Change Your Image
aldenhoot
Reviews
Neptune (2015)
Quiet beauty on a rocky coast
Set in a tight-knit island community off the coast of Maine, Neptune unfolds around a tragic loss and Hannah Newcombe's budding struggle for independence as a young woman. The rocky coastline forms a breathtakingly beautiful backdrop for this quite yet suspenseful story.
This film has some really fantastic cinematography and the shots of the coastline during golden hour left me breathless. In fact the more I reflect on the movie as a whole, the more I keep coming back to that thin line where ocean meets the rocky coast. If you've ever swam near such a shoreline you know that there is a serene beauty to floating amongst gently rolling waves, however those same gentle waves can seem terrifying when you suddenly find yourself too close to the rocks. Neptune is filled with a similar quiet tranquility, yet there is also an undeniable undertow of tension and suspense.
There is a clear reverence not just for the place, but for it's people too. In any tight-knit community the boundaries and labels of modern living get blurred by familiarity and interdependence. Lines between good and bad, cruel and generous, funny and heartless are hard to pin down. Even the rather tyrannical cleric and foster father Jerry Cook (played by Tony Reilly) winds up to be a bit more Willie Loman-esque than outright unlikable. That said, the one thing which kept this from being a full 10 stars for me is that there are moments where several of the characters appear to have been pressed into dramatic service, filling conflicting roles over the course of the film without a clear evolution in their personality which would motivate such an alteration in their actions.
If you enjoy quiet and subtle films which unfold in a gorgeous setting then Neptune is definitely worth checking out.
Chi-Raq (2015)
Great promise yet largely disappointing.
Here is what I picture happened during the making of Chi-Raq. Lee and Co. saw the headlines last summer about the insane violence in Chicago and said "we need to make a movie about this!" Then they set out to do just that and quickly realized that anything which stayed too close to the actual truth of what is happening in Chicago would just wind up being free advertising for the gangs, so documentary and dramatic re-enactment were out and maybe the best thing to do would be to catch the topic a glancing blow in an abstract kind of way, like maybe with a musical or something.
Yet without that hard-hitting grit they suddenly realized that the story lost a lot of it's edge and the whole project was sounding dangerously like a West Side Story remake. Then someone had a brilliant idea. "We have all these gaps and holes and things we can't attack too directly because either they're too utterly horrible or they wind up glorifying the very things we are trying to condemn... What if we hang this mess on a framework, something tried and true, a classic. How about Lysistrata? Nobody's done much with that for a hot minute."
And so the patchwork began to take shape.
To be clear Chi-Raq is not a bad movie. As a spectacle I'd be hard pressed to name a more richly faceted and densely packed piece of pop culture, and if I ever teach a film class to High School or Undergraduate kids I think it would make for some really amazing essays. Yet even having said all of that, I still found it to be unfocused and superficial when what it needed to be was incisive, diligent and commanding.