delight by Isaac Asimov and his robot stories. The late Isaac Asimov was president of The Humanist Society, succeeded by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. As a scientist and a humanist, Asimov used the frame of the robot story to illuminate human nature.
Greg Pak goes a long way towards filling the Olympian shoes left by Asimov. In a very gentle, but textured, way, he uses "far-fetched" premises to examine subtle emotional events that are so close to us that they normally escape our notice.
For a young film-maker, Pak has a firm grasp of sketching the subtlety of human feelings with an economy of style and an ability to direct actors to express them. I anxiously await his further artistic endeavors.
Empathy (2003)
A Fetid Amalgam of Half-Baked Dreck
In viewing this "film," my wife and I, found ourselves in the curious position of knowing quite a bit about psychoanalysis, film-making, deconstructionism, architecture and modernism. As a "narrative" the "film" was a reminder that experimentalism is no substitute for talent. De-constructing something is no excuse for bad lighting, unprofessionally executed two-shots, lying to the participants and the audience, or treating your "talent" (analysts and auditioning actresses alike) with contempt. Whether we look at the narrowly chosen, baiting questions asked of the analysts, the inaccurate and pointless pseudo-parallels between modernism and psychoanalysis, or her clumsy misuse of deconstructionism as a bludgeon in an apparent personal grudge, she seems a dilettante. It is telling that she is outclassed by the analysts who seem to want to take her seriously and try their best to be genuine. Perhaps her recipe for success will be found in more therapy rather than in more film-making. Should she choose the latter, she would be well advised to consider that technical and intellectual laziness is ill-concealed by splashy experimentalism.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
It's no "Forgotten Silver"
Hey, I thought Peter Jackson was a witty, hip, edgy film-maker. "Forgotten Silver," is Jackson's spoof documentary of a forgotten (fictional) luminary of New Zealand film-making, Colin MacKenzie. In this movie, a distraught MacKenzie retreats to the hinterlands of New Zealand to make (by himself) a full-scale reproduction of biblical Jerusalem for a film he dreams of making, "Salome." In "Forgotten Silver," this comes off as a delightfully wicked joke, but in "The Lord of the Rings," Jackson's production of a lost world in the New Zealand wilderness has gone terribly wrong, his mischievous creativity drowned in a flood of money and technology. He was able to make hilarious biting satires on a shoe-string budget with "Meet the Feebles" and "Dead Alive," and even in the better funded "The Frighteners," but the need to appeal to a mass audience has, apparently, isolated him from his earlier, risk-taking stance. I, for one, want the old Peter Jackson back; edgy, delightfully wicked and irreverent. Stephen R. Cann
Invincible (2001)
Delightful, Dreamlike, Moving--Vintage Herzog
You either like Werner Herzog or you don't. I'm a big fan. My wife and I went to see him speak at Facet's Multimedia in Chicago, maybe, twenty years ago. He is a warm, gentle humanistic soul; not unlike Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. His films are hypnotic (as many reviewers have noted, he hypnotized the entire cast of "Heart of Glass") and the pacing and sensibilities cannot be casually compared to that of other film-makers. I feel that he brilliantly captured the medieval texture of the shtetl, which contrasted to the powerful pulse of pre-war Berlin. He has elevated a chronicle of a true event past documentary or traditional narrative film to the level of dream-like myth, legend or fairy-tale. It is a film of gentle power. The graceful, un-evolving simplicity of the biblical values portrayed in the shtetl are what is invincible. The real strength shown is very much like Gandhi's Sattygraha. I believe this film is a classic.
Bad Santa (2003)
A genuine Christmas film
I find it odd that the reviews are devoid of the theme of redemption. If there is a SINGLE theme in Christianity, it IS REDEMPTION. Who needs redemption...George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life?"...some sugary sweet character? No, it is a lost soul who seems beyond redemption. "Bad Santa" is more like a comedic "Bad Lieutenant" than a corrupted "Miracle on 34th Street." If the birth of Christ signifies anything, it is the hope of redemption for those who need it. And boy do the main characters in this film need it. Billy Bob Thornton does not revel in his depravity, he hates himself. The lost boy, is a lost boy. They need a miracle and they need it bad. This movie does have comedic elements, but it is also a serious film. It does not provide ALMOST SAVED characters who need a tune-up with redemption. These guys are lost. If that isn't the miracle of Christmas, I don't know what is.
Red Dragon (2002)
More satisfying allegoric ending
I will not address other aspects of the movie. The cycle of Will Graham's therapy under the tutelage of Dr. Lector is more satisfying and disturbing than in the other, philosophically wimped-out versions. Will begins as hesitant to strike a "friend" (Lector) who almost kills him. Tormented by the conflict between his "goodness" and killer instincts, Will is taught by his love of healthy families, his role of hunter and jibes by his "therapist," Dr. Lector. At the end (unlike the Clarice in the movie version of "Hannibal") he has learned that he is good, his killer instinct a part of him, he accepts it and survives, both physically and psychologically. This dialectic and cure are infinitely more disturbing than the previous cinematic attempts at this series and leaves questions about the need for awareness and avoidance of simple societal definitions. Who is good and who is evil?
Ôdishon (1999)
Woman's lib ala Japanese
When a widower imagines that a woman to meet all his needs may be available for the picking and all he has to do is give her what HE thinks she'll want, it begins the ultimate parable of male dominance. He and his friend have "benignly" planned to exploit a woman to be a thoughtless commodity. Of course in their narcissism, the prize, a man, makes the "lucky recipient" of his affection, "tomorrow's" heroine. When "tomorrow's heroine" shows up, her youth, beauty and OBEDIENCE make her charming, and her darkness and suffering are there to make her exquisitly empathic to the widower, or so he thinks. She witholds comment on the last assumption.
The film graphically (I emphasize this point) illustrates the un-Japanese (but not so new anymore) idea that women have minds, feelings and ideas of their own. It provides a cautionary tale to those who are easily led to believe what they want to hear (about 98 percent of everyone in most countries). The ultimate perverse irony is that at the moment that the radical restitution for this narcissism is exacted, the widower finally feels his first real connection to the female protagonist in a way that is satisfying to both of them. I think that this resolution is easily missed in the last glances, because it violates american sensibilities so profoundly. It is an authentic (albeit grisly) happy ending, in counterpoint to the usual contrived happy ending. Everyone's unconscious (and ugly) unconcious needs have been met.
Besides sharply (I emphasize this word) satirizing narcissism, this film picks up a thread of sadism in Japanese interpersonal relationships seen in films from "Mishima" to "In the Realm of the Senses" and even in the boy being sent by his mother to be killed by the foxes in Kurasawa's "Dreams."
An allegory is hinted at between the main character and contemporary Japan when it is suggested that "all of Japan is lonely," and "are we all unhappy?" I'm not familiar enough with the current Japanese Zeitgeist, but would be interested in others comments.
All in all, a well crafted, wickedly paced, thoughtful movie at many levels. Memorable perfomances (bald understatement), striking images, brilliant soundtrack and striking compositions make this a must see for those with a who can handle uncomfortable intensity.
Begotten (1989)
Eine Kleine Witz
Anyone who correctly identifies the opening images as God killing himself without reading the end credits certainly deserves a free ticket to a rest home in Transylvania. I would imagine this as being a favorite movie at "Twin Peaks" dark lodge on movie night if time existed there. I would think that a better title might have been, "How much fun can you have with someone who's almost dead in the forest with only neolithic technology?" The answer, it would seem, is quite a bit. So, despite the silly "God Killing Himself," the uber-pretentiousness (an apt phrase taken from a previous letter), the more clearly "Alistair Crowley - Hi, I'm the Beast, deal with it!" than Christian cosmology (I can't believe another viewer had the thick-headedness to see the Judeo-Christian Bible in this)... despite all of that... this is a daring, important work that most people should not see. I am both impressed and creeped out that it was made at all.