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whorrinhatch
Reviews
Domestic Violence (2001)
Amazing.
If you are familiar with Wiseman you know what to expect. I found myself
fascinated by all 196 minutes of this film. Two or three times during the film we see a tour group of elderly women who are visiting the battered women's
shelter/rehabilitation center/school where the majority of the film takes place. These old women are spectators in this bizarre and frightening world just as we are. The expressions on their faces - the various ohs and oohs, the cowls, the frowns and the nods of supposed understanding - mimic those of the audience.
The old women are helpless tourists who wonder exactly what it is they can do to help, and the task seems so overwhelming that they're left to sit at a board room table and sip iced tea. Wiseman's observational camera is the perfect
medium with which to view domestic violence, a problem that has probably
always existed and will continue to exist as long as we do. Here is, in three hours and sixteen minutes, its document. A multi-angled and wholly satisfying portrayal. Highly recommended.
Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972)
Right.
A one-hour deconstruction of a photograph. Jean-Luc Godard's accent is
probably the most interesting part of this film. It's only an hour, and thus much easier to sit through than most of his work from this period.
Shock Corridor (1963)
Awful, terrible, bad, and other such adjectives
Based on the imdb user comments, I thought I might enjoy this film's "strange scenes", "great performances" and "notable...social commentary". But in reality this film was a complete bore. Let's ignore the fact that almost all of the film's jokes come at the expense of mental patients (those funny, funny schizoids the movies have taught us to love), and concentrate on some of the film's basic elements. The plot, dialogue, characters, editing, lighting, camera work and sound are all mediocre at best. The acting is terrible. There are some slightly funny Mad TV-quality jokes. A black guy who's in the KKK! A fat guy who sings opera! If this is your type of humor, I still wouldn't recommend this film because it is absolutely 100% boring to the core. And when I say boring, I don't mean "slow". This isn't Tarkovsky. It's crap.
Secretary (2002)
Gimme a B...Gimme a D... Gimme an S...
A very believable love story about two people who find themselves through the give and take of BDSM. The characters feel real (Spader and Gyllenhall are
both amazing) and the comedy almost never gets in the way of these two
wonderful characters. Certainly the most memorable movie I've seen so far this year. If you're put off by the BDSM element of the film, don't be. There's really nothing graphic on screen at all (most of these things are implied or out of the camera's view). Highly recommended.
La pianiste (2001)
Stunning and... well yeah
Really I have nothing to write about this film. I found myself extremely intrigued by Huppert's character. Kept searching for themes....tried to evaluate motives using my limited knowledge of psychology and came up empty. Definitely going back for another viewing. A lot of people resent this film because it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but I found it rich and rewarding - certainly deserving of some sort of gold trophy or plaque. Something shiny like that. Highly Recommended to everyone except my mother.
Lolita (1962)
Flawed, but one of Kubrick's best
This film is more visually subtle than most of Kubrick's later work, which I think is a good thing. James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon all turn out wonderful performances that give Nabokov's characters new life. One of the major problems a lot of people have with this film is that it's oftentimes unfaithful to the book, which is a silly thing to complain about. Is it really possible to be completely faithful to a massive novel in a two hour film? I do agree, however, that the character of Quilty is over-emphasized and Peter Sellers' performance leaves much to be desired. Sellers' comically overacted Quilty seems to interrupt the narrative flow far too often. His performance is a preveiw of the excellent work he does in Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove...", but it seems very out of place here. In the end, it's the well constructed narrative, along with Kubrick's small touches (the dancing scene at the beginning comes to mind) that make this film for me. It's definitely one of Kubrick's most coherent and skillful films.
Vanilla Sky (2001)
Absolutely TERRIBLE in every way.
CONTAINS SPOILERS This film is beyond description. Not because it's "intellectually stimulating" or "difficult to understand" but because it is so utterly horrible that there does not exist a word in the English language that could accurately describe its level of failure. The characters are hollow, the acting is stale, and the pacing is nauseating. The directing and editing are cliched and the soundtrack fits the film like spandex pants fit a sumo wrestler. The film's dialog is laughable at best and the plot twists and turns in ways that just don't matter ::ENDING REVEALED AHEAD::
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But after enduring two hours of insanely pompous "jibberjabber", we finally learn what the film had been vaguely alluding to the whole time: That the events of the film were not real, but in fact dreams that Cruise's character experiences after he (I'm not kidding) hires a cryogenics company to freeze his body allowing him to live forever in the magic dream of his subconscious. This "Who Shot J.R.?" ending is supposed to make you contemplate the barriers between the real world and our dreams, but it left me thinking about how anyone in their right mind could buy in to this movie.
Cruise's random yells and smiles are eerily similar to those he displayed in "Jerry McGuire", while Crowe seems stuck on his 'Almost Famous' rock music trip, as 'Vanilla Sky's name-stuffed soundtrack adds nothing to the film (other than marketing value of course). Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, R.E.M., Radiohead, and Sigur Ros all make appearances in awkward places. Especially ironic is Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place", the opening number to a film where nothing is anywhere near where it's supposed to be.
0.5 out of 10