"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world" -- Jean-Luc Godard
Posts
All Comments
Hugo follows the follies of a young thief named after the films title played respectably by Asa Butterfield. Besides being a small time crook, Hugo also maintains the clocks in the train station he calls home. He is doing so in replace of his uncle who has recently disappeared. It is later revealed that Hugo resides in the train station because of his father's untimely death in a museum fire and has unwillingly been placed in the care of his drunkard uncle. The only attachment Hugo has to anything of the past is though a small mechanical robot called an Automatron, which he steals pieces from in order to slowly rebuild the machine. Unfortunately, given that the pieces are so specific he is only able to steal from the resident toy seller Georges (Ben Kingsley) who eventually catches him in the act and attempts to turn him into the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) who finds an unhealthy enjoyment in capturing orphans. In the process of capturing Hugo, Georges also steals his notebook that contains his fathers notes on the Automatron. Furious, Hugo follows Georges home to demand his notebook back only to be interrupted by his daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) who explains that he must win Georges respect in order to gain back his notebook. However, as Hugo undertakes this task he slowly fixes the Automatron until it is able to write its intended message, a drawing of a spaceship running into a moon. Hugo is taken back, because the image is one he remembers his father telling him about, which fuels Hugo to discover the films origins. This task is filled with obstacles, however, because as Hugo discovers Georges's past is far more complicated. In fact, the film his father spoke of was indeed Voyage To The Moon and was directed by Georges Melies, who is the same Georges for which Hugo worked. Hugo discovers that due to war and its disparaging affects, Georges retired from filmmaking and lost all access to his films, or so he thought. With the help of film scholar Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) Hugo and Isabelle show Voyage To The Moon to Georges and he is inspired to once again do good by his films. In the process, Hugo discovers his place in the machine as a fixer of things both emotional and physical. A rather sentimental closing for Scorsese, but one that is soundly emphasized by silent images of Melies works.
I mentioned the sentimentality of this film in the opening sentences of this review. I find it rather notable coming from a director like Woody Allen whose staunch pessimism has always found its way into his movies in the past. Whether it be Annie Hall or Bananas Allen's films remind viewers that reality usually lets us down, and that all does not end well. However, Midnight In Paris does not do these things, in fact, it does the opposite. In this film the guy gets the girl, all be it a girl who appears only momentarily throughout the film and is not the one viewers expect. More importantly, however, the character matures. In all of the other Allen films I can recall, Allen's characters, often played by the director himself, never advance and often stick to their old ways arguing that putting themselves on the line would only prove hazardous. In Midnight In Paris this is not the case, Gil absolutely puts himself out in the open for change. After desperate flailing and a rather harsh taste of reality, Gil accepts his own place in society and advances forward as opposed to staying stagnantly in the present, an absolutely mature approach to narrative from Woody Allen. Perhaps it is Allen's late age or love for old school movies, but if it were not for the occasional Freud inspired joke I would have had trouble placing this as a Woody Allen film and thought it more of a film Wes Anderson might make twenty years from now. Regardless, Midnight In Paris is a sobering look at aging and the past and is a promising reminder of how truly prolific of a filmmaker Woody Allen can be, hopefully, we will see many more films of this nature from the director in the years to come.
An absolutely fascinating documentary, Babies studies the life of a new born in four distinctly different places in the world and reminds viewers that the gift of life is universal.
Something about rocky underbits...
This film is about the unspoken bonds of family, even those bonds that have become corroded by the divisions of failed communication. The film is also very much about the power and problem of misappropriated tradition. Still Walking is also very much about food. It is a film about the power of performing family tradition as a focal point for unity, it is clear from the films opening scenes, to conversations about lunch and dinner, that even in the most dire of situations a group can meet and coalesce happily over a plate of food. I am not terribly keen on food studies, or how they relate to film analysis, but I am aware that this field of study is becoming considerably prominent in academia. I am not fully prepared to make an intense discussion about food studies as they relate to this film, but I am absolutely certain that it could be done, along with many of the films that made my Thanksgiving day Top Ten list. Fortunately for me, I have a girlfriend who has taken a handful of classes in this subject and I plan to hound her about what family, food and performance really means. Hopefully I can draw something deeper and more profound in the future on the subject, but for the time being I just find it intriguing that such a seemingly simple act like cooking, proves to be so necessary in assuring familial cohesion throughout Still Walking. It is worth discussion, if only for how delicious all the food looks.
The plot of Some Like It Hot is a well-known one in the vocabulary of film history. Two musicians, the paranoid bass playing Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and suave saxophone playing Joe (Tony Curtis) assume the worst when they discover they are on their last leg of financial luck, only to become accidental witnesses at the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In desperation and fear, Joe signs both Jerry and himself up to play with a traveling women's band. While disapproving, Jerry begrudgingly agrees that it is their best course of action and the duo begin a new life as cross-dressing men. The duo appears to be successful at their new lives and pass as women despite the critical, and oblivious, watchful eyes of the bands leaders Sweet Sue (Joan Shawlee) and her henchmen Beinstock (Dave Berry). Both Joe and Jerry are fine with their new feminine lifestyle given that it assures their livelihood, but this changes when they both begin developing feelings for the band's lush violinist Sugar Kane Kowalcyk (Marilyn Monroe). Sugar Kane who is also oblivious to the duo's maleness takes them to be newfound friends and becomes intimately close with the duo, sharing a nearly naked night of drunken debauchery with Jerry. Upon the band's arrival to their next performance, Joe undertakes a new disguise as a rich son of a Shell Oil tycoon to win over Sugar Kane while Jerry unsuccessfully evades the advances of a rich suitor. In a stroke of misfortune, the location of their performance is also the place for the meeting of the mob bosses, including the ones that Joe and Jerry witnessed murdering other mobsters. In a final and hilarious confrontation, Joe and Jerry evade the mobsters while Joe convinces Sugar Kane to run away with him. Jerry is stuck with his rich suitor, who agrees to provide for him even after Jerry's confession of being a man. As I said earlier, a zanier movie does not exist.
Beginners, though non-linear in its narrative, is a relatively simple story. It begins with the thirty-eight year old Oliver (Ewan McGregor) packing the final belongings of his late fathers house. This act alone leads him on a reflection of his own relationships with both of his deceased parents. The film, and Oliver's reflections, paint his mother Georiga (Mary Page Keller) out to be a depressed and drugged out woman whose relationship with her son and husband are distanced and meaningless, leading Georgia to act out in public to spite them both. It would appear as though Georgia's actions are selfish and loathsome, until Oliver is told in another flashback with his aged father that he had, in fact, married Oliver's mother despite being gay. This confession on the part of Oliver's father Hal (Christopher Plummer) leads Oliver to question everything he has understood about his life, including his own relationship with his dad. Fortunately, for Oliver he is able to rekindle his relationship with his dying father purely out of providing support for him and accepting his lifestyle change as a desire that had lingered long before he arrived in the world. Tragically, Hal does die and Oliver is left to clean up what remains, acts that range from dumping out his father large amount of medicine to caring for his telepathic dog. Oliver seems content to graze through life unattached to those around him with only a dog as a companion, until he runs into a mute girl at a costume party who hits on him by writing notes. This woman, Oliver discovers, is a French actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent) and her lack of voice is due solely to a case of laryngitis. The two begin a head on collision of romance and therapy that leads the two down a confusing path of love and fear, which seems doomed for failure until a last minute change of heart makes Oliver realize that he cannot live his life in fear like his father did, because to do so would be to dismiss a chance a true love, even if such love is momentary.
This film is sweet and beautifully shot, but what is perhaps the most captivating element of the film is its ability to seriously deal with contemporary issues without loosing its artistic edge. Beginners clearly has an agenda, particularly its concern with reminding viewers of the unfortunate struggles gay Americans face prior to the new millennium. In freeze frames, Oliver reflects on notions of beauty, politics and family between two years, often using the 1950's and 1960's and a comparison to the year of 2003 in which the film is set. Through this duality Mill's makes it quite clear that for a character like Hal to have been openly gay would have meant his public banishment and a life of solitude. The fact, that he had to hide his own sexual desires until his last months alive are tragic and a character like Oliver helps viewers to comprehend how truly baffling such a ridiculous demand was for people living fifty years ago. More than this though, the film is also a beautiful observation of the seemingly limitless boundaries of love. As I noted earlier, the character of Georgia is painted rather bitterly and shown to be pathetically lost in her own world of ennui. However, in a very touching scene Hal reminds Oliver that he loved his mother and she loved him, their being together was an act of friendship and loyalty. She know of Hal's sexual preference, but agreed to marry him regardless, because she knew the social consequences if he were to remain unmarried. This moment helps Oliver to comprehend much of his confused youth and he grows to respect his mother, as well as the obstacles his father continued to face even in his dying days. Oliver also comes to realize that he cannot expect happiness to emerge through finding his father love, but instead in supporting his decisions while searching for his own source of happiness, a feat that appears to happen in the films closing shot.
Roughly translating to Japanese Hell, Jigoku is perhaps the most exploitative Japanese film besides School of the Holy Beast.
