Author: Bert

Every time a new Pixar movie hits the cinemas, my inner child starts poking my chest, trying to get out. I’ve struggled it at first, trying to resist the hype just for the sake of resisting the hype, but ever since Ratatouille I’ve given up and embraced the kid, letting him out and fully enjoying it. Because hey, you have to admit: Pixar movies are pretty rad. And in that regard, UP is certainly no exception.

Married Life

As a story, UP is all about letting go: Carl is an old man who’s lead a mostly happy life. An old man who feels rejected by society and mourns about the things he’s never done. One of these is going on an adventure, an adventure ending with living in Paradise Falls, a land lost in time. When one day he is threatened to be evicted from his home, he decides to turn his house into a giant balloon and fly off, searching for this fabled land. But he didn’t count on finding Russell, a young boy scout, on his porch.

The premise of this story is simple – a lot simpler than Wall-E. Wall-E predominantly was a critique to society, and in doing so it was automatically pretty heavy. UP, while maintaining a firm message to its audience, is a lot lighter in its execution and really does make you feel good – no buts attached. UP also tends to get a bit silly, but it’s expectable right off the bat. That means that, as opposed to Wall-E, UP is a tad more coherent in its own story. Which doesn’t mean it’s better or worse – it’s just different.

Small Mailman Returns

As per usual with Pixar, UP is a stunningly beautiful movie. What I like is that the style is different from everything they’ve done before (as always). UP is also a lot more colourful than we’re used to: the balloons are bright, the jungle and its inhabitants are cheerful… Even if the premise of the movie (loving a lost one and letting go) is dramatic, the execution has laughs and cheers written all over it.

I guess that’s a bit of the magic I like in Pixar movies (or anything I tend to like): it’s a not-so-new concept that was executed in a (for that concept) strange style. We’ve seen these kinds of stories before; just not in this kind of execution.

In All…

I always wonder what makes a Pixar film appeal to me the way they do. I mean: I like animation as a medium, but the older I get, the less I like. Pixar’s always been high on the list and I think that’s in part because they try to reinvent the wheel a tiny bit everyt time they bring something out. With Wall-E, I was amazed how un-Ratatouille it was. And now, with UP, the same thing struck me again: I still had Wall-E in my head, and withing ten minutes, they made me forget that movie completely. Obviously, I’ve been comparing to Wall-E in this review – but while I was watching, I never made the comparison.

UP sucks you in from the first scene onwards. Of course, you might think that this stuff is for kids and not like it. Maybe you just won’t like it either way. But for me, this movie opened my eyes yet again, and showed me that this is the kind of stuff I want to do: I want to fill a theatre with adults, grown-ups with boring jobs, and make them all feel eight years old again.

Sometimes, a movie can get really, really close. Unfortunately, the closer they get, the harder they fall. Today’s fall belongs to District 9.

Insert clicking noises here

The premise is good enough: a huge alien ship hovers over the city of Johannesburg (South-Africa, wonder if it’s a coincidence we got a tourist video for the country before the trailers started). Yes, that’s not New York, Los Angeles, Paris or London – Johannesburg. Aliens are extracted from the vehicle and since they can’t seem to get along with humans due to cultural reasons, they are put into a slum – the District 9.

The movie starts out as a documentary explaining the facts above and showing off the pover lifestyle of the aliens. It then cuts to MNU (Multinational United), a big firm that’s taken charge of everything revolving around those aliens. They’ve built a camp twenty kilometres from the city – a camp they plan on moving the aliens into. In order to do that, the creatures must be evicted. And in order to accomplish that, they need a gopher, who comes in the name of Wikus Van De Merwe.

A smile is cheaper than a bullet

Now, first off, I want to say that Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus, is a first class actor. He might start off as comic relief, but soon he is dragged through a whole range of emotions – so many that you hardly notice you’re still watching the same actor at the end. The movie is worth seeing for this guy alone. All of the other cast is good as well – as are the aliens (even if they are a tad uninspired). It’s refreshing to see a big budget film made without big budget actors.

As you would expect from a movie produced by manchild Peter Jackson (whom I greatly respect, by the way), this movie is highly entertaining and looks really good. Wikus’ adventure is a chilling one, and you’ll be going along every step of it. And when shit hits the fan and the fan hits people (who then explode into a tiny million pieces ad nauseam), you’ll love watch the cartoony violence this movie holds. It’s like being a kid again.

In All…

But wait – what was that last sentence? But weren’t we watching a documentary? Exactly. Which brings my review to a close. The thing that destroys this experience is the incoherence that surrounds it. Random parts of the movie are made in documentary style (news footage, interviews, …) whereas other parts are just your normal popcorn type experience. Why is that? Why couldn’t they decide on one style and stick with it?

District 9 is a great movie. But it’s got potential to be at least twice as good. Why they couldn’t decide on one style, I don’t know, but it’s killed it all. After I left the theatre, I even felt a bit empty and slightly angry that it went that way. I loved the first thirty minutes. I loved the story. But they couldn’t make it so that I could wholeheartedly recommend this movie to anyone without a big “but” in front of it. What a shame…

I had never before seen a Lars von Trier film. I knew however that usually, they are very brutal and harsh yet strangely beautiful at he same time. I can tell you straight off the bat that Antichrist is no different.

Grief

At first, Von Triers concept seems a bit vague: the movie is called antichrist, but revolves around a couple trying to get out of depression after their toddler jumped out of a window. In order to do this, they visit the woman’s greatest fear and end up in Eden, a thick forest-with-a-cabin in the middle of nowhere. This part of the movie makes perfect sense. What comes next, however, gets stranger, creepier and uglier – with a writhingly atrocious last twenty minutes.

Since it’s hard to give a bit of in-depth appreciation for the plot without giving it away for those still wanting to see this film, I’ll put it behind spoiler tags.

[spoiler]My main gripe is – but that might just be me not understanding it – how the stories goes from “death of a child” to “my wife is a witch” in about fifteen minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I like the two parts of the story, but in my mind the link between the both of them was missing. The witch storyline was nicely executed, with symbolism that was eerie at first but shown as a saviour later on (the fox, the deer and the bird). It was extremely bizarre, yet intelligible.[/spoiler]

Summary: movie consists of two subplot which I cannot seem to connect.

Pain (Chaos Reigns)

As a movie, Antichrist is breathtaking. At first because it’s so beautiful (check the trailer for the parts where She is walking through the darkened woods, casting light on the trees), later on because it’s sickeningly horrible. Charlotte Gainsbourg (again in a tragedy-filled role, I guess that’s because she has the face of a beaten dog) and Willem Defoe (who completely ruined himself for me by his performance in Spiderman) perform magnificently: they’re credible and natural. You don’t have the feeling you’re watching two actors – these people seem to feel the pain.

And with them, we do too.

Which brings me to the next part: the pain.

Despair (Gynocide)

In the last twenty minutes – and you know this is coming as soon as you start watching, you know it is coming somehow – things completely blow up. All of a sudden, the tension relieves itself in a horrible, horrible couple of scenes that seem to go on for ages. And, because of the eighty credible minutes before that… you won’t be able to resist.

Once again, I will use spoilers for those who want to see for themselves (which I am not sure I should advise).

[spoiler]If you can watch this without flinching, you probably have no soul. Did they really have to squish testicles, squirt blood, drill through a leg and cut off a clitoris? Wasn’t one of these things enough? I know a von Trier film gets ugly – but this isn’t ugly anymore: it’s sick.[/spoiler]

Summary: ew ew ew ew.

In All…

But still: Antichrist is pretty – before the shit hits the fan and the log hits the – nevermind. That’s why I’m not sure whether I should like it or not. The symbolism is there. The acting is there. The directing and camerawork are most certainly there. So why did it have to turn out the way it did? Why so much? If I’m eating a vomit-flavoured pancake, I certainly don’t want another one and another one and then another one. I might get used to the flavour!

Which brings me to the strangest experience: the crowd. After reading some imdb reviews, it became apparent that there is a crowd for this movie – who call it art. I personally don’t know enough of art to call something art (and movies are always a bit strange on this level), so that’s not what I’m getting at. People tend to justify whatever they didn’t like about Antichrist by saying von Trier “had to do it” to attract a crowd. He had to shoot explicit penetrative sex scenes. He had to be so gruesome, or no one would come.

What a load of bull. Why would someone make a movie that is so adamant on destroying itself and the characters in it, on destruction as a concept and then put in some different scenes to attract a crowd? He put in a penis and a vagina because he thought he needed to. Jesus. He’s a director – a very good one, I have to admit – but given the nature of his movies he will shock you. Just admit the director shocked you. Stop being a pussy and blaming it on others.

It’s okay.

It shocked me too.

A little while ago, I ran into a South Korean movie called Milyang – which translates into “Secret Sunshine”. As Usually I’m a bit weary of Asian movies (they tend to go on forever), but this time I would not get stopped and was determined to check it out. And I’ve got to say that, even if it did run for 142 minutes, I did enjoy it a lot. Maybe I’m maturing? Nah, it’s probably just that this movie is really good.

The Eternal Downwards Spiral

Other than a basic theme (“coping with tragedy”), it’s near impossible to say what this movie is about, exactly. The premise is quite simple: Sin-ae, a thirtysomething mother, moves with her son Jun to Miryang, the town where her dead husband was born. After that things get a bit hairy – things happen and happen and happen, much reminiscent of that other thing people try to show us in the cinema so often: life.

That’s just about it, really. You can’t really say that this movie tells a certain story, because it doesn’t. Picture Magnolia – a handful of characters which are linked share the theme of “redemption” in their storylines which other than that have nothing to do with each other – but remove the “handful of characters” bit: all these stories just happen to this one woman (performed by the more than great Do-yeon Jeon, who does an awesome job at convincing us that it’s all real), all after another.

In All…

I like that: it’s a kind of unusual way of storytelling and we were really wondering how it would (or could) go on at certain points throughout the film. The end of the movie fitted the feeling that we were granted a small look into someone’s life – a look without a firm beginning or end. You get a picture and you can check it out, but you can’t see it all. You can only see what’s in the frame, not what’s on the edge, or the moments leading to the taking of the picture. All you can do is invent those occurances as you see fit.

One little disclaimer though before I send you off to the movies to watch this: it goes to the bone. It never goes beyond that, but it does get pretty dramatic. Oddly enough though, me nor the person with whom I watched this movie, felt really bad afterwards. We just both fell silent, and had to think about it for a while. Interesting.

Now, off you go!

Whenever a new Tarantino movie hits the silver screen, I’m a bit cautious. You see, I’m not a big fan of his work. I don’t really respond all that well to unnecessary realistic violence in movies (case in point: I tend to dislike Zac Snyder movies too). But there’s the thing: the violence featured in Inglourious Basterds is neither unnecessary nor realistic. So I found myself enjoying this movie a lot more than I thought I would.

Wolfenstein meets Little Red Riding Hood

The story consists of two different storylines: one tells the tale of the Inglourious Basterds, an allied terror unit in World War II with as a single goal killing (and scalping) Nazis. The other revolves around a Jewish French woman and the plans of having a big Nazi premiere there. Both storylines obviously come together at the end, but before that there is a lot of frolicking around in typical Tarantino fashion: with loads of dialogue, resulting in violence.

At first, the dialogues were reminiscent of Death Proof – which I disliked thoroughly. Soon, however, one could tell the big difference between Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds: the cast. This wonderful cast actually carries the insane amounts of insane dialogue, instead of getting carried away by it. Some of the more complicated lines – in four languages nonetheless – were uttered by Christoph Waltz. It was obvious he had studied them thoroughly and knew what he was doing. Stunning, stunning display.

Once upon a blabla

Inglourious Basterds tries to be a bit of a fairy tale. It never tries to be realistic, but keeps the setting correct so it’s credible enough. You know the events at the end of the movie never happened, but – in the world of Tarantino himself – they could have happened (but hell could also freeze over). Also, you don’t really relate to the characters (a thing I’ve actually never done in any Tarantino movie, come to think of it) – whether they live or die, it’s the same thing. You just hope they go out with a bang.

[spoiler]I do have to say though: the Basterds killing Hitler? The manchild in me says that’s pretty awesome. Even though the whole burning cinema fire was poorly executed, littered with continuity errors and a display of very, very bad taste in humanity.[/spoiler]

So it’s a bit of a side story. In that way, it’s a smart plan of Tarantino’s to cut the story into five smaller bits – chapters. Sure, fine and dandy, but this does not work if your first three chapters combined are the length of the fourth or the fifth respectively. The first three chapters felt like introduction, and it wasn’t until the last two that the audience could see where Tarantino was going with this. Had this been an unknown director, he wouldn’t have gotten away with it, I think.

In all…

Even though I dislike Tarantino’s movies, I would recommend you go and see this one. It’s pretty fun. The violence has been kept to a minimum, and this time around, it’s not about wildly ejaculating but all about the build-up to the orgasm. Scenes go on for ever as you can feel the tension slowly rising. It’s something I have rarely seen with Tarantino; he’s usually so gun-ho that the load has already been lost before the thing even got off the ground.

And yes, you can go Freudian on that.

Favourite Quote: Lt. Raine: Donny! Got us a German here wants to die for country. Oblige him.