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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

February 15, 2009:  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Oh, David Fincher, when will you let me rave again about your films?  I know the critics liked Zodiac and I don’t take issue with that.  Panic Room wasn’t a masterpiece although it still had the basic meat of a “Fincheresque” film.  But I still cling mightily to the one-two punch of Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), both of which immediately launched themselves into my top 25 favourite films of all time, and there aren’t a lot of other directors who could manage that.  I even advocate for Alien3, although only in its director’s cut form.

But now I need to wrap my head around The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I had heard plenty about this film, and read the widely mixed but ultimately negatively skewed reviews, and when the Oscar nominations came out it led with 13 (a near-record, only topped by the 14 nominations each for All About Eve from 1950 and Titanic from 1997).  But I’ve been following this Oscar stuff for long enough to know that 10+ nominations doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll like the movie.  And you know what?  I didn’t like this movie.  It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why that is, but it’s probably in large part because IT DIDN’T MAKE SENSE!

This is the story of a boy who is born old, and becomes younger throughout his life.  That seems reasonable.  It’s based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I haven’t read but definitely want to, in order to make the comparison and think about how I might have approached this adaptation differently.  He meets a girl when they are both about 10 years old (i.e. she’s a child of 10, and he appears to be a man about 10 years younger than dead), and they meet up periodically through the years, finally enjoying a romantic interlude when they are both physically 40-ish.  They struggle with how to deal with the certainty that he will become younger and less mature as she grows older, and whether they can even still know each other once this crossover period has been swept away by the winds of time.

Now, while this review will conclude with an overwhelming negative opinion of the film, that’s not to suggest there isn’t great potential here or even that none of it is realized.  There are some great moments during Benjamin’s life arc, but they are ultimately negated by sappy or weak sequences which arose from the choice to follow the entire arc from birth to death.  The contrivance of Benjamin Button’s backwards aging serves to emphasize how chance meetings really do drive our lives, and how there really may be only a handful of points in people’s lives where they make that first connection with someone special, and outside of those key points, they will otherwise misfire.  These are valuable observations about life and how it’s lived, and about connections among people, and I’m glad the movie brought these to me to think about.

So what’s the problem?  Well, as noted earlier, the whole thing really doesn’t make sense.  Why is Benjamin born baby-size, if he’s supposed to age backwards?  He grows up, and then shrinks again, and that’s not what happens to real people, even backwards.  The script provokes obvious and not necessarily favourable comparisons with Forrest Gump (1994), with the same slow/deliberate speaking style of the main protagonist, his quiet observation of the world while participating in his own way (working on a fishing boat, helping during the war), the fact that he ends up coming into money to ease the logistical pressures around an oddball character needing to make a regular living, and finding himself in historical situations by chance.  The two films have the same screenwriter which explains a lot of the similarity, but it makes Benjamin Button seem derivative – didn’t we see a lot of this 15 years ago, without the overlaid confusion of the physical strangeness of the main character?  Also, the story is told by Benjamin’s one-time love as she lives out her final days in a New Orleans hospital against the backdrop of the approaching 2005 Hurricane Katrina, for no apparent reason.  Again, it’s not that there isn’t potential in that setting, but if it’s realized, I certainly didn’t notice it.

So what this really comes down to for me is the question of whether The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a departure from style for David Fincher, or a brilliantly dark movie masquerading as a whimsical one.  I like to think it’s the latter, but the brilliance is lost on me, and I don’t know why that is.  But I don’t feel compelled to view the film a few more times to find out, and that’s really the key.  I have to warn potential viewers against this film, but I wouldn’t go so far as to discourage them from trying to find the intended experience in it.  Se7en and Fight Club buy Fincher a lot of leeway with me, and I’ll keep seeing his films as long as he keeps making them, but I don’t promise to love them all.

Brilliant?  Maybe, but I couldn’t tell.

2009 05 29 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Bolt

February 14, 2009:  Bolt

Bolt is the “other” movie nominated for Best Animated Feature of 2008.  Wall-E (Pixar) and Kung Fu Panda (Dreamworks) fill the standard slots, and this is the wildcard.  Bolt was FAR better than that wildcard movie tends to be, which is a step ahead of the usual for me.

The story concerns a dog who is the star of a TV show, along with the little girl who owns him.  The effects and stunts in the show are performed such that Bolt doesn’t even know that he’s on a TV show and has never left the set of the show in his life, an artistic decision in order to keep his acting and expressions believable.  When an unfortunate incident causes him to escape from the set and get accidentally sent across the country, he needs to contend with making his way in the outside world for the first time as he tries to find his way back.  A friendly hamster and not-so-friendly cat encountered along the way make for an animated Incredible Journey for the 21st century.  I won’t spoil the movie by saying whether or not they make it back safely.

I will, however, point out that a late conflict between Bolt and the cat seriously detracted from the story.  It’s forgivable since there was no other way to approach it, but it emphasized the predictable and awkward parts of the movie.  Presumably professional screenwriters put more than the 10 minutes’ worth of thought into it than I have, and might be expected to come up with a more smoothly integrated story.

John Travolta provides the voice work for Bolt, and does so with ease.  Travolta’s expressive voice was used 20 years ago for the baby in Look Who’s Talking!, so he’s familiar with this type of work, although it’s surprising he hasn’t done more animated work.  Susie Essman is an underrated comedienne who provides the voice of the not-so-friendly cat.

The film parodies elements of Hollywood production in a way that is coming to be well-accepted these days, and it’s a fun way to provide humour for the adult audience and also something the older kids will start to understand in this media-saturated age.  Tropic Thunder did the same thing recently.

This is a Disney animated film, which would explain the depth of the story and the fun for both kids and adults.  Say what you will about the big conglomerate, but even when filtered through the corporate processing of this day and age, Disney still puts out good children’s entertainment which remains palatable for adults.  I saw this with my wife and son on a Saturday afternoon (as did a number of other families), and I was not disappointed.  There are of course the expected weaknesses around predictability and simplified characters, but that’s totally expected and not out of place.

Animated fun, not Pixar, but worthwhile.

2009 05 26 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Visitor

February 7, 2009:  The Visitor

I had heard about The Visitor for quite a while, and planned to see it, so it was great to see Richard Jenkins, a long-time character actor, get a Best Actor nomination and put this on my list to see before the end of February.  Richard Jenkins has been around for decades, and has been in a bunch of well-known movies (he stands out most in my mind as Ben Stiller’s psychiatrist in There’s Something About Mary, sneaking out to bring back his lunch while Stiller is in the middle of a therapy session), but hasn’t really been treated as a leading man.  He proves here that that is a real shame.  Step Brothers was the last thing I recall seeing him in, but he’s been around for 35 years and has 85 IMDB entries.

This film first showed up on the festival circuit, and saw a limited theatrical release in spring 2008.

Anyway, The Visitor is about Walter, a university professor in Connecticut (played by Richard Jenkins), widowed some time ago, who is something of a loner and not really a people person.  He is reluctantly sent to New York City to present a paper he officially co-authored but didn’t really write.  He happens to maintain an apartment in the city, which he has had for a long time and presumably can keep because of rent control regulations, so we know that he has a history in the city and isn’t faced with the stress of finding an unfamiliar place to stay.  However, when he gets there, he discovers a man and woman who have been living in his apartment for a couple of months!  They leave once they realize that someone has illegitimately made the place available to them, but they have nowhere to go, so Walter invites them back until they get on their feet.  They turn out to be illegal immigrants from Syria who are trying to get properly registered in the country, and Jenkins helps them with the administrative details, comes out of his shell in the process, and incidentally learns some real-life lessons related to the paper he is about to present.

This is a quiet and deliberate film, which builds its characters over a comfortable running time in a thoughtful way.  People are portrayed as being generally understanding and compassionate, which is probably a much closer representation of reality than many of the story arcs seen in modern entertainment.  It doesn’t fall into the typical trap of people meeting and falling in love, despite teetering briefly on the edge, and is all the better for it.

Walter researches and writes about economics in developing nations.  As he spends time with his immigrant cohabitants, he sees the face of such economic struggles up close and hears real stories from real people.  The man living with him is a drummer, who plays with a group of drummer/musicians in a park in New York City, and Walter eventually agrees to learn how to play these drums and tries playing with the group.  This is in stark contrast to Walter’s colleagues, and until recently Walter himself, who are all white-bread academics totally isolated from the cultures they write about and about which they profess to be “experts”.  It’s obviously a difficult thing for Walter to get to know new people, but it’s also clear that once he knows someone, he can be a great friend.  He grows as a professional, and he knows it.

There’s also a strong suggestion of guilt, as Walter has this apartment which is empty most of the time, while others are struggling just to be allowed to enter the country and find a place to live.  This is a big part of why he comes out of his shell and reignites his love of life, which appears to have been snuffed out leaving him rudderless following the death of his wife, who was also passionate about music.

The Visitor is highly recommended, a movie which doesn’t feel shackled to the conventions of Hollywood storytelling, and is rich and rewarding as a result.  The plot is substantial but not overreaching, and the characters grow in such a way that you know there will be lasting differences.  They have changed as a result of their experiences.

Thoughtful, intimate story; breaks from convention.

2009 05 21 mike Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Frozen River

February 6, 2009:  Frozen River

Now, here’s a revelation!  A quiet, understated little movie, nominally anchored around one woman’s struggles, but with a supporting tapestry of characters and settings which perfectly capture the bleak and hopeless tone found in so much of the movie.  But bleak and hopeless though it may seem, these people have heart, and they know not to dismiss others outright just because of appearances or even first impressions, and it leads to far greater warmth and understanding than the icy landscapes of northern New York state would suggest are possible.

I knew nothing about this movie and may not have even heard of it before Melissa Leo got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.  There are usually one or two lead acting nominations scattered through the Oscars for small obscure films with what are considered to be standout performances by lesser-known actors.

Leo plays a mother of two in upstate New York, recently left single by a compulsive gambler husband who ran off, leaving her in desperate financial straits and with a payment due on the new double-wide trailer they plan to move into.  Following a chance conflict with a Mohawk woman from a local reserve, the two women encounter each other again and Leo learns that she can make money by smuggling illegal immigrants in from Canada across the frozen river separating the U.S. side of the reserve from the Canadian side.  The two become enamoured of the easy money and push their luck, coming closer and closer to getting caught, and in the process they learn that their situations are more similar than it first appeared, and they learn where their own limits are.  We cringe as we watch them blow past any prudent limits on the way to the inevitable conclusion, and this predictability detracts from the film despite being necessary for the movie to exist in the first place.  I don’t know exactly what I expect, since I don’t suppose I expect a movie about people who clearly understand what they can get away with, and profit from their crimes with no repercussions.  I like to think that’s more realistic, but when I open a newspaper (in a figurative sense what with the internet and all) to see what’s happening in the world, I realize that maybe movies are more realistic than I like to think.  Still, there are careful and smooth ways of telling these stories, and there are awkward and predictable ways.  Guess which one this is.

When I see obscure movies like this which are nominated for awards, I’m sometimes really taken by those performances, and sometimes not so much.  On the occasions when I’m not so taken, I end up wondering whether I understand movies and their related craft at all.  I was impressed but not blown away by Melissa Leo’s performance in Frozen River, so I don’t quite know what to think.  This is a “desperate mothers doing things for their children” movie, which is traditionally a no-brainer for acting awards, so I guess that explains it.  But to be fair, this character-driven piece, flawed though it is and despite sometimes-repetitive pacing, finds itself in the end and rewards the forgiving viewer.

The harsh winter scenes are clearly intended to reflect the bleak outlook for the community.  I was impressed by the depth of character of the two kids, and how they reacted to the newly desperate state in their family, trying to be strong and realizing that their mother was just doing what she could.  At the same time, kids will be kids and they get into trouble and don’t always listen to their mother, just like real children.  I didn’t immediately clue into the recency of their extreme poverty, wondering why she sent her kids to school with lunch money rather than packing homemade lunches, until I realized that they were in the adjustment period where all old habits are turned upside down, and hadn’t yet figured out where they needed to tighten up.  I was reminded of Wendy and Lucy in the subject matter as well as the desaturated and threadbare aesthetic of the film, and realized that again I had misinterpreted the exact state of poverty of the main characters.

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone rush out to see this, but it’s a solid rental for someone looking for a low-key drama which manages to achieve an intensity through the actions and internal conflicts of its characters, rather than from more outward and obvious conflict.

Riveting in its way, but flawed.

2009 05 20 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Duchess

February 6, 2009:  The Duchess

At this point, I’m in the heart of my push to view all of the Oscar nominees.  The Duchess was nominated for Costumes and Art Direction, which is entirely to be expected for such a period drama.  In the late 1700s, an aging British Duke (Ralph Fiennes) needing a male heir marries a teenager (Keira Knightley).  Daughters and miscarriages occur over the span of several years, raising the tension level, and then things get very strange.  In the end, there is a male heir, but at what price to the long-term sanity and/or happiness of all involved?

I knew nothing about this, although it was apparently based on a true story.  There’s a sometimes subtle, and sometimes overt power struggle constantly going on among the main characters, primarily the Duke, his wife, and her friend who is also his mistress.  The film was overlong, and dragged a little, so what was an engaging story for its genre ended up kind of shooting itself in the foot.

The costumes were impressive, of course, but I’m no expert judge of that.  As usual, I found myself wondering about the production design with the lavishly decorated estate houses, and in particular, I wondered how much of the costume work in such a film is new production, vesus reuse or modification of existing wardrobes.  There have been lots of period dramas made for the big and small screen, so there must be lots of pre-made clothing available.  However, shifting to a different area of a country or changing the time of the setting by 10 years probably creates a vast difference in costume details.  200 years from now, when someone is making a period film about the 1990s, would viewers notice if instead the characters are all wearing 1980s clothes?  It sometimes strikes me as taking a lot of time and effort and expense just to make the period details right for a movie, but then I think about all of the time and effort and expense put into explosions and car chases in movies (which undoubtedly cost even more!), and I remember that these things are all a matter of preference.

The Duchess was better than I expected, but it’s fair to say that I wasn’t expecting much.  Solid performances are seen from Fiennes and Knightley, and there are some suitably chipper or creepy supporting characters, but overall, this doesn’t set itself apart from typical period costume dramas with either its story or its setting.

OK, but it drags a bit.

2009 05 11 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

February 5, 2009:  Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

I knew that there was a previous Hellboy movie, and didn’t know that there was a sequel, but I watched this because of the Oscar nomination for Makeup.  It turns out to be some kind of tongue-in-cheek superhero/mutant story, and actually pretty funny, with Ron Perlman in the lead.

Of course I have no idea what happened in the first film, and I figure it doesn’t really matter.  I would give a plot summary for this sequel, but I really have no idea what was going on.  I quite liked the characters, but not the story so much, and couldn’t really invest myself in it.  For the second half of the movie, I was only paying about 70% attention, and I have to keep reminding myself that that is OK even though I write reviews, because there’s an almost 0% chance I would have seen this if not for the nomination.

The makeup was OK.  It was very heavy, which I guess is considered to be a good thing.  But apparently the makeup in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was better.  Supporting performances by Jeffrey Tambor and John Hurt add to the proceedings.  It’s also good to get some more perspective on the work of director Guillermo Del Toro, who brought us the strange and borderline-disturbing Pan’s Labyrinth a couple of years ago.  Overall, I thought the movie was enjoyable but I definitely wouldn’t seek it out.  If I were more of a comic book fan, it might have hit me differently.

Makeup good, characters good, story confusing.

2009 05 07 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Revanche

February 2, 2009:  Revanche

Revanche was the 2008 Austrian entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, which is more or less why I saw it.

The trouble I have with reviewing this film is that although I wrote a 250-word plot summary in my notes following my viewing, to reveal much at all of that plot would be to potentially spoil the movie.  There’s a man and a woman, and another man and another woman, and fate causes their lives and/or deaths to become intertwined in kind of horrifying ways on at least a few different levels.  That may not sound like it makes for a good movie, but I thought it was fascinating.  The story is complex but is well laid out, and the ending, or non-ending as I suppose it really is, strikes a real note of satisfaction with me.

Can’t say much, but liked it.

2009 04 30 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Australia

February 2, 2009:  Australia

Uh oh.  Here’s another review which threatens to keep me stalled for weeks even as I push to bring myself back up to date so that I can review movies within a month or so of actually watching them.  I had mixed expectations going into Australia, being generally a fan of director Baz Lurhmann and Hugh Jackman, but not so much a fan of Nicole Kidman and historical epics.  In the end, despite being overlong, Australia was loopy enough for me to be impressed after I saw it, although I can’t say that I’m keen to sit through it again.  This is one of those movies that makes me wonder how a director and editor can possibly go into the “office” every day in post-production, needing to watch and recut scenes over and over and over again.

I think one of the key points was that I warmed up to Nicole Kidman.  She was a bit tough to take in the first hour, but “lucky” for me, there was plenty more movie left after that.  I lost count of the near-endings, which to be fair, almost did make sense in the flow of the story.  However, some of the major subplots could have been cut, which would have conveniently removed one or two near-endings, and it would have been a half-hour earlier when the major villain finally met his end by being impaled on a fencepost or whatever horribly overdramatic thing it was that happened in order to emphasize how very evil he really was.  This pacing is the core weakness of Australia, since the first 2 hours breezed by for me (although again, not in a way that makes me want to rush out and see it again), and the way things wrap up at the first fake ending much more closely match the way I expect the real world works.  In the real world, the evil rich powerful guy usually ends up either ahead of the game or at the very least not negatively affected by his bad karma.  Why can’t movies depict something resembling reality?

I had been under the impression that Australia was an ambitious chronicling of the history of Australia.  It was decidedly not that, but rather an ambitious chronicling of some fictional characters over a few years leading up to and into World War 2 in Australia.  Kidman plays an English woman whose husband owns the only cattle ranching land in Australia which is not owned by a dastardly big-business bully played beautifully by Bryan Brown.  When her husband is killed, Kidman moves down under to try and take over the ranch, hiring a ledgendary rancher (Hugh Jackman) to help.  They try to assert themselves in the cattle business in order to bring some competition to the market (British military ships re-provisioning with beef are the customers).  All of this is set against the backdrop of the story of a half-aboriginal boy who lives on the ranch and whose grandfather, an aboriginal witch-doctor-type living off the land, watches silently from afar and helps them out when needed during their long cattle drive through the desert and up to the coast.

This film has plenty going for it.  Hugh Jackman is in a meaty dramatic role, something he doesn’t often get to do.  Exposure to the changing Australian seasons, where the dry desert comes alive after the annual rains, is something to behold.  References to and direct mentions of The Wizard of Oz (1939), contemporary to the setting, is maybe overly cutesy but mostly fits.  But the film is hamstrung by some serious problems.  There’s a romantic interlude 2/3 of the way through the running time which is believable to a point but overdone.  The visual effects are very distracting, with lots of obviously fake stuff in a lot of the wide-angle shots.  There’s the common cinematic device of different characters repeating a phrase as they come to believe in its true meaning, which is valid here but not smoothly integrated (in this case, the phrase is something along the lines of “[Person #1]: That’s the way it is.  [Person #2]: Just because that’s the way it is, it doesn’t mean that’s how it should be”).  The score is manipulative and there’s manufactured dramatic tension, although I can be a sucker for that.  Does it sound like the negative is overtaking the positive?

So why did I bother to watch this?  Well, as I mentioned earlier I consider myself a fan of Baz Lurhmann, although I can’t really figure out why.  I haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom (1992), although I know it’s well-liked.  William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) didn’t really do it for me, although I totally respect what it was trying to do.  And Moulin Rouge! (2001), the movie that set Hollywood into musical mode again after a merciful three-decade break, was actually pretty good for what it was, although I think I blame it for Best Picture winner Chicago (2002) the following year.  Maybe what I respect is that Baz Lurhmann can make a living by putting together only 4 modestly-grossing films in a span of 16 years.  The specific reason I saw the film was because of the Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.

Costumes OK, movie kind of sucked.

2009 04 29 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The Wrestler

January 28, 2009:  The Wrestler

Every awards season has one or two juggernaut movies, labours of love by filmmakers and their actors, which somehow manage to rise above obscurity and become talked about at water-coolers everywhere.  The Wrestler was such an example this year, and the back story of how this movie came to be, and what it’s done for its participants, is even more dramatic than what happens in the movie itself.  I don’t know how many people actually bothered to go out and see it, but either way people were talking about it.

The Wrestler paints a portrait of a broken, aimless man (Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke) who is coming to terms with the price he paid for letting his professional wrestling success outweigh his personal life.  Popular in the 1980s (an obvious composite of such players as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper or “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan – yes, I grew up watching Saturday Night’s Main Event as Saturday Night Live was occasionally pre-empted for an hour and a half of professional wrestling), he now works the third-rate wrestling circuit and sells his merchandise at nostalgia fan shows.  He tries to make amends with his long-estranged daughter but still doesn’t quite have what it takes to play a stable role in her life.  He explores the possibility of something more than a “professional” relationship with a borderline over-the-hill stripper (Marisa Tomei, who, while she has the acting chops to take on the part, definitely doesn’t strike me as looking over-the-hill) at the local sleazy peeler joint, with mixed success.  By the end of the film, Randy has examined his life, and realizes where he fits into the world, and accepts that.

These intertwined threads in Randy’s life go through wild ups-and-downs throughout the movie, generally driven by his mood and temper swinging from one extreme to another.  The strange mix of hope and despair on which the movie ends is a testament to the courage of director Darren Aronofsky to break from Hollywood convention and consider more closely what might actually happen in real life.  Mind you, Aronofsky is no stranger to breaking from convention, with the impenetrable Pi (1998), the horrific and controversial Requiem for a Dream (2000), and more recently the beautiful but incomprehensible The Fountain (2006).  I count myself as a fan despite the fact that I know I don’t “get it” when I’m watching his movies.  His work strikes me as being like what David Fincher’s output might look like if Fincher were a shade brighter in his tone and considerably more willing to depart from traditional narratives.  This is among the more narratively conventional Aronofsky films, but we can see the chaos beneath the surface, ever so thinly veiled.

This is a great character study – that’s all it tries to be, and I think it succeeds wildly.  Some viewers may have difficulty with the presentation, since there are some intense wrestling scenes including one or two particularly violent and degrading matches in the wrestling underworld as Randy hits his rock bottom, which make hitting people over the head with folding chairs seem cartoonish and painless.  But if you can take what the movie throws at you, it is gripping throughout, and comes to a satisfying and perhaps counter-intuitive conclusion.

The big story around this movie, of course, is the career resurrection of Mickey Rourke.  I had most recently seen (and barely recognized) him in Stormbreaker, but he’s been languishing for the better part of two decades since his heyday in the mid-1980s playing rebellious sex symbols.  Here he gives his all, and gets a well-deserved Oscar nomination for laying everything out for all to see.  He illustrates the little-acknowledged performance aspects of wrestling, such as bleaching his hair at home and going to tanning salons to keep his bronzed look, which is a courageous “behind the curtain” approach that not all actors are willing to take.  Rourke ultimately lost the Oscar contest to Sean Penn’s more conventional portrayal of the doomed Harvey Milk, a decision I haven’t yet quite brought myself to analyze since I wasn’t totally sold on the idea of Rourke winning, and didn’t think Penn needed to win again, but the other three entries might not have sat right with me either.  Anyway, I hope the momentum of this role propels Rourke into a revival, and that he can keep his famously difficult temper under control during future film productions.

Gripping character study, intense but rewarding.

2009 04 28 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

In Bruges

January 27, 2009:  In Bruges

I had been told by a friend for months that I should definitely see In Bruges.  I dragged my feet because I don’t know much about Colin Farrell, and while I usually like dryly humorous gangster movies, for some reason the marketing campaign hadn’t coveyed that to me.  I finally saw the film when it was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and I’m glad I did.  I think this was my favourite out of the movies I saw in the run-up to the Oscars this year.

In Bruges is set, appropriately enough, in Bruges (Belgium), where we meet a couple of English hit men (young whippersnapper Colin Farrell and older and grizzled Brendan Gleeson), who have been sent there by their boss after a job, and told to await further instructions.  The idyllic picture-postcard setting is appreciated by Gleeson and lost on Farrell, though both are uneasy about the purpose of their open-ended stay in Belgium.  Eventually the reason for the trip is made clear, and things take a dark turn.  Their boss (Ralph Fiennes, appearing in three Oscar-nominated films this year, the other two being The Reader and The Duchess) eventually shows up, and all hell eventually breaks loose, in a public square, no less.

The faithful reader knows me as a writer who harps more or less endlessly about Oscar nominations and wins, and I should reiterate that I completely understand that the awards don’t represent a pure and unadulterated view of the highest quality films of a given year.  The marketing and glad-handing and bribes play a huge part in this recognition, but the cynic in me views that as just the established way of doing business.  Everybody knows that, and the necessary compromises are well understood, so I see it as being a level playing field within that larger context.  Measuring the “quality” of films based on any other single source, like Roger Ebert’s reviews or RottenTomatoes.com or Leonard Maltin’s reference book, would be to simply accept different influencing factors.  The Oscars are significant, just not always for the reasons they’d like you to think they are.

With that rationalization out of the way, I wanted to comment on In Bruges’ obvious comparisons with Pulp Fiction.  14+ years have gone by since the release of that iconic film, and even casual moviegoers are aware that an insane flood of imitators has been churned out continuously ever since.  In Bruges could be classified on the surface as a Pulp Fiction knockoff because of the snappy dialogue among well-dressed gangsters, the overarching code of honour among criminals, and beautiful widescreen photography immersing the viewer into the location.  But In Bruges leaps head-and-shoulders above many of the other imitators/homages, and indeed it achieved an Oscar nomination for the very award Pulp Fiction won.  That carries some real weight.  It lost to Milk in the end, but I wasn’t exactly picking my jaw up off the floor after that announcement.  The Best Original Screenplay Oscar is very strange territory, and I take it much more as a suggestion of 5 good movies to watch, rather than one in particular, since its awarding is often politically driven as a consolation prize for a movie which is otherwise mostly snubbed.

So why did I like In Bruges?  Well, the story was inventive and seems like it has good replay value.  Ralph Fiennes has a nice break from type and chews scenery in a manner totally appropriate to his over-the-top role.  There’s a refreshingly feisty and independent female lead, more than just a romantic interest, played by Clemence Poesy (whom some might recall from one or more Harry Potter movies that I skipped).  Brendan Gleeson (Hamish, William Wallace’s burly red-headed best friend in Braveheart) is always great – check him out in 28 Days Later as well.  There’s a dwarf who is portrayed as a regular guy for a change.  The movie is the right mix of darkness and fun.

Mind you, it does nearly go off the rails for a few minutes here and there, which had me worried, but it quickly got back on track.  Also, some things are clearly foreshadowed and/or predictable, but that seems to be par for the course.  Movies are movies.

In some of my reviews I ramble on a lot, but don’t come up with much of a recommendation either way.  If you don’t mind some gangster stuff and violence, absolutely check this one out.

Gangstery fun, great dialogue, see it.

2009 04 27 mike Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink