Humanoid Josh

Three thousand words

2005-09-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

Nothing more than a vehicle for green screens and even-voiced, guns-blazing swagger. Monologues continue, unperturbed, a few seconds after the coup de grace. It's not Tarantino, except when it is--but only briefly, then. The only credible leads are Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen--I cringed some at Alexis Bledel, as out of place as Lauren Graham in Bad Santa. Well. Benicio del Toro's nifty, too, but I don't know if I want to encourage that kind of performance.

Right. It's a vignette movie, sort of, and a little overfond of snappy motif-ery in the dialogue. "No need to play it quiet" gets said a couple times, and Bruce Willis reads the same damn scene twice. Not that it's not effective, 'cause it is--just don't expect a whit of subtlety here. I should also say that I liked it a bunch. It's beautiful all through, even when Elijah Wood gets eaten by his dog. Um. Belated spoiler alert! A must-see.

Image hosting!

2005-08-31T19:20:00.000-07:00

Don't mind this. It's for a GO! thread.

Song without words

2005-08-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

"Song without words" is the second movement to a Holst suite I played in high school. I played cues for the oboe solo--pretty. Anyway, this will be a movie review without screenshots.

This came to be mostly because there weren't many quotable frames in In the bedroom. It's a peculiar way to watch movies, looking for keyframes, and I don't know if I'm any good at it. Maybe it distracts my attention from the real purpose of the movie onscreen. Maybe, but I didn't think this one was worth especial attention anyhow.

It's another quietly lovely film without much merit past the setting (Maine, complete with docks and lobstering and the expected, blunt-trauma metaphors) and the cinematography. Like I said, though, I couldn't find a single still image that I wanted to capture. Several little clips I'd like to include, maybe good enough to rent the movie again, rip it, and do a postmortem. With software-forceps and a healthy detachment from plot and character. There's a Blazer, approximately (I don't know cars) crossing a little bridge at nighttime, with arrays of triangles forming both sides, and the headlights make expanding shadows over the water and the trees on the other side. That was stunning, but it's a kinetic thing--like a slow sigh filling a room, or something.

The plot iron maidens a nice short story by Andre Dubus (I bought a little anthology last week, read half, and forgot it at home--damn) into a two-h0ur-and-ten-minute agonizer. I complained to H., during the movie, about "pointless insertions" to bulk up the story, which doesn't deserve that kind of treatment. There's a painful metaphor at the beginning:

Two lobsters got caught in the same cage. Deathmatch ensues; one loses a forelimb. A proverb is invoked: "Two's company; three's a crowd." Already I've developed a muscle twitch. I wonder if the whole rest of the movie's going to be about domestic conflict, or the fallout thereof.

Yes, it is.

This movie is rife with sloppy emendations and interpolations. Having read the story a few days prior, I could tell when the dialog was lifted from the original and when it was spun from whole cloth. The original snips stood out like little bluffs overhanging the rest of the affair. Frank Herbert, author of the venerable Dune series, produced a son. Bad news: said son continued the series after his father passed away. Cases like this argue forcefully against genetic determinism--the kid can't write. The screenwriters who got their mitts on the original story ("The Killers") are of the same ilk.

And yes, maybe I'm attached to the book and can't appreciate the movie, because deviations from the text are inevitable, etc, etc. But I don't think so. Even if I've judged the writing unfairly, I maintain that the movie is too damn long, no getting around it. The story was spare and rich with implication. A tic was described in a paragraph, and the reader (I) imagined significance in the smallest gesture, and the mood, grim and sad and desperate, channeled the imagination into appropriate and meaningful places. In the film, nothing is left to the imagination. Bits hinted at on paper are crass and ugly in daylight.

On the up side, I'm still minorly infatuated with the really super Tom Wilkinson. And Marisa Tomei manages to eke real beauty out of an otherwise by-the-book tumble in the grass with her young love. And things can be just heartbreaking on film, and dialogue can always be ignored or muted.

Stop!

2005-08-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

..
..
Continue.

In the middle of the other side,

2005-08-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

Quotated,
Read the following words:

Movieblog!

I saw We Don't Live Here Anymore the other night. I'd heard about it a while back, when it was in theaters. First thing I noticed was the cast: Mark Ruffalo, whom I liked in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and was more than a little annoyed by in You Can Count on Me, and Naomi Watts, who's got more grace and talent in a fingernail than, say, Catherine Zeta-Jones has in her whole body.

One dead fingernail. This reminds me: I don't have any Rushmore screenshots yet. Easily remedied: I've got the DVD somewhere--in the car, maybe, under the socks.

I was first introduced to Naomi Watts as a Hollywood hopeful in Mulholland Drive, memorable (to me--sorry, Lynch fans) only for its protracted, prettily shot lesbian sex scenes. I was happy to find that she's a fine actor, too, in I [Heart] Huckabees.

What I was saying [ellipsis] I figured We Don't Live Here Anymore for a mopey failed-relationship movie. Which it is. I could call it very focussed, or very oblivious--real life seldom intrudes into the frame. It's the four leads, two husband-and-wife couples, and the occasional saucer-eyed kid. Work is presented, and briefly, as an extension of the men's emotional lives--the restless lech, the soulful girlyman--and the women are housewives.

Right: one standard-issue cutie-pie kid, looking coolly into the well of her father's sorrow. Actually, the kids here are commendably normal--no Dakota Fanning-style b.s. here. Like, no Matildas, no wiser-than-her-years parent-kid role reversal. A quiet relief.

I decided, maybe halfway through, that this isn't a good movie. This isn't to say I didn't like it, 'cause I did. But only because of my particular situation relative to matters of this kind. It's very suggestive, full of ellipses, significant pauses, etc. Contemplative music. There are long shots without speech, and the actors' faces and the ambience and the feeling of dread that accumulates through the film are supposed to contain, and convey, some meaning. I'm convinced they don't. But! It gives the viewer something to work with--empty space to fill as he likes. So I was allowed to imagine all kinds of complexities that aren't really there.

Here's one of those scenes. Mark Ruffalo is vaguely discontent. Later on (this is from the opening credits), he and his wife spar cattily. The coldness in his voice evoked a memory real enough in my mind to imbue the scene with real feeling. But, thinking about the dialogue, and the performances, it didn't really hold together. A couple of people spitting poison at each other isn't automatically believable, often as it happens in real life. The director tries the old instant-backstory trick--an occasional, unexpected shot of the characters, younger, with the color intensity dialed subtly up. You know the trick I mean--it could just as easily have been shot on fake home video tape. It worked lots better in The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Campbell Scott rides his bike with young wife Hope Davis on the handlebars, obviously scaring the shit out of her. Downhill. Well. Dentists had visible motivation. The characters weren't always sympathetic, but they made sense. We Don't Live Here Anymore is too coy, like oversize sweaters. Everything's left to the imagination.

It is very pretty, though. I like this shot of a traffic light under snowfall.

Anyway, I've spent a good part of the day culling cool screenshots from some movies I've ripped to my new hard drive. I'll post more later.