(apologies for the delay between this post and my last one, I was teaching a 2-week condensed course from Jan. 5 to Jan. 14 that left little time for anything else)
For most of the country the "holidays" are already over, but at my college the spring semester doesn't start until this Tuesday, so I guess I can get a little more use out of this title. This time it's a couple likely Oscar contenders that I missed in theaters but have now caught up with on Blu-ray.
The Hurt Locker
At the moment (though these things can change quickly), this appears to be the front-runner for Best Picture, having just picked up the top award from the Broadcast Film Critics; we'll see what happens at the Golden Globes tonight (though the Globes awards are rather meaningless, the winners do often go on to nominations for the Oscars).
Not surprisingly, the movie itself was very good - intense and engaging. It was more episodic than I had expected, but I think that probably was for the best; this is a case of form matching content, and I imagine that for those serving in a war, particularly in a specialty area like bomb disarmament/disposal life itself could seem episodic, with each mission a thing unto itself, and not necessarily a lot of connections between them. Every day you get up, and you go out on a new mission and don't know what's going to happen. The movie did an excellent job of conveying this sense, and putting us in the mindset of the soldiers in which anything and everything may be a threat or a friendly, and they have to make snap judgments about how to respond to each person, scenario, or place. By the end of the movie we're on the edges of our seats virtually all the time, because it seems like danger could be anywhere.
Strong performances by the cast all around, including a few familiar faces in small roles. One of the most impressive bits to me was simply the way that two different men move while wearing the bomb disposal suit - you get a lot of information about their personalities just from their walks. Sound design was very strong, and I liked that a lot of segments ran for extended segments without music, and the music was subtle in others so that you never felt it coming in and out. Also a lot of good dynamics play, building up to loud, oppressive sound in some places and then folding down to just ambient and Foley in others. Great job by Kathryn Bigelow and her crew on all areas of visual and sonic design.
My only major complaint is with the ending, and to some degree I think it's as much a testament to the caliber of the rest of the filmmaking as anything else. Without giving anything away, there's an extended speech/monologue (well, extended in comparison to the rest of the dialogue which is very sparse) near the very end and then a musical cue at the very end, both of which I could have done without. In the case of the speech, I understand what the motivation behind it must have been, but by the time I got to that point the rest of the film had so effectively (and more poetically) conveyed exactly what was said that it felt superfluous and should have put more trust in the audience (especially after the great line preceding it, which starts with "You know they need more..."). As to the music cue, IMHO it was simply over the top and seemed like it would have been appropriate to a straight-up, good guys vs. bad guys Willis/Stallone/Schwarzenegger action movie than to this much more thoughtful dramatic piece. I guess I can understand the conceptual rationale for this selection as it says something about the character being shown, but again I feel like the movie had already more powerfully said the same thing and this felt like a bit of a cheapening.
All in all, powerful stuff, and a strong entry in the "war classic" genre: a film that shows soldiers in war but is really about something much more primal. I have to say that thematically this reminds me a lot of a more subtly done The Thin Red Line (Malick's 1998 version) even though these two films are artistically worlds apart.
(500) Days of Summer
Movie #2 in last night's double feature (I almost picked up District 9, which I also still need to see, but was a bit worn out from The Hurt Locker and thought this romantic comedy might be easier to handle). According to Entertainment Weekly this is a likely Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay. And the script is fun, has some good lines (my favorite pair ran something like: "That's what would have happened in a world where good things happen to me" "Well, that's not the world we live in."), and I enjoyed both the non-chronological back-and-forth structure and some of the little surprises (including the nods to classic films, especially the hint of The 400 Blows at the end), even though the movie hardly breaks new ground in the relationship comedy genre. I don't buy Summer's final decision, but I did like the very end of the movie so was willing to cut it a little slack.
What impressed me the most about the movie, though, was the way it used a hodge-podge of cinematic devices that all seemed to work, without any of them seeming out of place even when they were only used once or twice (which is hard to do, since usually unusual stylistic choices stick out when only appearing once in a movie). Consider that ALL of the following "tricks" made at least one appearance during the course of the movie (minor SPOILERS, so skip if you want to stay totally fresh):
- direct address to camera by primary character
- direct address to camera by secondary characters
- an omniscient narrator
- split-screen pairing "real" and "imagined" versions of events
- animation
- musical song-and-dance number
- fake "old home video" footage
- repeating the same footage with different sound pairings at different points
- black-and-white in some points, color in others
- 2.35:1 widescreen in some points, 4:3 in others
Kudos to director Marc Webb and the whole crew for combining all these different tricks effectively without them ever being distracting to the audience or feeling inappropriate. So it's worth checking out for the creative decisions made, and I definitely liked the movie, but I'm not sure it's as good as some of the reviews/hype have made it out to be. Certainly I don't think it's the #227 movie of all time (current ranking on IMDB). However, given that the pickings in the romantic comedy genre tend to not be as strong overall as those in some other genres, if you're looking for an interesting film that doesn't just paint-by-the-numbers, give it a try and even if you're not "wowed," you shouldn't be disappointed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment