Change Your Image
eme-9
Reviews
Lord of War (2005)
A String of Anecdotes Rigged to Make the Author Look Good
I cannot understand how those TV critics gave this film two thumbs "way" up. This is the season of overrated movies maybe.
Voice-over narrators are not inherently bad. In SMALL doses they work well, say, in detective stories, and movies where the main character--not the author or biographed person being portrayed by an actor--but a fictional CHARACTER--is doing the narration, for example, in the fabulous Kind Hearts and Coronets, or in Lolita. A narration, whether it's purpose is to "cover" events of 20 years, or to manipulate the audience into thinking/feeling a certain way--a la TV's Desperate Housewives--is not a substitute for a plot, and the necessary UNITY a good plot must evince in order to produce an emotional reaction in the audience to the events the main character undergoes. That unity cannot be glued on by a voice-over narration. A good plot must show--you've heard this term--an "arc". This is what produces catharsis--why YOU watch movies, or read novels. People, that is, consumers, are most often concerned with "what is the movie about?" But subject matter is only part of a story. The same subject matter in Lords of War can be seen on TV news and tabloid shows, and even Frontline. I seek something more from movies and books. I seek magic, escape, satisfaction.
It takes guts to set yourself free from "what happened" and turn real events--by selecting some, and eliminating others--into a real story. Telling "true" stories is most often a straight jacket on artistic story-telling. "But it didn't happen that way," squawks the person whose precious story is being told. The collaborating writer shrugs and rewrites the scene, removing material which might have helped create a better STORY. An example of an excellent, compelling movie "based on true events" was Shattered Glass. Lord of War is a mediocre movie, at best "watchable", but unsatisfying.
Just because it contains the obligatory moral-of-the-story doesn't make it good. Message movies never get out of their own way. Actually, the moral of Lord of War is curious and a bit too facile--Uri justifies his profession because the U.S government is the world's largest arms dealer, so what right does the U.S. gov have to persecute/condemn him?
It's EASY to get a rise out of people by depicting gore--bullets smashing into heads, etc. It is much harder to bring the audience to satisfaction by telling a great story with great characters.
Yes (2004)
No.
YES is watchable, and obviously Sally Potter's "labor of love", so I gave it a 7, but that's because I'm kind.
The dialog of this movie is entirely in verse. Speaking/writing in verse creates some heavy expectations of/in a movie's audience, emotional, and perhaps spiritual expectations. Shakespeare could get away with it, his verse generating a certain ancient resonance of universal Truths transcending, yet underscoring, an individual's petty self-concerns.
But in Yes verse creates false gravitas. The "adulterous" love affair doesn't seem all that scandalous, sorry to say, nor portentous with broken sexual suppressions: the newly "liberated" lovers will be sure to suffer for, at last, breaking taboos and having their moist FUN.
Some powerful "moments" in Yes, yes, and potentially it was evolvable into a great movie-but that didn't happen: *Obligatory interludes in southern regions, over-stewed in style, style never a substitute for deep content, *Been-there-done-that jogging in the sun-filmic foreplay for the fluidic reunion, *Herkyjerky camera, *An unintelligible whispered soliloquy in Irish brogue-making a case, as long as the film-makers took such care to deliver the precious verse, for optional English subtitles, *Char-women making direct "contact" with the audience with no emotional justification for their domestic pontifications, which seemed (2me) incongruous.
The lovers' reconciliation was meaningless (2me) because I didn't care that they had broken up. Actually, when they, or rather he, the petulant putz, broke up, I felt: Good riddance!--who wants a man, a doctor no less, who twiddles his germy mustache while preparing people's food!
Crash (2004)
Candidate for Most Overrated Movie in History
First, I had no problem watching Crash, didn't take a bathroom break and forget to first turn off the DVD player (a sure sign I'm not enjoying the feature presentation). I was very impressed with Sandra Bullock's performance especially. Don Cheadle, as always, was also excellent. No actor's performance in Crash, in fact, can be faulted. The problem is: poor "STORY". No critic I know of has looked at Crash from the perspective of STORY.
The multiple vignette concept, as seen in Magnolia, Short Cuts, Happiness, and various other efforts, is a way of using, and maximizing fallow fiction material without having to properly develop any single story. As a substitute for a single well-developed story and its appropriate "subplots", the vignette movie-writer attempts to "unify" the vignettes--for example, the players are all people living in the SAME city, which isn't quite enough, is it? but that's Crash--and this "unity" is extremely difficult for the writer to effect without resorting to puerile contrivances, and forced drama -- drama which seems to be controlled, not by the characters' choices, but from "above", by a "deus ex machina", the Greeks called it, whether it's a chorus of chanting Fates, or splatting frogs, or a writer pushing an agenda and using puppets (characters) to speak for him, the contrivance explains "everything". No "plot", that is, no story, is necessary.
The various vignettes in Magnolia are "unified", finally, when frogs rain down on everyone, no exceptions, in the stories. There's William Macy sitting in his car while frogs splat on the windshield. No absurdist philosophy can justify this BS, this, to quote myself, "puerile contrivance" of an "ending", which demeaned the rest of the movie. As other posters said, the actors in Magnolia --Cruise, and Phil S-Hoffman--were excellent, and it was just as worthy of winning an award as Crash was, which is to say, neither was.
The "unifier" in Crash was ... well, everyone lives in the same city. And, oh yeah, people will sometimes CRASH into one another to get a little "contact". That's the Crash agenda. The internal "logic" of one vignette, Matt Dillon's, is shoddy, garbage writing, false. It "just so happens" the only cop on hand to rescue a woman in her burning SUV is, guess who?--the cop who just "molested" her. What a coincidence. Let's teach everybody a lesson in ... melodrama. Set-ups and (moralistic) "punch-lines" passed off as plot. Pick any story-line in Crash, Sandra Bullock's, for example, or Matt Dillon's,and imagine it fully developed into one great STORY.
To all but worship Crash as some sort of paean to racial "truths", should be a felony. Crash looks and talks "funky" enough, but it's loaded with a "politically correct" subtext. Speaking of which, I've had my fill of that sanctimonious monomaniac, Oprah, going goo-goo over this movie and the players, read: black players, in it. Gimme a STORY already!