Wherein the author continues to watch as many award-season movies as possible, jotting thoughts down as soon after viewing as he can.
An Education is sweet and full of texture, it brought to life both the drab and the excitement of 60s Britain without really choosing sides: The drab is also comfortable and cozy. The exciting is also shady, strange. It's somehow wrong, wrong in ways you can't quite explain other than that it's not comfortable or cozy. That David is also somehow wrong we know right from the start, and as we and Jenny learn more about him the wrongness gets clearer and clearer until it's blatant, inarguable. But he was
always wrong, and the movie handles this well, he never becomes any less or more than he is right there at the beginning. Only Jenny is changing.
The movie loses ground only when Jenny starts to become the voice of authorial arguments, delivering speeches to blank-faced adults who could very well offer a counter-argument but never do. Maybe that's the point though, she has to learn on her own, the adults in her life are of no help, not unless she wants their help. These other roles really make the movie though. Her father is played brilliantly by Alfred Molina, he exudes care and love and worry even while yelling, you just want to give him a hug every time he talks. Emma Thompson as the school headmistress is exactly the opposite, she never needs to show that she cares. She's only in a few short scenes and mostly on the quiet end of a Jenny-speech, but just in not arguing with Jenny she makes probably the strongest argument in the movie. These two performances balance the story, a cartoonish portrayal of either would have ruined it from the start.
Also excellent was Rosamund Pike as the trophy-girlfriend Helen, who manages to be dumb yet sweet without being too dumb or too sweet. Again, a cartoonish portrayal would have killed it.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Herzog movies generally take place in a world somewhere between the realities and the delusions of his main characters, and in this movie even the obvious fantasies: iguanas, break-dancing souls, etc, don't mark a clear line between reality and unreality. They're real to Nicholas Cage, and that's all that really matters. As the plot gets increasingly convoluted and nonsensical you might start to wonder if we're all tipping into fantasy-land with him. But no, turns out it's no more or less real than it ever was.
And Cage's performance is so strange, mostly because he's clearly wrong for the part. He walks around hunched over in suits too big for him, moving like he's fifty pounds heavier than he is, yelling like he has a voice for yelling. (He doesn't have a voice for yelling. He sounds more like a frustrated English professor than a professional, no matter what movie he's in.)
But Cage is fabulous at being miscast, I can't think of any other actor who so deliberately seeks out roles he is completely wrong for. If this movie were another Harvey Keitel vehicle you could imagine the Lieutenant as being actually frightening, actually loathesome, actually at times courageous and at times charming. With Cage, we have a character who is none of those things. He's nothing at all really, just confused and in pain, and the movie is better off for it.
The point of the movie seems to be that there's things out there (reptiles, water) that disaster lets in and once they're in they take hold and get stronger and stronger until at the end you're drowning in them.
Cage's question at the end is "Do fish dream?" Herzog's answer seems to be "Yes, they dream this movie."
Bright Star is a well-needed reminder that poetry, as it is in the first line we hear of Keats, is a joy, cut of the same cloth as a walk in flowered fields or throwing pebbles in a lake or sitting in front of an open window on a windy day — though more than a hundred years have almost convinced us that these things aren't enough, as if there were something that was more of life than these simple, fleeting moments. In the movie, Mr. Brown is an annoying, heavy-handed reminder of what poetry shouldn't be: vain, self-serving, cynical, serious, witty in the service of pettiness, "modern" in the service of fear. Though he's a reminder of what a poet has to deal with you often he's far too despicable to have as much screen time as he does. Keats however is portrayed as playful first and melancholy second, a welcome departure from the brooding Byronic figure you come to expect from movies about poets. Movies in general aren't keen on geniuses, they'd much rather focus on common people in uncommon circumstances, public figures — genius is too private a thing to translate well to a medium that is public at every stage of production and consumption. Intimacy in a film is a difficult and necessary illusion, which is why the love story is practically the definition of film: A love between two people is both private, between each other, and public, seen by each other. It is the smallest unit of intimacy that can be put to film.
The production is very lush and surprisingly intimate, and manages the difficult task of making a period piece not look like a set piece. Some shots have the heaviness of a painting, and though this takes you out of the story a little it also reminds you of what you're in. The movie is brimming with poetry, in the dialogue as well as the visuals.
It all turns to misery of course, and Campion is a Romantic enough to embrace the misery as much as the joy. Everything may turn to misery in time, and everyone may die, but in those bright moments of not-misery there is a promise and a hope that misery might never return. The young sister Toots is a heartbreaking reminder of this as she banishes autumn from her garden. In some world, she succeeds.
As for the love story, it's strange. The courtship is short and full of jousts and lots of silences, and you get the sense that the most they know of each other are those silences, that they are filling those silences with dreams of each other. Like love was a dream they were wishing each other into, and in so faling in love themselves. You never once suspect in the end that they actually know each other, or even themselves (they're so young!). And in that sense it's a very honest love story, and a very true one. And very powerful.
Also, that cat should win best cat acting by a cat in a non-cat movie.
What was surprising about
Inglourious Basterds is not that it's bad — and it is bad, very bad, "What were you thinking?" type bad &mdsash; but that it's poorly made. We don't expect a Tarantino movie to be drab, his characters lifeless and their motivations a mystery. We expect explosive wit and familiar throwbacks. We expect larger-than-life characters pitted against each other in a ridiculous and ultimately satisfying orgy of genre tropes. But the only larger-than-life characters in this unsatisfying movie are The Nazis and The Jews, the individuals are almost nondescript. His Nazis are luxuriously evil, slippery and smarmy and nasty, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. If only he cared nearly as much for his so-called-protagonists, but to call them cookie-cutter would be an insult to creative bakers. The only one of any interest is Brad Pitt's Aldo, who is clearly not Jewish. The rest are so well summed up by their nicknames ("The Bear Jew," etc) they don't even need to have lines (and many don't).
But the names Nazi and Jew are red herrings, this movie would more honestly (and far less offensively) be set on Mars, with some evil Martian Socialist Party hunting down ethnic barsoomians or something. But the fact that the movie makes no sense (and the movie makes absolutely no sense) is secondary, we could forgive even that if it were in the least bit interesting. The script is set up as a series of verbal confrontations, some of them twenty or thirty minutes long, and an ordinary director would play these heated conversations as a buildup of tension, putting off the release until the last possible moment until it explodes, generally in gunfire. Instead, Terantino has these scenes play out normally, as if nothing were happening at all. The audience knows something is at stake, the characters know something is at stake, yet no one acts as if something is at stake — giving an overall impression of watching boring people talk about boring things which something interesting just might be happening somewhere else. Like having to sit through a discussion of hog futures on the deck of the Titanic. And because there's no tension when the release comes it feels less like a climax and more like a "What just happened?"
The problem here is clearly that Tarantino has developed a sort of auteur's arrogance, he expects us to believe whatever he tells us. He says this crack commando team has killed so many Nazis behind enemy lines that even Hitler is afraid, we're supposed to believe him (even though all this Nazi-killing supposedly happens in the jump cut between the "Let's kill Nazis" scene and the "Hitler is afraid" scene). He says Eli Roth is somehow fearsome, we're supposed to believe him. He says that movies can end the war, we're supposed to believe them. Sure none of it makes any sense, but he doesn't seem to even lift a finger to try to convince us, which is both lazy and unforgivable.
The joy of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was in things we've seen already, familiar themes and tropes and body movements and dialogue, for what is "genre" but something the audience already believes without you having to tell them?
Inglourious Basterds is a departure from that. Things are still familiar, god knows he doesn't have an original bone in his body. But they don't
feel familiar. They feel rather shoddy.
