Irreviews

I went into Farewell with my expectations way too high. I can see that now. My wife and I love (good) espionage thrillers and we were pretty damn bored in this film. We got duped by the preview, which was really well done, carefully crafted to hide the film’s shortcomings. In actuality, they made every mistake in the book.

The first problem is that they decided to tackle the story from every angle, like a bad made-for-TV drama. This was completely unnecessary. The inclusion of the American side of the story – complete with a highly distracting performance by Fred Ward as Reagan – kills the momentum of the espionage story and needlessly dilutes the viewer’s invested energy and attention. They needed to decide: is this movie a history lesson, or is it an espionage thriller? They thought they could do both, but they couldn’t.

In espionage thrillers it comes down to two things: trade-craft detail and the sociopolitical impetus of the character’s actions. And both of these rest in large part on the quality of the dialog. So we’re back to my fundamental problem with modern movies: filmmakers just don’t write any dialog these days, and their films suck as a result. This is a movie about a political system being brought down from within by one of its own. What they needed to be talking about was the system itself and why the Russian traitor felt it needed to come down, preferably in a way that highlighted the irony that Russia now (20 years after its liberation from Communism) is a nightmare of murderous thugs, a fucking cesspool of organized crime, sex-trafficking, and worse. They also needed to talk about how these two guys managed to accomplish everything they did in a system that was set up to neurotically spy on itself. These two concepts are really interesting – why not spend time on them?

Instead, we get a proliferation of throw-away lines like. “After today, I’m done! I can’t put my family in danger any more!” “The old system needs to come down. There will be a new start.” “You tell those ass-holes I want out now!” “I say when we’re done! We’re gonna do this my way or not at all!” It’s just plain boring. At the end of the movie, Dafoe (playing the head of the CIA) mentions that the Russian traitor operated in a way that flew in the face of all the rules of espionage. Really? Now THAT would have been fun to see in the film!

There are almost no interesting details on how their information exchange system actually worked, or what problems they faced. Instead the filmmakers are obsessed with the fact that the French dude brings the Russian guy romantic French music from the west, and brings Queen tapes for his son. They waste all this time on the Russian guy’s affair (which in the end has nothing to do with anything,) on establishing the fact that he’s not going to leave his wife, and on his dull relationship with his son. They waste five minutes as we watch the son sing along to a Queen tape and play broom-stick guitar in the middle of some field. Please! Then they shift gears and we see Reagan making some member of his staff watch cowboy movies with him, or scenes showing the French and the US engaging in “hissy fights”  because they don’t like to share information. Who gives a fuck!

Think about a really great political thriller like The Lives of Others. There was NO wasted motion in that film. Everything supported the details of the action or the underpinnings of the character’s motivations. Did they go on huge tangents about how the playwright was flirting with some bimbo down at the drugstore? No. Did they spend 1/4 of the film examining the West German reaction to the article he writes, and the inane recreational proclivities of the West German president? No. They stayed focused on the story! Period!

Then there is the casting. It is a huge problem that the dude playing the French intermediary is really bad. He has a pretty good look about him (which really helps sell the preview, I might add) but his performance is not very good. The guy playing the Russian traitor is okay, passable. But honestly, you never bond with either of these guys, and how good can a political thriller be if you never bond with any of the main characters? How good would Three Days of the Condor have been if you didn’t really like Robert Redford and didn’t overly care if he lived or died? I rest my case.

This film is in very limited release (we saw it at Sunshine, in NYC) and it is not out on video. I’m willing to admit that my disappointment in this film may partly be a function of unrealistic standards on my part. There’s worse stuff out there, to be sure, but on it’s own it sure doesn’t amount to much.

My wife and I saw Salt on opening night at the 19th street theater in Manhattan. We enjoyed it for what it was, both both agreed that it was a very surface-level kind of enjoyment. Angelina is pretty good in the title role, and even though I thought everyone else in the film was pretty awful, it didn’t really matter because the whole point of the movie is to continually dazzle you with incredible action sequences (which for the record I thought looked a bit fake.)

Focusing on non-stop action every second of the film really limits it. Think about the original Bourne movie, about how much dialog there was in that film, about how much time the characters spent talking to each other, thinking, scheming. The action in Bourne was contained in very small bursts. That’s the combination that made it so great. In Salt, all we get in the way of discussion are throwaway lines that lead nowhere, like “I guess you were right about her!” and “I know you’re her friend, but she’s mine and she goin’ down!”, that kind of shit.

The whole tag-line of the movie, “who is Salt,” is a bit oversold. Early on in the film, it is pretty clear who Salt is, and even though there are a few twists later in the film, I did not leave the movie feeling that I had been surprised by the story. It pretty much played out as I imagined about 1/4 into the film. One thing’s for certain: the filmmakers invest no time at all having the CIA try to figure out who she is, and that perfectly illustrates the insignificance of this “mystery” to the actual plot.

As far as the all-important set-up of the movie goes, they didn’t do a very good job. They tried a little bit in the scene with the defecting agent, but it’s a pretty poorly written scene, and of course the movie suffers because of it. Without a decent set-up, you don’t really care about the action you are watching. The flash-backs are bad and add nothing. It’s like they were so busy trying to hide who Salt is they eliminated all texture from the film. It’s all people getting shot, cars getting smashed, things getting blown up, people running amidst automatic gunfire, people jumping down huge distances and slamming into metal objects in a way that would shatter any normal person’s bones, and so on. It’s a hour and a half of this.

Salt is like playing pinball: it seems sort-of exciting at the time, but as soon as you’re done there’s nothing to hold on to from the experience.

I knew from the opening narration in Chloe that we were in trouble: Amanda Seyfried, sounding like a dopey school-kid, describing how she services her clients as a high-end prostitute. Yeah, right! It’s the worst and most unconvincing opening scene I’ve seen all year.

The central problem with this film is that Amanda Seyfried is not erotic. She talks like a suburban bumpkin and she kind of looks like a space alien, frankly. She definitely does not fly as a femme fatale. I’m not saying she isn’t pretty in her own way, just not erotic. And Julianne Moore is definitely not erotic – she’s cold as a fish. And the two of them have ZERO sexual chemistry. So you have these two women in a movie whose main purpose is to set up a lesbian sex scene between the two of them. Not a good game plan.

And it really is all about the sex scene. The rest of the movie is completely tiresome, boring and predictable. There is ZERO suspense. It’s badly written. Seyfried’s descriptions of what she does with Moore’s husband are just laughably unerotic, and the flashbacks that accompany them are even worse. You don’t bond with any of the characters; you don’t even like any of the characters! So you wait the entire movie to watch these two women go at it, and what do you get? One lame-ass scene of Seyfried  “rubbing” Julianne Moore, written and staged by someone who has obviously never had sex before. And in that scene they are both so “glossy” they don’t even look like real people. Why the fuck are they suddenly so glossy?!!!! Is that written into their contracts? “Actress may participate in full-body-nude sex scenes, but only if her skin is greased until it shines like a brand new car.” But the problems don’t end there. These two woman can not even kiss each other convincingly! They can’t undress each other convincingly!

The interesting thing about American movie sex is that it only comes in two flavors: rape and affected, staged, posed, embarrassingly fake-looking crap. This tells you everything you need to know about sex in our society – basically, we can’t handle sex. We can make it fake and non-threatening or we can use it as a weapon of aggression, but straight-up passionate sex is just not tolerated. That’s why when we watch something like the sex scene in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, we are stunned and blown away by it.

It’s funny, but I think these filmmakers thought they were “being French” with this film. Here’s what I recommend: watch Secret Things (2002) and see how close they came to a French film dealing boldly with sexual topics.

As a side note, the music in this film is absolutely terrible, and to make matters worse they kept pushing up the volume on it so that it frequently drowns out the incessant whispering and mumbling of the characters. Not that they are saying anything interesting, but still …

What a waste!

My wife and I finally caught up with Precious. Wow, what a great little movie!

First off, let me just say that Mo’nique’s performance is so fucking amazing it took my breath away. I’m always a little skeptical when I hear about flashy roles that the Academy gets taken with, but this here is the real deal! I was literally on the edge of my seat every time she came on screen. It’s not often that you see acting that comes across with that kind of natural spontaneity and honesty. Coupled with the fact that the role is brilliantly written to capture the unpredictability of the mother’s behavior, it makes for a riveting movie experience.

People talked about this film is if it was nothing but horrifying abuse scenes. Yes, the abuse scenes are not pleasant, but they do not dominate the film, are very well done, and not glamorized at all. The film is really about Precious herself, and there is more going on for her than her mother’s abuse. It’s a grim tale, to be sure, but one that is very rewarding to experience. You bond with Precious in a very interesting way during the movie. I’m not sure I would call the film an “upper,” but it wasn’t a “downer” either.

The dialog in the film is strong, and this sets up all the performances. Gabourey Sidibe is really good in the title role, as are Paula Patton as the teacher and Mariah Carey (yes, the singer) as the social worker. All of Precious’ classmates give good performances. The direction is outstanding to get all these performances to come across so naturally. I might also add that the narration in the film is written and performed quite well, and it is not used as a crutch – It adds a nice dimension to the film.

Precious is a film about a girl living a tough life, made with skill and tenderness. If you have not seen it yet, rent it and enjoy!

My wife and I went to see this movie at the third avenue theater in the east village. It was showing every half-hour and every show was sold out. The line to get in to the 6:00 was all the way down the block. There’s a reason for this: what the hell else is there to see? The A-Team? Cats and Dogs? Airbender? Twilight Eclipse?

The Kids are All Right is a solid little indie-type film. I enjoyed watching it. But it has no transcendent moments, and in retrospect is a bit dull. I doubt I would ever watch it again.

Mark Ruffalo carries the entire film. The guy is so warm on screen! Plus, his character is really cool and likable. I felt that Julianne Moore and Annette Bening were not believable as a lesbian couple, and I found both to be rather irritating – Julianne Moore less-so because she has many scenes with Ruffalo who props her up. The actors playing the kids are solid, and actually look and act like real kids (not a very common occurrence in films these days!)

My wife and I agreed that the problem with the film is the same problem that plagues so many other serious indie dramas over the past ten years or so. It has become very trendy to focus on capturing the awkward reality of social interaction, in other words capturing how inarticulate and boring people are in real life. Critics LOVE this shit – they eat it up. But I would argue that it doesn’t make for very good or interesting movies. Great movies have great dialog, period.

Consider the “Joni Michell dinner scene” in The Kids are All Right. It seems good at the time, but really the content of the scene is quiet boring and one would never really want to watch it again. Compare it to the memorable dinner scenes in Tumbleweeds, for example, and you will start to see how stunted this very literal approach to film making really is.

The Kids are All Right is probably one of the better things I’ve seen this year, and I would certainly recommend it, but in the end it really didn’t leave me with much.

My wife and I saw The Girl who Played with Fire at Angelica in NYC and we both really enjoyed it, even more than the first movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The Girl who Played with Fire is more straightforward than Dragon Tattoo to translate to film because it has more action and traditional suspense. As with the first film, the filmmakers wisely stick right to the book and avoid adding distracting, superfluous shit, and as a result the movie version works really well. The action scenes are captured in an exciting and spontaneous way – they put action in recent Hollywood movies to shame. At the same time, when conveying the complex story to the viewer, they wisely resist the urge to resort to fancy flashbacks and instead stick to the old ways: well-written, well-delivered dialog! It’s not quite up to the quality standards of the great 70’s classics perhaps, but it’s very refreshing to see filmmakers take the trouble to write information into the dialog, rather than just bashing the viewer over the head with flashbacks or (even worse) narration.

The filmmakers made very good decisions about which story elements to condense or eliminate and how to go about it. (The makers of the Harry Potter movies could have learned A LOT from the editing craftsmanship on display here.) The only mistake was they left the connection between Zala and the murders of the two journalists a bit too murky, and I think they should have included Salander’s visit to the journalists and attempted to flesh out that whole aspect of the story a bit more. I think they felt that going there would have disrupted the dramatic impact of the story; I don’t think it would have. But don’t get me wrong, the story hangs together very well with their approach.

I hear that an English version is in the works now, probably starring Carey Mulligan as Salander. She’s all wrong; she’s way to warm for the role. (As my wife pointed out, “I don’t think Lizbeth Salander has dimples.”) But what I want to say is that these films are so good I think an American or English version is completely unnecessary.

I’m not sure what kind of distribution The Girl who Played with Fire is getting right now, but highly recommend tracking it down and seeing it on the big screen. Ditto for Dragon Tattoo, if you can still find it (it’s still at Sunshine in NYC.)