Well, in the past couple years, we've seen all sorts of explicit experiments in visiting the movie past. Some of these are simply through emulation: using old story and acting conventions, perhaps even old cameras, sets film stock and so on. Others visit the past in more clever and indirect ways. "Goodnight and Good Luck" was a thoroughly modern picture set fifty years ago and wearing that era like a costume. Gosh, now that I think, there are too many to list, each interesting in what they choose to use from the past and how they use them as objects or environments.
Now this. Here's a case where the movie is a strange disappointment if you watch movies for the story as the direct carrier of its intent. Its confused beyond what the normal viewer can tolerate and where the filmmaker intends ambiguity and tension we get the impression the film is a failure. But it isn't; it is wholly realized, its just that the message is conveyed on the telephone wires next to the track instead of on the train.
The story: a woman has ten kids and a husband who is a mean drunk. She's completely on her own; her priest (she's Catholic, obviously) and the local police buddy up to her husband against her. She's bright so she enters contests a previously popular advertising gimmick and wins enough to save her family (always at the very last moment) from certain disaster. The woman is played by Julianne Moore, and superficially she creates a woman who is defiantly happy no matter what. No matter what, even after negotiating charity from the milkman, then having her lousy spouse push her down breaking all the milk and seriously cutting her. Smiles still to the hospital and back.
So if you stick with the story, defiance is in her attitude and the prize is this sainthood granted her by her children, one of whom writes the thing.
The narrative experiment and happy, happy gloss is established well before we know she's cursed by what feminists would rebel against. And its that narrative structure that you will find interesting.
Julianne's character is the narrator. Often, she looks directly at the camera and speaks to us. Sometimes, she is on screen twice; once as the narrator and again oblivious to the fact she is being spoken about.
This notion is extended by a gimmick. Her contests mostly are posed on TeeVee shows and there's a lot of overlap in several different ways between TeeVee space and narrator space. That narrator space gets pretty big; One example: our narrator explains how contests are judged. She sits on an envelope and flies to New York, following the entry. Another: she wins a sandwich slogan contest and the sandwich literally comes out of the screen with three dancing women in pastel dresses (like that of our heroine). They commingle with the narrator-TeeVee-contest space which by that time we've accepted as her private refuge from reality.
Later, the house becomes populated not with actors playing the ten children, but the actual children themselves, now grown of course. In this sequence we see the daughter who wrote the book take her mom's typewriter.
Its scads more sophisticated than say, what Woody Allen did in "Purple Rose of Cairo." But it reads.
And it works if you allow it because Julianne knows how to place two persons in one role, what I call folded acting; two skins one hers and one ours.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Now this. Here's a case where the movie is a strange disappointment if you watch movies for the story as the direct carrier of its intent. Its confused beyond what the normal viewer can tolerate and where the filmmaker intends ambiguity and tension we get the impression the film is a failure. But it isn't; it is wholly realized, its just that the message is conveyed on the telephone wires next to the track instead of on the train.
The story: a woman has ten kids and a husband who is a mean drunk. She's completely on her own; her priest (she's Catholic, obviously) and the local police buddy up to her husband against her. She's bright so she enters contests a previously popular advertising gimmick and wins enough to save her family (always at the very last moment) from certain disaster. The woman is played by Julianne Moore, and superficially she creates a woman who is defiantly happy no matter what. No matter what, even after negotiating charity from the milkman, then having her lousy spouse push her down breaking all the milk and seriously cutting her. Smiles still to the hospital and back.
So if you stick with the story, defiance is in her attitude and the prize is this sainthood granted her by her children, one of whom writes the thing.
The narrative experiment and happy, happy gloss is established well before we know she's cursed by what feminists would rebel against. And its that narrative structure that you will find interesting.
Julianne's character is the narrator. Often, she looks directly at the camera and speaks to us. Sometimes, she is on screen twice; once as the narrator and again oblivious to the fact she is being spoken about.
This notion is extended by a gimmick. Her contests mostly are posed on TeeVee shows and there's a lot of overlap in several different ways between TeeVee space and narrator space. That narrator space gets pretty big; One example: our narrator explains how contests are judged. She sits on an envelope and flies to New York, following the entry. Another: she wins a sandwich slogan contest and the sandwich literally comes out of the screen with three dancing women in pastel dresses (like that of our heroine). They commingle with the narrator-TeeVee-contest space which by that time we've accepted as her private refuge from reality.
Later, the house becomes populated not with actors playing the ten children, but the actual children themselves, now grown of course. In this sequence we see the daughter who wrote the book take her mom's typewriter.
Its scads more sophisticated than say, what Woody Allen did in "Purple Rose of Cairo." But it reads.
And it works if you allow it because Julianne knows how to place two persons in one role, what I call folded acting; two skins one hers and one ours.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.