So I am going to try to watch as many Oscar nominated films as possible before the big day two weeks from now. Who knows what the future will bring in terms of my schedule, however, so I may not get to blog about it. If all goes well, I will be able to write at least one more post which will mean I've had time to watch at least one or two more films before the big night.
The King's Speech (2010)
Dir. Tom Hooper, 121 min., in theaters
Hooper is not stranger to period pieces, directing two period television series that involve the personal trials and tribulations of great men and women of history. I was fortunate to catch a bit of Terry Gross' interview with Tom Hooper and it may have biased my viewing of the film since Colin Firth's (King George VI, "Bertie") method approach to embodying the character and speech manner of George VI was fascinating. The big buzz in method acting this year centered around Natalie Portman in Black Swan and Christian Bale in The Fighter, but Firth deserves at least as much if not more credit for his performance in this film.
In a nutshell, George VI (Firth) becomes king of England in the period leading up to WWII after his self-absorbed and definitively un-Royal brother Edward VIII (Guy Pierce) abdicates to marry a divorcee. George's wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) arranges the help of a speech therapist, Lionel Louge (Geoffrey Rush) to help remedy George's debilitating stammer which prevents him from confidently performing his functions as the figurehead of British society.
The film benefits from an inspiring real life story, and the storytelling within the film keeps a brisk pace and lends a dire gravity to what would ordinarily be yet another Oscar-bait, palace intrigue story. Rush was much maligned for chewing up the scenery in this film, but I found his performance to be within the bounds of the character, whose flamboyant therapeutic methods were a perfect match for the actor. Touching moments abounded throughout, and I found myself genuinely in suspense of the outcome and desperately rooting for his success.
An additional bonus was the gorgeous cinematography. Most every shot was a visual treat. This would ordinarily strike me as a film that need not be seen in theaters, but viewing this film at home will not do it justice. In a bit of cinematic irony, we see characters in the film spacing themselves out from microphones only to have the camera bossily push its way into the faces of Firth and Rush. Dividing the screen into thirds, the film presents close ups that juxtapose visually intriguing patterned backdrops with Firth's (and Rush's) pained facial expressions. One of my favorite releases of 2010.
9/10
The Social Network (2010)
Dir. David Fincher, 120 min., on DVD
Two things: First, just because it's about Facebook doesn't mean it will be interesting or that I'll care. Second, no one talks like this in real life.
Going from a touching rendition of one man's brutally difficult struggle to be heard to a Aaron Sorkin script hardly seems fair to this film, but life isn't usually fair, as the characters of The Social Network find out.
If you have to explain to me why I should believe that the dialogue you're presenting to me is believable as human intelligible speech then perhaps it needs to be toned down ("Having a conversation with you is exhausting. It's like dating a stairmaster"--just one instance of many awkwardly explanatory lines). If Sorkin has tried to prove one thing with his writing, it's that people hash out ideas in fast-paced, borderline maniacal speech sprints that shove rapid-fire witty retorts down your throat. Putting my dislike of Sorkin's view of the world aside (if I can), the film still was a disappointment to me, perhaps due to excessive buildup.
The Social Network is less the story of Facebook and more the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), and the film really struggles to come to some conclusions about his character. The events that happen throughout the course of the film were mostly window dressing for a character analysis of, as the film's closing captions tell us, the world's youngest billionaire. As such, everything has to be extreme: extreme work sessions, extreme Harvard snobbery, extreme coincidences (Zuckerberg happens to move in next door to Sean Parker, Napster creator played well by Justin Timberlake) and, of course, extreme partying (a zip line from the chimney into the pool, really? It's like a Mountain Dew commercial, a beverage which was product placed right into the movie, EXTREEEEEMMMMEEEEE DUDE!).
In a very non-critical appraisal, I just wasn't feeling the film. I again admit that I dislike Sorkin's unique style of writing, but that wasn't the only thing bothering me. Most of the reviews I read/heard were praising this film for making a deposition interesting, but it just wasn't. The two depositions could have been struck from the film for all I care, as the storyline proceeded in chronological order anyway and didn't need any added layers of commentary telling me when to feel what. Why were they included? I guess for more Zuckerberg character development.
Was the timing right for a biopic of Zuckerberg either? Where is this source material coming from? Like the litigators in the film, is someone picking through the Harvard Crimson for this stuff? There were a lot of wasted opportunities for commentary on the ways that Facebook has changed our lives (with the notable exception of a great relationship status message bit). This film was less a study of the triumph of a megalithic social networking site than a character study on why Mark Zuckerberg is an ass (with one lawyer at the end regrettably spelling it all out for us: "You're not an asshole...you're just trying to so hard to be one"). I don't know many billionaires, but I'm guessing that being an ass is par for the course, and I didn't need a two hour lesson in why that's the case.
6/10
Restrepo (2010)
Dirs. Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger, 93 min. (unofficial), on Netflix Instant
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien writes that "a true war story isn't moral." Hetherington and Junger's Restrepo tries to buck that trend by interjecting a lot of sentimentality and positive story trajectories into their film. However, as a documentary, whose to say that isn't the way the story went?
Firstly, the only way you can really review a film like this and criticize the artistic merits of the film is to first separate the subject from the presentation. There's no shortage of respect for the sacrifice of armed service members here, which is really the only way you can tell the story. However, along with an accurate representation of modern warfare and the struggles that our soldiers face fighting in Afghanistan, there are some disturbing undertones of how the story is presented.
This film comes off like a gnomon, leaving me with a sense that something more profound is missing from the presentation; perhaps out of respect for the sacrifices made by the soldiers, or perhaps to mitigate the senselessness of war. In either case, the filmmakers do themselves no favors by holding back. Surely the brutality of war is well represented in the film, but the sanctimonious justifications of the soldiers is not, as one would expect, thrown into sharp relief with the hopelessness of their fight. It seems like everything the soldiers in this film built will fall apart, but the film tries to go out on a high note, which I felt was undeserved given the climate surrounding the Afghanistan war this year.
I'm not sure my full attention was arrested by this film either. In terms of subject matter, the film comes off as disorganized and thrown together (dates might have been helpful in laying out the storyline). Perhaps this was a commentary on disorganized nature of human conflict and war.
However, the film ultimately redeems itself in the raw footage that the intrepid filmmakers were able to capture and put together. Funded by Nat Geo, this film (as in all of their projects) has a "being there" quality that makes it worth the experience. As a closing thought, this really is an experiential documentary, focusing on putting you in the shoes of the subjects and leaving the explication of the issues for post-viewing homework.
6/10
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Ip Man (2008)
Dir. Wilson Yip, 106 min., on Netflix Instant
Ip Man tells the story of a Chinese martial arts master, and not the inventor of the Internet Protocol as I was let to believe.
Wow, rereading that first sentence, I sound like a Groupon ad copy writer. All stupidness aside, the film is about a martial artist before and during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. Ip Man is a master of the fighting style known as Wing Chung (must fight Groupon style joke...argh...can't hold back...as opposed to WANG CHUNG, GET IT, HAW HAW HAW HAW).
At first Ip Man (Donnie Yen) just enjoys the occasional bout with locals, but he eventually starts beating on a traveling group of renegade martial artists that roll into town and defeat every other skilled fighter. That whole sequence is essentially the first half of the film.
Once the Japanese show up, they start pitting soldiers (I assume they're soldiers--it's never fully explained) against former martial arts masters in town to prove once and for all that Japanese fighting styles are superior. There's some buildup over the course of an hour or so, and a subplot that briefly reintroduces some pre-occupation characters, but most of it is window dressing for the final fight between Ip Man and the Japanese general.
In general, the martial arts in the film come off slightly fantastical. I like fighting films, but they are by no means my favorite type of film, so I can't speak with too much authority on historical conventions. I know that samurai films typically have a fantastical element that has something to do with Japanese folklore, but in my experience, fighting films that focus on one particular style tend to be grounded in reality (the very notable exception I can recall is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)). This film doesn't so much break the laws of physics as bend them in inexplicable ways: no one is flying from rooftop to rooftop, but there are several Matrix moments in the fight sequences.
The film is semi-biographical, which is a polite euphemism for lightly fictionalized, and what I like to call partially stuffed full of crap that attempts to make it more interesting and condense a person's life history into a contiguous chain of events. Categorizations like that are always worthless anyway, as the film could have been 100% fictional and still worked just as well for anyone who didn't know anything about this man's life, a set of persons of which I am a part. If the film really was semi-biographical, the director might have eliminated one subplot which does practically nothing in terms of character development and spends 20 or so minutes as a setup for the film's conclusion (if you watch or have watched the film, I am talking about the factory subplot).
Weak pacing really sabotages what would otherwise be a perfectly enjoyable film. This film reminded me a great deal of Fearless (2006), which was supposedly Jet Li's final martial arts film, unless you count the seven he has made since then. The pacing in Fearless was superior in that the story had a superstructure that enabled the viewer to anticipate the redemptive arc. It's backdrop as a semi-biographical also worked better in my opinion; this may have had to do with superior character development for the non titular character (which paradoxically leads to better development of the film's subject).
In closing, the real test as I see it for a biopic is did I feel like I learned who the man or woman was by the end. In this case, I don't feel like I understand any more about Ip Man than I could have gleaned from a quick scan of his Wikipedia page.
5/10
Ip Man tells the story of a Chinese martial arts master, and not the inventor of the Internet Protocol as I was let to believe.
Wow, rereading that first sentence, I sound like a Groupon ad copy writer. All stupidness aside, the film is about a martial artist before and during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. Ip Man is a master of the fighting style known as Wing Chung (must fight Groupon style joke...argh...can't hold back...as opposed to WANG CHUNG, GET IT, HAW HAW HAW HAW).
At first Ip Man (Donnie Yen) just enjoys the occasional bout with locals, but he eventually starts beating on a traveling group of renegade martial artists that roll into town and defeat every other skilled fighter. That whole sequence is essentially the first half of the film.
Once the Japanese show up, they start pitting soldiers (I assume they're soldiers--it's never fully explained) against former martial arts masters in town to prove once and for all that Japanese fighting styles are superior. There's some buildup over the course of an hour or so, and a subplot that briefly reintroduces some pre-occupation characters, but most of it is window dressing for the final fight between Ip Man and the Japanese general.
In general, the martial arts in the film come off slightly fantastical. I like fighting films, but they are by no means my favorite type of film, so I can't speak with too much authority on historical conventions. I know that samurai films typically have a fantastical element that has something to do with Japanese folklore, but in my experience, fighting films that focus on one particular style tend to be grounded in reality (the very notable exception I can recall is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)). This film doesn't so much break the laws of physics as bend them in inexplicable ways: no one is flying from rooftop to rooftop, but there are several Matrix moments in the fight sequences.
The film is semi-biographical, which is a polite euphemism for lightly fictionalized, and what I like to call partially stuffed full of crap that attempts to make it more interesting and condense a person's life history into a contiguous chain of events. Categorizations like that are always worthless anyway, as the film could have been 100% fictional and still worked just as well for anyone who didn't know anything about this man's life, a set of persons of which I am a part. If the film really was semi-biographical, the director might have eliminated one subplot which does practically nothing in terms of character development and spends 20 or so minutes as a setup for the film's conclusion (if you watch or have watched the film, I am talking about the factory subplot).
Weak pacing really sabotages what would otherwise be a perfectly enjoyable film. This film reminded me a great deal of Fearless (2006), which was supposedly Jet Li's final martial arts film, unless you count the seven he has made since then. The pacing in Fearless was superior in that the story had a superstructure that enabled the viewer to anticipate the redemptive arc. It's backdrop as a semi-biographical also worked better in my opinion; this may have had to do with superior character development for the non titular character (which paradoxically leads to better development of the film's subject).
In closing, the real test as I see it for a biopic is did I feel like I learned who the man or woman was by the end. In this case, I don't feel like I understand any more about Ip Man than I could have gleaned from a quick scan of his Wikipedia page.
5/10
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