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jportwood3
Reviews
Elephant (2003)
Go ahead and describe it as many ways as you want
My first reaction after the film was beautiful, but so what. The cinematography is captivating, even when nothing is happening on screen. And the students are chillingly real. Seeing the film in Spain of course, everyone's like "so THAT'S what American schools are like."
But no, they're not. First of all, they're worse. Rarely would you find a roomful of kids chatting away about homophobia (even though it is inane banter) and there'd be security at ANY school and when fires start, fire alarms go off. So obviously we're not looking at reality, but it's presented as reality in a documentary style. So good ol' Gus is simply playing with us again.
Elephant's young actors are mostly amateurs using their real first names and improvising their own dialogue, and they prove comfortable and credible. They're generally bright, but not in a quippy, artificial way, and they remind us how the troubled teens provided the most graceful notes in Van Sant's "To Die For."
But ultimately I wonder why this movie needed to be made. It's so thinly veiled as a Columbine shooting movie that it lacks a certain creativity. Why didn't he go even further with the experiments and shots than give us a message?
Worth seeing, but not worth swooning over.
Mystic River (2003)
Throw them in the river
It took me a while to get over the fact that there is such a horrible title for this film. MYSTIC river? Oh come on, even someone in a beginning creative writing course could do better than that when trying to extract symbolism.
Some fine acting by Penn and others, but I didn't believe Robbins in his sappy, troubled state. I like Robbins, I think it was just poor casting.
But when did Laura Linney become Lady MacBeth? The movie dissolves into a Greek/Shakespeare tragedy that doesn't sit well with the lower end Boston neighborhood. Try again, Clint.
Suite Habana (2003)
Universal language
There's no need to have Spanish skills to understand the story told in this film. Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction (these are real people, telling "their" story, but they've been directed into scenes of "their lives).
At times it gets a bit cumbersome when the "characters" are not talking. You know they would be chatting away over their dinner of rice and beans but they are presented quiet and stoic.
But the story gets told without words and with amazing images of Havana. Having visited, I was overwhelmed by the truth in this movie, and impressed that the subtle political message in this "apolitical" film was able to get out of Fidel's Cuba in the 21st century.
But by the end of the film I was overcome with emotion and sat for moments after the final message, tears overwhelming me. This type of film is manipulative to the extreme, but it's also the type of thing where you don't mind being manipulated.
I've brought everyone I can convince to see it.
Mucha sangre (2002)
Much blood
Much blood. Well, science fiction and blood, shouldn't be a problem following what's going on. It turns out the movie is this wacky spoof on Spain and modern cinema. Imagine "Naked Gun" mixed with a Tarantino flick.
These guys escape from prison, take this sexy chick hostage and then want to get money from this ganglord. But it turns out he's the Padre of a group of alien zombies that are trying to populate Spain by sodomizing the men and turning them into zombies as well. No really.
So they capture one zombie and try to kill it, but it keeps sprouting more limbs and heads and finally they discover that it has this huge uh -- member -- and they have to shoot it. But then it scampers off like the alien in "Alien" and finally, when it confronts the woman (she's now on their side), she blows it away and is covered in uh -- stuff. Great.
Noviembre (2003)
Trite but true
Saw this film in Barcelona without subtitles and with only my somewhat pitiable Spanish skills. It's definitely an artsy masturbation job, but I enjoyed the earnest of the actors and the filmmakers. Part of the new wave of films that use "documentary" and "reality TV" type devices to motivate plto.
I thought I didn't get the fact that the older people were the grown-up younger actors telling their story at first because of my language skills, but I asked several native speakers and they were as bemused.
The street scenes of street theater in Madrid are really the best moments and worth experiencing if not anything else.
Dogville (2003)
Our town is not this town
I walked into the film not knowing anything other than a recommendation from a Catalan friend. Immediately I was shocked by the "Our Town"-like set, no walls, chalked outlines of buildings, miming opening doors, etc.
I heard a sigh from my friend and thought, we're not going to make it through this film are we?
But as we progressed we were drawn in by Nicole Kidman's mesmerizing performance. I agree with other critics in the fact that if it weren't for her performance, we couldn't have handled this heavy monologue (and narrated) film.
I felt at moments I was watching a Hawthorne morality story (a la "The Scarlet Letter") mixed with a Marquez magical realism short story ("A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"). The camera work was inspiring, especially scenes when we were suddenly given true omniscient narrator viewpoint from above.
By the time the end of the movie neared the end (which you are prepared for by the "chapter" titles) I was enthralled. But then Von Trier spoils his universal message about human frailty and wickedness with the closing credit still shots of Americans from the 1930s and Bowie's "Young Americans."
His "politics" seem to be worn on his sleeve and taking a cheap shot at "America" when anti-American sentiments are running high seems a bit weak. I rather liked the idea that the romanticizing of "poor" people and "simple," "salt of the earth" folk is a fallacy instead of learning that he just had it in for a country on whose soil he's never even ventured to step.