Month: April 2009

I remember the day when I saw Adaptation. It’s one of those movies that will remain fresh in my mind for ever because of the sheer absurdism of it. The premise? Two people each write one half of a movie script – the script of the very movie they are in – which makes for one crazily distorted story and two halves that when put together, make little to no sense.

It was okay for Adaptation – that was the movie’s concept. It was not okay for Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s return after 300 and Sin City. Snyder’s known for his stylistic approach and roller-coaster kind of movies where plot is not really important. This movie – even though once again he technically didn’t invent the story himself – is no different from the two others. Oh wait, technically fifty percent of it is.
Glorious Violence!

The times, they are changing

As soon as the movie starts, it becomes apparent to you that you are watching a Snyder movie. The camera is stylish (but on a better level than this movie’s older brothers) and the violence… well, it’s very gratuitous. A little spoiler of useless violence you will be seeing during this movie (not exhaustive): a bullet being shot through a leg, a man being chopped in the head repeatedly with an axe, a man who gets boiling oil tossed over him, a man whose arms get sawn off, a running guy on fire, an arm being ripped out of its socket… Even though I usually don’t quote other reviewers, the New Yorker’s Quote on Metacritic kind of says it all on the violence for me:

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

Now I have nothing against a good bit of violence in a movie. I also think some of the fight scenes were really well done – the opener of the movie truly blew me off my chair – but this sort of graphism? Not really needed, kind of like gratuitous sex (which this movie had aswell, complete with a fl
amethrower as metaphor for the orgasm – even if it was ironic)… it usually pulls me out of the movie more than anything.

The Last Laugh

That is to be said, not all of the movie is popcorn-and-violence-based pictures. The first half of the film – which takes a lot of time setting up our “heroes” – is actually really, really deep. The backstory for every vilain is a tragic story of its own, a story filled with rape, prostitution, lost loves… This part of the movie was simply amazing and stunning, and I wished it would never end.

But it did. About 60 percent into the movie (a point at which it could have already ended – the thing is a whopping 160 minutes in length) the whole thing suddenly turns into a very generic… comic book hero movie. And with that, the whole magic of the movie is gone: the alternate 1985 (not the one from Back to the Future) suddenly felt shallow and shoddy, the overly dramatic dialogue suddenly became tacky and silly… It felt to me that as soon as the Silk Spectre put on her latex outfit, the whole crowd re-hit puberty.

In all..

Watchmen is a true mixed bag. For one, the first half is awesome – the best cinema experience of the year so far. Secondly, the second half is anything but awesome. Thirdly, and most importantly, though: this movie has no reason whatsoever to be 160 minutes in length. Kill your babies – it would’ve made this thing a lot stronger.
The whole back-to-spandex thing this movie pulls on you would have been far stronger had it only lasted for fifteen to twenty minutes. No chatting on Mars, no tacky sex scene, no endless Deus-ex-Machina pulling with Dr. Manhattan…

However, I still can’t think of a reason to truly tell people not to go see this. Because ultimately, you should. The setting and the first 60 percent of the movie are fresh and unique and pull unseens stunts on you. The introduction sequence showing the rise and fall of superheroes is amazing. Dr. Manhattan’s backstory, where Koyaanisqatsi music suddenly creeps up on you, is breathtaking. Rorschach’s tragic youth, fittingly told through ink blot tests, was unbelievable.

So why did they have to turn it into just another pop corn movie? Oh, right, the comic.

Favourite Quote:
Dan: What happened to us? What happened to the American Dream?
Edward: “What happened to the American Dream?” It came true! You’re lookin’ at it.

The advantage of living in a big city is that big cities have big things. Case in point: IMAX. Seeing how I’m a small town guy, I’d never ever visited an IMAX cinema before. So now that something mildly interesting was actually playing there, I figured I’d check things out. So I got treated by Monsters vs Aliens, Dreamworks’s new animation. In glorious 3D!

Let me confess to you: I’m actually not a big fan of Dreamworks animation. Sure, the technology is there, but their movies always feel soulless. This movie was not an exception to the rule: the hair looked realistic, and so did the skin… but then they put those realistic technologies into the most creepy animated human ever. Ew.

On the other hand, though, the story told in this movie is a lot better than the past few that had the Dreamworks name on them. No more endless sequels (seriously guys, the first Shrek wasn’t exactly the greatest movie of all times, so what’s with all the sequels?) or crazy movies moving at lightning speed (squirrel from Over the Hedge, my eyes are on you). I’d like an unpretentious movie, a bit of entertainment and a laugh here and there. And that’s exactly what I’ve got.

This movie is not great. It is never great. Nor – in my opinion – does it try to be. The main character has the staleness of a Dreamworks main character, there is another character for comic relief, and all of the characters – all of them – wander through the plot being underused. Except for the main character. You know, the boring one.

But hey, you’re watching Dreamworks. You don’t get to be picky. You opted for a good, two-hour laugh. And that’s what you get. Loads of movie references (Men in Black, Indepedence Day, Godzilla…), some awesome-looking characters (the cockroach-o-saurus and the egg-robot-thing, for example – just never the humans, never the humans)…

I just can’t write anything else about this movie. It’s not bad and it’s not good either. The 3D was cool. But without 3D? Not worth paying a cinema ticket for. Wait for the DVD. And then rent it. It’s like fast food: you gulp it down and forget you ever had it.

Reviewing The Reader is not going to be easy. In fact, I wonder why I even bother. Maybe it’s because The Reader managed to touch all my strings and I have the feeling I need to write something about it just to be able to get said strings unstrung. Maybe. Hopefully.

One day in Europe

Before I let myself get carried away in the morality-versus-law discussion lying at the core of the movie, I have to say something else: the fifties and sixties Europe created in The Reader is reason enough to go see this movie. It’s right to the very toothbrushes, houses and bikinis. It’s breathtaking how they pulled off a two hour feature without breaking the illusion of Europe once. I’ve never seen an American production do this – the fact that a German production team, along with a bunch of Germany’s most talented actors, was involved, really helped.

With that out of the way, time to get lost in endless tirades about… other stuff. Like Kate Winslet winning an oscar. An Oscar that was well-deserved if you ask me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female actor pull off these kinds of performances. Before you jump on me and eat me alive, allow me to elaborate. A common tendency in Hollywood is the fact that most big actors and especially actresses seem to spend more time trying to make themselves look good than actually act properly. The Reader is somehow different: never is Hanna, Kate’s character, truly sexy or pretty. She’s always small and jagged around the edges. She walks like an old woman torn apart by guilt. This is simply beautiful. And it makes her beautiful. And sexy. If that makes sense. Doing something like this as an actress takes a lot of nerve and confidence. And lo and behold, it worked: it made the sexual tension between Michael and Hanna very… human-like. Very credible. Very recognizable.

The lady with the dog

And that’s what this movie is about. Humans. Not illiteracy, not sex, not the holocaust… humans. And how humans make mistakes, even if they know they’re making them. It’s a tragic fact that Hanna joined the SS because she was trying to hide her illiteracy, a tragic fact that lead to the destruction of her life. Every event that followed during the Second World War was a mistake in the past.

That’s one side of the coin. The other side is the story we actually experience during the movie. Michael and his decision not to help Hanna by exposing her secret is a mistake of him in the present. A mistake he can only face at the very end of Hanna’s life.

That’s it. Humans. No more, no less. Humans making mistakes and paying for them dearly. Interesting. There’s not a single hero in this movie – not even the judge that convicted the ex-SS women. It was obvious that these verdicts were only there to appoint blame and to get the trauma over with. To forget. Something we can all see for a great part in this day and age, but something that was blasphemy when you said it in the sixties.

It’s not just about you

But should Michael have saved Hanna? Is Hanna a poor woman in need of saving? The movie does a great job trying to tackle and avoid this question. You see, the thing is: we don’t seem to know this Hanna character at all. Other than two things (the fact that she’s illiterate and that she needs order) she’s kept relatively open. We can’t actually determine whether “saving” her would have been right or wrong. An interesting thought worth pondering.

That being said, however, this movie does go to the bone… and beyond. When Michael changes his mind on whether he should visit her it just takes your breath away. It’s so sad. But then again: you don’t know whether it’s the right thing to do or not. And neither does he. He’s only human; he can’t deal with it.

In All…

This is a movie about life, love and dealing with mistakes. In that way, it’s a movie about learning. And, in that way, this movie isn’t all that special; in fact it’s what we expect to see in a movie. We want our characters to learn. But the way in which our main characters learn throughout the movie is not through one another, it’s next to one another. And that’s what makes this story so special and so tragic: because it’s – unlike what movies tell us nowadays – the way in which learning seems to happen.

Favourite Quote:
Teacher: What we feel isn’t important. It’s utterly unimportant. The only question is
what we do. If people like you don’t learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?

You can see that before the Oscars, people didn’t exactly know what to do with Slumdog Millionaire. Sure, it was heavily marketed, but it appears they just couldn’t wrap their brains around how exactly they would market it. Was it bollywood? Was it drama? Was it a comedy? Something more alternative? The (final) answer to that question: it’s a little bit of both, but at the same time something else altogether. The chaiwalah has done it again!

A thousand billion million Rupees

Jamal and his brother Salem are two sides of the same coin. But still throughout their lives two things are predominant: money and love. Jamal leans towards the love side of things, whilst Salem craves money. We start our journey with Jamal – our main character, a low-payed tea servant at a callcenter, who by chance enters the Indian “who wants to be a millionaire”. Whether by luck or not, he appears to know the right answer to just about every question. That’s the reason he got arrested and tells his interrogators his life story, and how he managed to know all of those answers (and wishes he didn’t).

The premise is a stroke of unconscious genius: as unknown the country of India might be for us westerners (and believe me: once you see this movie you’ll notice you know nothing of the place), the show “who wants to be a millionaire” is an international standard up to the point where you can actually compare the chairs and the lighting and see it’s all the same. I don’t think this was done on purpose, but it is an interesting idea that makes your head spin and broadens your mind.

Is that your final answer?

The story is undoubtedly one of the strong factors in this movie: it constantly rushes around between past and present, takes twists and turns you can’t always see coming. And once you get the idea of what the movie is about and what the storytelling rules are, the fun changes from seeing what is being told to how it’s being told. You can never predict the relationship between the questions and the answers in advance. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

But story aside, even if you don’t like jumping through time the way I do and find the whole premise too absurd for words, you can just go see this movie as well. Reason? It looks very, very good. In fact, it has a style to itself I have never seen in a movie before – but I have seen it. I’ve seen it in animation, but never in a live action movie. The way the kids run through the city in the opening scene is simply breathtaking: it’s alive with colours and the camera shakes, pans and zooms like there’s no tomorrow, treating us to a piece of visual poetry.

In All…

This is a movie you will want to see. It’s pretty, it’s well-written (if you can ignore the corniness of the dialogues) and it just drags you in. It never drags or gets boring, but always keeps the pace
flowing. And: if you came to see it expecting to see Bollywood… let’s just say there’s a little surprise somewhere in there. It’s not very subtle. You can’t miss it.

Favourite Quote:
Jamal: The guide book was written by a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing Indian beggars!

I had been wanting to see In Bruges for quite a while, but you know how it goes with some movies: they’re always the third on your priority list, and never seem to get up to the first place. So when you finally get it, a lot of time may have passed. This time, though, seeing how the store was empty and had no copies of “Aanrijding in Moskou” (which seems to be doing a better job in Germany than in Belgium) left, it was finally time for “In Bruges”.

It’s in Belgium

As I expected, this movie is filled to the brim with insults towards Belgium. These are just like the ones we used to see in Monty Python: silly mockeries that make little to no sense – a fact acknowledged by the writers themselves. I guess it’s the fact that it’s a small place with no identity (even after the government crisis and the whole molesting children thing) – like a rural town. A rural town much like Bruges. So that means: you’ve got a rural town inside a rural town. Are there any larger shitholes left than Bruges? Not for the British.

The movie had a lot more than just touristic antitourism though. It had brilliant acting too: it was wonderful to see Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes (of Voldemort fame) perform such lovable assholes. The moment where Harry (Fiennes’s character) apologizes to his wife for calling his children “fucking cunt kids” is a good example of this, as is the chat he has with Ken (Gleeson) whilst drinking a beer. You love to hate them. They’re cuddly motherfuckers.

Maybe that’s what hell is

What really struck me though, was the solidness of the script. I was expecting a lot of swearing, a lot of anti-belgianism and loads of black humour, but I got so much more: the movie slowly but certainly delved into this “night of the living dead” kind of feeling: Bruges is a place where you go to die, sort of the like the river Styx: when you’re inside you’re not quite dead yet, but you’re certainly not alive. Only in Bruges, there’s cocaine. And midgets.

I love it when a movie has a defined style, and sticks with it. You can tell when you look at In Bruges that the director (Martin McDonagh) wrote the script himself and chose to make this movie something of his own. A product he loved and nurtured like a child, if you may. It has this incredible sense of stylistic oneness, this absurdism which sticks by its own set of rules, almost like poetry. This story has not been conceived by ten semi-gifted people sitting around a table shoehorning semi-good ideas into a semi-good script. This story has been written by someone who knew where he was going.

He was going to fucking Belgium.

Favourite Quote:
Ken: Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny. I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a
cunt now, and you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that’s going to change is that you’re going
to be an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my
cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.