Recent IMDB Comments
July 23, 2008 Monte Carlo: Operatic
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.3
DVD at Amazon
I seem to be spending time with films like this. If you take away the story (excepting the last five minutes) the characters, the dialog and the songs, this is a very fine movie. It has such deft technique that it can support a tone of light humor regardless of the main attraction.
This fellow was a master. Too bad he only made useless movies.
There is what I call a narrative fold. The story is that a nobleman disguises himself as a servant to get close to a penniless noblewoman. They fall in love. He is shunned because he is a commoner — or perhaps because he has no money, it isn't clear. As all simple love stories do, this one must end with discovery and happiness. It occurs when the two at an opera where: guess what? The story is the same.
In that last few minutes, the songs and words on the stage of the opera overlap with those on the stage of the movie. Its nice.
The craft is enough for this.
July 22, 2008 Si j'étais toi: Insides
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.7
DVD at Amazon
It doesn't matter much to me that this movie fails, because its based on a pretty good idea. I assumed when watching it that the Japanese original was better as they typically are. It seems not.
The idea here is one at least as old as Shakespeare: when an actor plays a character, he or she hosts an unnatural soul in the available body. So if you want layered performance, you set up a script where this happens within the story. Its what's called folding, folding in the acting. Clever actors seek these parts, which turn out to be comparatively common.
What to do if you want to go further than anyone has? You introduce sex. Now, sex is also about one body entering another, so this can work, especially if there is some extraordinary tension. The plot provides. The situation here is that a woman's soul is transferred to her sexually active sixteen year old daughter. The man and girl both horny, frisson results.
In fact, this is one of those movies where the description is more interesting than the movie. Things like this are hard to make, especially when you have to conform to the limits of how sex can be played. And of course when you lack basic skills.
July 22, 2008 The Dark Knight: The Noir Card
Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 9.5
DVD at Amazon
Two things interesting about this for me. (I'll let others talk about Heath.)
One is how much more of a comic book it is than a film. I don't mean that it is sillier or more fantastic, but that the values seem to be based on storyboards as panels. The implications are pretty interesting. All those Marvel productions are pretty much the same: the same level of fantasy, the same vocabulary of cinematic effects. The same slant from "graphic novel" framing to modern film traditions — which incidentally are less designed than are the accidents of common CGI compositing tools.
This on the other hand is not cinematic. It makes it boring for me visually, but there's another result: the story. The story is not your standard long form arc. Its at least four stories concatenated, as if you would read a few pages and come back at the next lunch break. It rambles, it has real comicbook soap opera. I really do think of this as a comic book that accidentally finds itself in a film.
That's as opposed to "Sin City," which though based on a comic, and supposedly co- directed by the comic artist, is intensely cinematic, so much so you almost drown.
The other feature for me: the handling of noir.
Noir is all about how the viewer manipulates the action by viewing. It has permeated nearly every corner of film and most intelligent filmmakers try to play with it. It is the primary narrative tool we have to add depth by adding layers. The Nolans are intelligent filmmakers. While the film isn't very cinematic, the script is, in this regard.
The novel trick here is the joker. Sure he is played well, and Ledger was becoming one of our foremost folded actors. But the thing works because the role was written to matter, and that's because he introduces a double noir fold. The watcher is in the film, and the watcher is "writing" the script regardless of any action that anyone in the film can take. Its classic noir doubled. The joker's key speeches even cover all the noir highlights: you have to ruin routine; you have to profoundly affect, even kill random innocents; you have to express an amazingly complex orchestration and make it seem capricious, accidental. You have to deny intent and complexity. You have to pretend to not be amused.
All these things are embodied in what Ledger was given. This is very important writing, and if you know "Prestige" and "Memento," even "Following," you would have expected something like this. Even if the film isn't good as a film, the writing is, and that allows Heath to make a film within. Its why "Clockwork Orange" is so important.
July 22, 2008 Saawariya: Red Miller's Wife
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.2
DVD at Amazon
I'm not very familiar with Indian cinema, but it seems that the Bollywoord formula is easy to understand.
I was sent to this as a gentle introduction, partly because my friend know I would immediately pick up the reference.
It seems that the songs and stories are all predetermined. All the characters and situations. The only thing that varies is the setting, and often — I am told — they take that from other films. Here it is clearly "Moulin Rouge," one of my deepest film experiences. And they do it well, thoroughly.
There's something to admire in the process of production design, when it does something like this that is both coherent and borrowed. I imagine it as a sort of rebirth of the Hollywood studio system from the 40s, where professionals were highly tuned to making collective visual imagination real — a sort of Hindu Lubitsch.
July 19, 2008 Mamma Mia!: Walking
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.2
DVD at Amazon
Musical movies are movies after all, and even a good musical play can be a bad, bad movie.
This is a bad bad movie, made by someone who is not a filmmaker. No Julie Taymor here: her stage skills do not translate well to the screen and in fact every single cinematic device here is borrowed, many even from "Sound of Music."
But its still an enjoyable experience. The girl is pretty and there are is a staging of a wedding that will color fantasies for a hundred years. The songs, even in their versions here, are gloriously catching. They all seem to have been designed to walk, walk, walk, hold, so even by listening you are dancing; the prancing we see is only a reminder, clothes exaggerated to highlight the important parts.
The only affecting thing in the performances is that Meryl gives the impression that she is having fun. And we enjoy that, especially a bit after the credits start. She's near sixty and I imagine has a long life yet. Its good to see this energy, good to see a 60 year old playing a 40 year old getting married.
July 18, 2008 Return to 'Sin City': A Tribute to Gram Parsons: Too Heavy
Year: 2004Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: Unrated
This is quite a disappointment. If you know Gram's music, you'll probably be offended by this.
See, the thing about Gram wasn't the melody or words, what is borrowed here. It was the lightness and sadness in the way they were sung.
His songs were patterned after ordinary country songs, which by design are simple and unassuming. His lyrics addressed a tragic life without the humor or detachment found in the originals. So they are notable in that respect, slightly.
But it was the way Hillman found a sparkling lightness with glittering small notes that were there only to fill the space as if they were sequins. And it was the way that on top of that, that Gram sung. His songs are delicate. Dylan's songs can survive any mangle, any approach. But Gram's were engineered for his voice and the way he surrounded his words with a perfect melancholy, so perfect that you suspect it, but so honest that you know in your heart he is a lost soul.
Its Janis turned inside out, the female firefly urges hanging in the space around his face. Emmylou made this perfect by occupying that space and giving him something to surround. Something like that can never happen again, never. Its those moments we need to celebrate, not the burned corpse of the song, dragged across the country to be sung by talented posers.
And the way they treat the material! Instead of a filigree, they give us a powertool. Instead of the lightness it owns, we are served a heavy boom a cucka thunking, the sort of thing that his vision has degenerated into. This is country rock now, where it once was cosmic Americana.
The Nora Jones solo is remarkable, not because of the song, nut just because she understands what it means to dance around a phrase. Its a different set of shapes than Ingram, but lovely nonetheless.
Then we get Keith Richards. The final desecration.
July 17, 2008 Fallen Angel: Gram Parsons: The Situated Seduction
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.9
DVD at Amazon
You should know I am biased in this comment. I know some of the people in this documentary. And I had Gram's piano in my house for ten years after he died.
I value what he found with Emmylou as charmed, unique and important. His music never touched me personally because it was so hopeless in intent while being so seductive and original in its phrasing. This is everything Sinatra was claimed to be. It was genuine; just the wrong food for health.
There are two stories here. One is the story of what actually made the music special — when it was. You won't get this from old musicians or girl friends. You have to get it from someone who is a storyteller of skill equal to the subject: subtle, light, subliminal and full of contradictions. Addiction before it manifests, while it is still an urge.
This documentary misses that, misses it completely. Some people say that he was influential and then point to what today is called country music. That's neither useful nor correct. You miss everything if you miss this.
There is another story, the "Tennessee Williams" family tragedy that proceeds three generations before and already two after him. Its vastly more complex than described here, cleaned for obvious reasons.
Some day, someone may find a way to tell this story in a way that is not merely voyeuristic, but in a way that matters, that is deep and that changes lives. Until then, simple people will just want the broad outlines, and some unusual drama. And they will be able to get that here.
The editing is fine. The archival footage is valuable. There are lots of good songs.
July 16, 2008 The Little Vampire: The Queens
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.5
DVD at Amazon
Sometimes the way a film is structured, the story is so automatic, so determined that all you can do is watch the actors. The most interesting time for me is when the actors are doing something remarkable — some representational, emotional gymnastics, or some collaborative kinematics.
But most times its just as it is here, you watch the actors not because they are doing anything interesting, but that they were in interesting projects. The nature of the enterprise here (vampires, kids) references stories outside the movie, so this character- by-reference idea is natural.
Pamela Gidley is the human mom. She was "the girl" in Figgis' ambitious project about space fugues: "Leibestraum."
Alice Krige is the vampire mom. Fantastically attractive, she has been in both a Maddin and Quay Brothers film, both in roles that you will never forget. Here she is made up as a vampire version of Queen Elizabeth, modeled more on Jenny Runacre's Elizabeth than the portraits or more conventional looks. Check the shape of the hairline to see that yes, this is Derek Jarman's Elizabeth turned from counterculture punk to vampire queen.
Richard Grant was (and will always be) Withnail, and is also burned in my mind as interloper of the most outrageous orrery in film in "Hudson Hawk."
And hey, here's Anna Popplewell as the preteen love interest. We just saw her in an equally vacuous movie ("Wardrobe2") now with breasts as the teen love interest. Her development and carriage seems worlds away.
How the mind wanders.
July 15, 2008 21: Surf Heard in the Background
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.9
DVD at Amazon
Its a matter of tone. No matter what a film does, it has to take us somewhere. Ideally it goes another place after it has established you, but it has to establish a place, a form, a tone.
MIT is a place worth being taken to. Not the fictitious clowny place of "Good Will Hunting" but the abstract warmth of the infinite corridor. Not the silly notions hinted at in "Beautiful Mnd" but the sexual fulfillment of deep math. Its cinematic. Its valuable. This does not take you there.
Las Vegas is also a valuable tone to set. Unlike that mathematical warren of mind, many, many films have taken us there and given us the lights, motion, unconstrained urges and those that live off all these. Its naturally and simply cinematic. Its cheap, you have to try hard not to take the viewer there. This doesn't take you there.
It takes you nowhere, and to nowhere from there. This isn't just the filmmaker, its the actors. No one is a being. No one establishes.
What's left is looking at the girl, I suppose, and wondering. She was wonderful in a little film called "Blue Crush" that was natural, whole, simple. I wanted to go back to it all through this.
July 15, 2008 Monitor: Elgar: Was Lush, Now Rotten
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.4
DVD at Amazon
Taste is a very strange thing, among the strangest. It fascinates, especially when I encounter something that repels me that many people like. Smart people or apparently so. And the encounter is through film.
This is such a thing. It features the music of Elgar. His music is vapidly florid, like cheap, loud perfume. Like tooled leather on a carriage just there to fill the space with decoration. But was a credible entrant in a national competition when all symphonic music was such, and so became a British champion, not unlike a soccer player. These national feelings color the love of the music, establishing it as normal. Its why Constable is venerated. Its not that he was great or even notable artist, but dammit he painted England!
Along comes Ken Russell, a young filmmaker. From his later work, we know he is a man of overblown excess, of cheap shapes and trick colors. So it is no wonder that he was drawn to music of the same ilk. If you don't like snippets of this music, you won't like the film, because that is the core of it.
They are excepted and played all out of context, and the fact that it doesn't matter is remarkable. There is no long form musical narrative, no development, just rosy conversation. While listening, we see an illustrated life, partly re-enacted.
Its dreadful, every bit of it. And highly regarded all around.
Why? Its a mystery, a beautiful mystery.
