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MieMar
Reviews
Bandidas (2006)
entertaining but ...the girlie aspect damages the whole
Good fun (if bit predictable). However, started to wonder as was watching it...what's wrong with two talented beautiful actresses acting their age...?!! They should have either cast girls - actresses who look like they could be young daughters still living at home at the start of the film ie teenagers - and so it would have had that believable silliness of two girls finding themselves, learning how to kiss & rob banks etc.
Or, with Hayek and Cruz simply being women of their own age in the era, more experienced, with a bit of character history (not just "educated in Europe" and "a farmer's sweet daughter")...
The ladies aren't that touching as just little ingenues anymore (and nothing wrong with that! )... and so we are left with just a male fantasy, boring for this girl viewer, where these two gorgeous, much seen actresses are pretending they are sweet sixteen, bit ditzy and oh so not-threatening.
Pretty half-hearted, for two "bandidas". Too girly for most guys, too "guy-y" for most girls...
Homeland (2011)
Amazing start grows to a bit of a disappointment
I cant help but wonder if this was meant as a one off but was changed when opportunity for season 2 came up... it starts off so tight and constantly surprising while being still completely logical. But by episode 8 we are watching some kind of a spy soap and the story is kinda derailed.
The production is still excellent but I am struggling to stay interested when plausibility becomes a bit of an issue. Like when a whole identity picture has to be drawn before the CIA can tell a difference between a black suspect and a ginger one... or when poor Damian, suddenly the best pal of a terrorist leader, wades through corpses only caring about one little boy. It might be just me but towards the end it seems that Lewis and Danes struggle a little to stay convincing. Which is a pity as both were absolutely excellent to start off with, Lewis extending on his brilliant work in Warriors over a decade ago as a war veteran who brings the complexeties of war home with him.
Until episode 5 or so I thought I was witnessing the future of thriller series, with new political and psychological acuity, like what The Wire did to police series or Six Feet Under to family drama. Now it looks a bit like just another TV-series with tons of talent and nowhere to go.
Ach, I hope I am wrong - the first impressions bowled me over, the direction and production style, amazing cast delivering like crazy, story that kept you guessing and thinking and entertained... lets hope the writing gets back its edge. Red herrings might make you watch the next bit but they don't make for a story you really care about returning to.
Margin Call (2011)
Near miss
Interesting enough (although longer it goes on the less you care, surely that is bit wrong) and great cast (although no-one gives anything near even to a career third best performance).
I think that maybe the film makers miscalculated a bit, they were quite eager to show that these people (how ever cut off from realities of most people & reality of money to the now famous 99% of the population) are still people like us too...
Because, actually, I think some of them really aren't. I mean, Dick Fuld (John Tuld in the film) by most accounts is a complete psychopath.
And I am not that interested if someone who is an active, irresponsible agent of destruction happens to be worried about the future career.
The film is just not ruthless enough about corruption and people deeply into creating financial bubbles to be interesting to most ordinary people. Now it could be sort of summarised: "many of the bankers feared they'd lose their houses too and their next years' million dollar wages, so they kinda sold rest of the economy up the river. Maybe. But many of them would be decent people too, given half a chance." Only area where it gets interesting towards the end is when Tuld (strangely toothless Jeremy Iron's who you would have thought could have killed Fuld) tells they need the best brains around still because there is fortunes to be made "coming out of this mess". That's where we are now, but the film is not.
So, Kevin Spacey goes and buries his beloved dog and sticks around to make the next bonus cheque, all alone cause he's miserably divorced too. Bo-hoo. I really don't have the empathy this film seems to have for these people.
Two for the Seesaw (1962)
Love this film...
Very unexpected gem... but you gotta like them talky to love this one.
Based on a play and that really shows. But LOVE the way it examines the nooks and crannies of a relationship.
Its about two people who have something to learn from each other, and not in an obvious way either. Who is hanging their hope and dreams on who here...? And completely disagree with those who find Mitchum too deadpan for this... he is completely his character, a old school guy of another generation (compared to Gittel, or MacLaine for that matter)... but enough of an off-beat to head to New York to live with some bed bugs once his marriage goes south. The phone calls between him and his wife are painful, Mitchum who himself had a long suffering wife who he had married young and ultimately stuck by (despite, apparently being super unfaithful), I think gives a very brave performance, possibly inspired by the cheer chutzpah of MacLaine's talent. He really shows the complex emotional ties that come with a very long marriage....for the generations who really, without a second thought, thought they married for life.
The emotional tables are turned on them both several times, and you always think its completely true.
There are a couple of clunky moments, and you must honestly also just take it on the chin (pun) that this was made in an era when a "slutty" woman could expect to be slapped for flaunting her "lack of morality". Here its all part of her problem though, the way she accepts how others treat her, much too readily.
Great, very little known film that seems to fit no genre what so ever.
Maybe its closest relatives are some french new wave relationship dramas. And those it beats, hands down. Because, unlike the Le French, its not about Women and Men but about people...
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Strange love of Martha
Simply, just a brilliant and unjustly forgotten classic. I am deducting one star for poor wooden Lizabeth Scott although she has her passionate fans (maybe you get lucky and turn out to be one of them, I didn't). And another for the at times clumsy editing/pace.
This is maybe Barbara Stanwyck's best performance - and that is saying a lot as objectively speaking, her scenes aren't always the best staged or written. But she's got this complex woman by the scruff of the neck and she makes her both chilling and heart-wrenching. When she bursts into tears mid-attack at her childhood sweetheart Sam, it feels completely believable that this woman - like his other love interest, Scott - just needs a break...
...except she is a rich heiress who could have had as many breaks as she wanted, if she could just see them.
I also belong to those who think Kirk D's drunk husband is brilliant and regrets that he would go on to do one note macho tripe for the rest of his life (and yes I include Spartacus in that). Strong looking weakling, a paranoid DA with quick mind for underhand methods seems the perfect role for him.
Ps. despite its oddness: the title is PERFECT - its not only Martha Ivers whose love is a bit warped but her husband's too, as well as the easy going Sam Masterson (Heflin) who can't but fall for who ever seems the most trapped, vulnerable woman around.
As someone already pointed - the closest connection to modern films is Almodovar. I bet this films in his DVD shelf....
Another Country (1984)
Brilliant little period film
This film is ageing brilliantly well. OK, the end might, the chat about accepting your sexuality etc, be very much of its time and of the stage where the film originated, but the film is crisp and, despite its slowness, wonderfully alive. The classically beautiful photography also helps the timeless feel of it.
In the scenes of Everett and Firth the film really comes alive, and the actors have hardly since been better. Firth of course has less to do but the strange Firth hallmark reserve - which Tom Ford exploited for A Single Man but for me, in most roles including that one, makes him somehow permanently fake - has not yet set in. Judd, the character, holds himself back but is present in a way that older Firth rarely manages. Everett, without a doubt, has never been better. Which, in itself, is a bit of a tragedy. Its a fantastic role but he is stunningly good, subtle and showy at the same time. No wonder that Orson Welles was impressed. His Guy is insolent, vulnerable, naive, world-wise, cynical, poetic, open, deceptive, gentle and ruthless. I was a bit of an admirer of Everett's work and persona even before seeing this film - he seems one of the last real people out there, in the homogenised, we're all just lovely people, really, fame-game arena - but find to my disappointment that his acting work is too often the least interesting thing about him. Which, truly, is a pity because as this film shows, he really has the goods as an actor - and clearly enough experience and emotional honesty in real life too - to actually really grab us, draw us in and make us feel for him, with him. But in a lot of his work it seems he rarely brings the full package of emotions to work, happy to perform a facet of a man for us - often a rather glib one - rather than a full creature. I'd love to see him do something brave again, as I am sure that the man and the actor he is now could wash the floor with his younger self, in terms of complex, deeply felt emotion.
Another Country, with is milieu of extreme constraint, beautifully frames the feeling and behaviour of the boys it observes, and the focus on the endless rituals of the boarding school life also work to remind us how world is out to shape these boys (a kind of an anti-Harry Potter/Trinian's, in that aspect) and works still as a metaphor for society at large. In some ways times have changed less than we'd hope - or less than it looked like it would change, a few decades ago - even if caning is a distant memory.
I wanted to give Another Country 9 stars but unfortunately, although the cast in uniformly very strong I feel that the third key role, Guy's love interest James, hasn't dated well and the performance is flat, leaving Everett to do all the work in their scenes. For the film to overcome the slight staginess of the ending and to give real meaning to the innocent way that Guy and James choose to conduct their romance when boys around them are clearly habitually doing much more would have needed an actor who could match Firth and Everett in terms of interpretation of a role.
Oh, and people who can be bothered to complain about the old-man make up on Everett at the end - get a life. This is a film, all latex looks fake, even today, how ever much you choose to believe it, for what ever reason.
Glorious 39 (2009)
Such a disappointment
I am a big fan of Poliakoff and this should have been great atmospheric piece but important parts are just off key, most of all the script that seem couple of drafts away from being what it could have been. Now it is just slow and quite unbelievable, things happen because the plot needs them to happen, and you can see the cogs turning. Just tighter editing might have helped at times, like when the first record (oh so conveniently) got broken.
Camera and editing seem a little off too, not as stunning visually as his last work on TV was... Cast are doing their best but somehow hang over nothing - usually Poliakoff manages this miracle, so little happens and is said but the tension and the sense of mystery (of life) underneath is palpable beneath - like puppets in the air, bit uncertain of their moves. Poor David Tennant was particularly badly served, left in our minds just a awkward over acted scream on the gramophone record... Maybe because there now is, in plot terms, a mystery too: what is going on with the records and the Jeremy Northam character and does Bill Nighy know. So the usual Poliakoff treat of sensing the strangeness of life in general doesn't manage to surface from under all this plotting. Also, the main character became at time quite annoying, always whining about not being believed even before anyone said anything...and then, when she realises she's in a nest of asps she keeps talking most unguardedly at places where she's clearly overheard. One thing that thriller's tolarate very badly is a hero/ine who comes across much dummer than the viewer...
What a missed opportunity!!! Just not good enough I'm afraid. Made you feel it was LAZY film making.