Fruits Unheard Of
A buddy-system blog of film reviews. Inspired by E.M. Forster's rhetorical question: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Please let me know if you'd like to take a stab at writing a review. (I've been told that the experience is a combination of mass frustration and deep satisfaction.) I will watch anything! Bring it on...
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Love Letters to Lee
After our dreary experience with Silver Linings Playbook, Brian and I felt wildly refreshed by another nominee for Best Picture (among other nominations which include Canadian composer Mychael Danna for Best Score). On this Valentine's Day, we both have bouquets to toss at Ang Lee.
Brian's Review of Life of Pi
Life of Pi: An Appreciation
Care
I love seeing
places I know in film. They feel like a secret shared between me and the movie,
a whispered "We know this place, you and I." Here, Ang Lee uses
recognizable locations in Pondicherry and Montreal in a way that maintains the
integrity of the local geography alongside the imaginary geography of the
story. He announces: Space matters and will be treated with care and attention
to detail.
Depth
3D is a spectacle
of depth attempting to deny the flatness of the screen. Objects are close or
far. They are in front of or behind. In moments of frenzied action, Life of Pi uses 3D in this way. More
often however, 3D is used to make empty spaces deep: air over flat water, light
on rippled water. Space expands quietly offering room for thought.
Unexpectedly, during
its most spectacular moments, the film arranges objects in the frame so as to flatten the image. A boat floats on a
black pool of brilliant stars; or it floats in a field of buttery light, sky
and sea indistinguishable except for the thin horizon drawn through the center
of the frame. These moments of flatness are announced as a compositional
strategy in the animal montage rolling under the opening credits, most
memorably in the picture of a bird and the flowering branches of a tree. The 3D
technology cuts the image’s foreground from its background, creating an
illusion of depth, but the photography cancels that illusion by composing its
subject in the manner of a silk painting.
The shallowness
of objects pitted against the depth of emptiness. This strategy is thematic. It
is also the only intellectual use of 3D technology that I have seen.
Love
The action of the
story is both constrained and enabled by the geography of the lifeboat and
raft. Distances between the raft and the lifeboat, between the front of the
lifeboat and its back are crucial here. The 3D underscores the distinction, and
here too, it is thematic. What after all is a dance between too close and too far
if not a love story? And this film is about nothing if not love.
Two images
capture that story for me. In the first, a tiger hangs to the edge of a
boat by a claw, desperate and lost. A young man, ax in hand and desperate too
to live, looks down from above and recognizes the tiger as real and alive and
worthy of care. In the second image, a tiger sits in a boat as night falls waiting
for the young man (who looks on from afar) to come back to their home.
Between these moments is a story of generosity and kindness given freely
until the giving becomes a habit and the habit a joy. That feels like a
definition of love to me.
Caitlin's Review of Life of Pi
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Poetry in 3D
by Caitlin Murphy
Prose writers
uncertain about cinematic adaptation would do well to trust their work to Ang
Lee. In Life of Pi, based on the novel of the same name by Yann Martel,Lee reveals again,
as he did so strikingly in Brokeback
Mountain, his deep integrity as a story-teller and sensitivity to source
material. What results is a film that is
visually glorious, entertaining and profoundly moving.
Pi, an Indian
teenager, is so named not as an allusion to math (we are told in playful
backstory) but to a famous swimming pool in France. He is voyaging to Canada with his family –
and the many inhabitants of their former zoo – when a massive storm strikes. As the sole human survivor of the shipwreck, Pi
ends up sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and must
devise ways to survive at sea with his impossible companion. As anyone who’s read the novel knows though, Life of Pi is actually the story of this
story, and an exploration of what it means for a story to be ‘true’. In a framing narrative adapted from the
novel, but adjusted for the film, a middle-aged Pi recounts his unbelievable
experience to a curious writer who has heard of his tale and sought him out to
hear it. Filmed in Montreal, mostly in the old Port,
these brief scenes add an extra little thrill for Montrealers.
To my delight, the
film is populated with essentially unknown actors. Having originally cast and filmed Tobey
McGuire as the listening writer in the framing narrative, Lee eventually
abandoned that footage feeling that McGuire’s star status detracted from the
centrality of the story. This strikes me
as one choice among scads of smart others that Lee made to protect and
priviledge Martel’s material. First-time
actor, Suraj Sharma, is compelling and forceful as Pi, especially given that he
spends most of the film not only acting opposite a non-human, but opposite a
non-flesh being even – 86% of the images of tiger Richard Parker were created
with CGI. To consider the amount of blue
screen work this entailed for Sharma, and the resultant workout his imagination
endured, is to find an evocative behind-the-scenes parallel to Pi’s own story.
At heart, like the
novel, the film is not so much about survival, as about storytelling and
faith. We don’t tell ourselves stories
because they’re true, but because they keep us intact. Pi’s memory of his near-death experience
serves as metaphor for the role of religion, but more generally his relationship
with Richard Parker also stands in for impossible situations of all kinds and
what we manage to do with them – an admission that life itself is essentially an
untenable proposition, full of suffering, pain, loss and fated from its
inception to end, that we negotiate as best we can.
At the ticket
counter, I grumbled shelling out extra money because the film was in 3D, and
even considered not seeing it. In my
limited exposure to the trendy gimmick, 3D has felt like a sad add-on meant to
vaguely “intensify” the film-watching experience; usually no one has taken the
time to think through what it’s actually supposed to be contributing to the
film beyond its own ‘trippy’ effect. Here,
its use is so refreshingly elegant, restrained, and thematically relevant, that
it actually felt integral to the story-telling.
The cinematography, heightened by the 3D effect, is so uniquely stunning
that water, animals, stars, trees appear re-invented, served up new again.
Indeed, the film’s
exquisite imagery made me feel like I’d been forgetting the sublime beauty of
the natural world – suddenly an animal’s colours, stripes, movements, whiskers
felt previously unseen or unimagineable.
Putting the audience in this naïve place of wonder is perhaps the film’s
single greatest achievement.
Watching Life of Pi is to be reminded of how very
much we have to marvel at. Which could
be a cheap, pat or cheesy lesson. Except
that it’s coming from Ang Lee, who is always doing something else altogether.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
The More Things Change
Somehow, nearly 5 months have elapsed since the last reviews. Shameful. But as my original blog-buddy Brian and I discovered as we began our Oscar nom viewing checklist, there is always a ridiculously contrived and unsatisfying upside to every down. Sigh. Enjoy these dismissals of Silver Linings Playbook.
Brian's Review of Silver Linings Playbook
Genre in Bad Faith
by Brian Crane
So I wasn't going to watch Silver
Linings Playbook. I'd seen the trailer and was pretty sure that it would be
terrible. Then one day, I found myself heading to a theatre to watch this thing
with Caitlin as part of our Best Picture screening list. Sitting down, I was
genuinely confused: how could a trailer be so misleading? I quickly learned, it
wasn't.
This movie is clearly a romantic
comedy. But in what I take to be a bid for contemporaneity or seriousness, it
makes a big deal about cutting through the bull, getting real, and addressing
the problems of relationships today. The hard truth this film proposes is that a
lot of us are sick, diagnosable, requiring accommodation. To know each other,
the characters don't need to communicate. They just need to be brought up to
speed on their case histories. And so, in scene after bathetic scene, we listen
to unpleasant characters announce their diagnoses to each other as if these
constituted personalities. "I AM" he says. "I AM" she says. "I AM" he says. And
so on and so on. And who cares?
For all it's self-importance, this
approach to character is much more simplistic than the approach native to
romantic comedies of the classic 1930s sort. Watch Bringing Up Baby or
The Philadelphia Story or It Happened One Night and you'll see
movies about adults made for adults. They have happy endings, yes. But these
movies earn those endings in complicated and emotionally complex stories that
transform their characters and launch them forward into life. Nothing in
romantic comedy--the cinematic genre most closely related to the theatre of
Shakespeare--is simple or easy. It only seems that way because we want so badly
for its faith in us to be true.
Silver Linings Playbook may
believe its view of humanity is smarter and truer than romantic comedy's, but in
the end, it can't pull off the picture it wants to paint. "I AM" plus "I AM"
doesn't equal "we." And so in it's final moments, the movie generates the
romantic closure it seeks by embracing (without avowing) the romantic genre it
has worked so hard to repudiate. Out of the blue, this movie about him saying "I
AM sick, that's just me," and her saying "I AM (not) a slut, deal with it,"
becomes a movie about a dance competition, one part Strictly Ballroom,
one part Little Miss Sunshine. Untrained, outclassed and with all of the
family's fortunes on the line (don't ask), the characters decide to try their
best, dance their hardest, and in the end, against all odds, discover they can
do it if they just let go and have fun. The family fortune is saved, and the
two, now lovers, find each other and kiss in the empty nighttime streets, happy
finally together.
I think this movie wants to update a
genre. It wants to make those silly, old-fashioned movies take account of what
we "know" today about human experience. How after all, if so much of what we
feel and experience is actually symptomatic of illness, can you find love? It is
telling (and reassuring) that the movie can't offer an answer any different than
the established generic answer. That four-hundred year old tale of marriage
delayed but achieved through work and conversation still rings true to our
experience and aspirations. The tangle of diagnosis this film takes as our lot
does not.
…and yet, all those awards and
nominations…
Something in us wants to believe in
the new story of sick people this movie can't figure out how to tell. And that's
terrifying.
Caitlin's Review of Silver Linings Playbook
Like a Lead Balloon
by Caitlin Murphy
A few years back, the Best Picture Oscar
category was expanded from a list of 5 nominations to a maximum of 10. The change seemed to have merit: create room for the less conventionally epic,
the more comedically inclined, the smaller budgeted – or otherwise just somehow humbler – cinematic offerings
to enter the fray. It’s a move that’s
allowed the Oscars to embrace such gems as this year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which might otherwise have fallen off
the radar. But it’s also a move that’s
backfired, letting in riff-raff like Silver
Linings Playbook. Written and directed
by David O. Russell (The Fighter) and based on the novel by Matthew Quick, the
film is a warmed-over rom-com that manages mediocrity at every turn.
Set in Philadelphia, the film opens
with Pat Solatono (Bradley Cooper) being released from a mental health
institution where he’s been staying since a breakdown 8 months ago. He comes home to live with his football-obsessed
father (Robert DeNiro) and snack-making mother (Jackie Weaver), armed with a
new determination to always find life’s silver linings (why haven’t other
bi-polar sufferers come up with this yet?). Pat strategizes to re-establish his life,
regain his job, and win back his wife (currently holding a restraining order
against him). Out for a run one day, he
meets Tiffany, a sultry, recently-widowed 20-something, who’s been
self-medicating with sexual promiscuity.
In exchange for getting Tiffany to hand-deliver a letter to his wife (not
sure why the American postal service wouldn’t work), Pat agrees to be Tiffany’s
partner for a dance competition. And thus
the bumpy wheels of the ‘romantic’ plot are put into crunchy motion.
In the vein of As Good as It Gets, the film attempts that awkward blend of actual mental
illness (as opposed to mere personality quirk) with light romantic comedy,
trotting out that old chestnut that true love can fix any noggin. It seems the only recent revision to this rom-com
narrative of “fucked up guy, meets redeeming girl who saves him from himself” is
“fucked up guy, meets similarly fucked up
girl, who saves him from himself.” Equality
at last.
Pat’s behaviour though never quite
feels ugly or complicated enough to do service to the reality of serious mental illness. His capacity for violence is typically tied
to ethical outrage: his initial
breakdown, for instance, resulted from discovering that his wife was having an
affair and losing it on his romantic rival.
Well, who wouldn’t do that, right?
At least a bit. And once he’s out
in the real world again, the only time Pat’s violent rage re-surfaces is when
he defends his Indian therapist from a bunch of racist football fans. Awww.
Focusing also on Pat’s father’s OCD-like
behaviour surrounding his beloved football, as well as his own history of
violence (he’s banned from stadium games), the film seems interested in
suggesting that we’ve all got our own case of the ‘crazies’ and some are just
more official than others. But it’s a
theme that never really gathers much momentum, and limply lies on the ground by
film’s end.
To return to the Oscar noms, the film
also somehow wound up in the undeservedly distinguished company of films like A Streetcar Named Desire and Who’s Afraid of
Virignia Woolf with nominations in all four acting categories (leading and
supporting). Bradley
Cooper, (who no matter what he does in his career I will always comfortably
reduce to ‘that guy from The Hangover’)
demonstrates precisely why he’s always expressing red-carpet bafflement to have
found himself with an acting career. His
performance is so much fluff. As for
Jennifer Lawrence, I like her – her
husky voice, solid build, no-nonsense posture, Juliette Lewis-like snark. She had me at Winter’s Bone and it will take quite a bit to undo that love at
first sight. But she’s wasted here. One-note and predictable.
When Pat’s father loses a huge football
bet that he wagered based on a rabbit’s foot faith in Pat, everyone rallies
around to help him. What follows is a
long, sloppy scene in which the players plot out an elaborate parlay bet to win
back his money by pairing up the results of a football game with those of Pat
and Tiffany’s dance competition. The
scene was reminiscent of a bunch of squabbling screenwriters sitting around
past midnight trying desperately to figure out how to ‘end this thing.’ And this is exactly what the film felt like
far too often – watching what the filmmakers were ‘trying’ to do, the awkward plot-making
machine churning away.
And the bow that ultimately wraps up
this turd? A boy-girl chase scene that
ends with a kiss in the middle of the street.
Of course. Like every other
moment in Silver Linings Playbook, it’s
precisely something you’ve seen before, or else something that vaguely stinks
of it. The entire film lacks texture and
specificity, and when it does manage to scrounge some up, the results are so
contrived and self-conscious, that it might as well have crept back to its
sleepy den of cliché.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Of Buddies and Beasts
My original buddy, Brian, is back for this one and hopefully many more. We knew pretty little about Beasts of the Southern Wild going in, which meant for that much more to delightfully stumble upon. Enjoy!
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