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Mashi69
Reviews
Match Point (2005)
A crime without punishment and a Woody Allen without wood
I'm being fair with Allen's movie and voting a 7 just because he's been able after so many attempts to FINALLY "elaborate the mourning" for his wrecked marriage and difficult life over the last decade in the manner that real artists do: by hiding, rather than showing.
He really was off the target in his last... how many? 4? 5? 6 movies? when he showed unable to abandon his by now stereotyped querulous, paranoid and irritating character who talked and talked without getting never to the core of things.
Yet of the three keywords he's been only able to show the "obsession" part. Btw, what have you perceived to be the main character's obsession? Scarlett Johansson or Emily Mortimer? I believe it is Rhys Meyers' wife and her craving for pregnancy that becomes the real obsession. A life in the form of a gilded trap for a honest and candid Irish Paddy. Both Passion and Temptation are more or less left on the background.
A huge note of blame for the way Allen tries to stick by force some Dostoevskji in the story. It takes more than showing the cover of a book and kill two women to even scratch the surface of that endless research of Good and the struggle between ideas and deeds that obsessed the Russian titan throughout his work.
What is Rhys Meyers "higher design" that he mumbles when dreaming the women he killed? It is not clear... perhaps the fact that he will pretend to love his wife to make her happy. Only in this sense Allen becomes Dostoevskjian: "Crime without punishment" read wrongly one of the DVD extra... wrongly because his punishment and redemption is there; his wife.
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Degraded perspective about degradation in a polished videoclip packaging
My opinion on this movie has rapidly degraded as hours and days passed by. I too, as the movie progressed, got involved in the neat technical package, and violence in itself was not so disturbing... you know, we are civilized 21st century men! we love violence (when we are not directly involved with it), plus we love violent movies and this one, well,was just a punch to the stomach a bit harder than the previous ones. And then the story, ooh, it was so wisely penned! with that delicious ironic look à-la Tarantino to smooth the edges of the bullet holes.
But after a couple of days I focused my thoughts and decided that I did not like it. I found it disquieting. Not because of the violence and degradation depicted. I'm partially editing my previous comment just because I know that the average 20 y.o. boy (who is, I think the average and perfect audience for this movie) is not able to understand a subtler critical stance about violence in movies and only thinks "hey, violence exists so why movies should not show that?", and that's the reason why such a movie is currently ranked as the 18th best movie in the History of Cinema. Makes me think that when internet will be accessible by all 6 y.o. children, "The Lion King" will quickly surpass this pretentious movie.
So what's wrong with violence in THIS movie? It's the way that the director has chosen to treat it. Can you show kids aged 8 that roam through the streets killing light-hearted and selling drugs? Yes, it's not shocking to show that, it sure happens for real in some damned place of humanity. Can you show kids aged 8 who smell death with terror in their eyes (the real terror, like only kids can feel) before getting shot because they have crossed paths with some leading gang? Yes, it's horrible but it probably happens for real. Can you take all this nauseating stuff about our refined societies and bring it on screen packaging it like an MTV videoclip? big show, hip music, special effects, frenzied camera movements? Yes, you can, but you risk total failure in delivering your message. If Meirelles' and the like's intention was to point their fingers at this degradation and tell the world "Look at what it's happening! How can it be possible that we are not able to change all this?", and they wanted to attain this with the lighter feeling of irony... well, then they totally failed! With their opportunistic art they have just shown to be a mechanism of the social processes that lead to that same degradation.
How many of these "10 star-brilliant-astonishing-movie" people still bring in their stomachs the look of those kids after the coke and pop-corn have been digested? This is the point: this movie is just like a fireworks show with no moral queue, and the only sensational thing about it is the way it misses the real targets... politicians, police, businessmen and foreign governments. And as for the presumed realism... please, don't make me laugh: just learn that "spectacular" and "realistic" are antonyms.
Ying xiong (2002)
A harmless fable with lovely colors
I'm perhaps biased because I don't like overusing unrealistic battle scenes in the manner some Hong Kong-China-Taiwan directors have been doing these late 10 years or so. It's OK: realism is not the goal of a the-making-of-a-nation movie. But even wearing a pair of reality-filtering glasses I cannot be unaware that repetition and exaggeration are part of the common lexicon of parody, and I don't think Yimou's intention was to sketch a parody. All the opposite, he's damn serious.
Even the fables we were told as babies, though unrealistic by nature, had some limits: they used an imaginary setting to convey a real-life teaching, but the stress was always on the teaching. Would you have the wolf blow off a dozen houses and hunt down a dozen piggies before being defeated? Or let Pinocchio's nose become half a mile long when he lies? And would you have Aladdin find three magic lamps instead of one? Just useless. So, for me 60 minutes of impossible fighting on a 90-minute movie is definitely a redundant thing.
Nor I do find interesting or provocative at all its simple moral "the ultimate good must tolerate some temporary evil": we've been living thousands, dozen thousands, hundred thousands of years of "ultimate good", is it not enough to consider it just as temporary as that evil which is supposed to justify it? People fight to impose their ideals of good to other people, there is nothing provocative in this, just inescapable. Perhaps, we might say, today it is much less inescapable and when armies export democracy there's a good deal of other reasons along with the "ultimate good".
Not much else to say. I don't know enough about the "martial arts" movie canon but I suspect this one just don't aim at being a super-mega-kung fu movie; as well as I know enough of the taoist principles to realize that here they have been used in a flat and shallow way, so this is not a philosophical movie either. Must we really conclude that this is a movie about heroism? I fear the answer is yes. But since I hold Yimou in high esteem, I hope the nameless hero is just a way to quote those nameless heroes who have died by the millions crushed by Chinese communism (this for what regards the "ultimate good" part), even though there are not enough signs in the movie to justify such an interpretation.
And it's OK, but I sincerely would have preferred if in the end Yimou had respected at least the complexity he seems to infuse in the king of Qin during the movie, by highlighting his grief for the rough and merciless mechanism that leads civilization forward cutting down the passions and the ideals of the individuals. All that is left of this issue is the nameless hero's hint when he whisper into the king's ears ("remember the people who will die"). What I liked most is the dual being formed by the actions of Broken Sword and Flying Snow, that well exemplifies the contradictory pulses which live side by side in everyone of us, a complexity that cannot survive to the final judgment of decisions.
So, a feeble-boned film, but what a fantastic skin! The movie is a real visual experience and stars those Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung who, for the habitués of oriental cinema, have a value added deriving from movies standing on a higher ground than this one (see "In the mood for love", "2046").
Dancing at Lughnasa (1998)
It takes more than stone cottages and moors to show Ireland: folkloristic!
Like all those who have criticized this movie, I too missed the point, because to me it just seemed a less than ordinary movie about ordinary people. I never saw the stage play, perhaps here lies the rub: that kind of continuity that films need (and plays don't, being divided into macro scenes) is totally lacking. The result is that the structure of this movie slackens and shows gaps as big as those of matter at the molecular level. I agree, the setting is beautiful: movies dealing with peoples who have strong traditions and attachment to their land must inevitably try to make the landscape one more actor. But when a work of "art" (lesser art) shows so blatantly its inner pathos-inducing mechanism, then the use of a spectacular landscape just makes things worse, as in the case of Dancing at Lughnasa: "folkloristic" in the worst acceptation of the term. Exemplary in this sense the voice off of the boy, Michael, who in the end has the nerve to say something like "I will remember those years as the most beautiful of my life" after having spent the whole movie interacting with the characters much less than any of the bushes in Mundy family's courtyard.