Category: Movies

“Well, this is war”, a good friend of mine sitting next to me said. “It is. War.” I replied. In all its darkness. In all its gruesomeness. And in all of its absurdity.

It’s the beginning of the end. Aka Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. Or, if that’s too long for you to swallow: HP7.1. (more…)

Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether Christopher Nolan will ever make a bad movie. It’s only been a month since I first heard about Inception, but when reading through the list of people involved with it, it had me psyched from that day until I saw it. Inception is a return to the roots, to Memento-style storytelling (very much so, in fact) – but the “hey-look-at-me-I’m-crashing-an-IMAX-cam-into-a-car” Nolan seems to have tagged along.

A Concept

The concept is deviously easy, but incredibly smart: dreams. And not just dreams, but dreams within dreams. Within dreams. Within dreams. Right off the bat, you’re dropped into a insane, multilayered world existing solely in someone’s mind. You’re given a complicated set of rules in a very short time, and how well you understand them will enhance the movie. If you understand nothing, at least the characters will be cool; if you understand it all (highly unlikely on your first viewing, I think), then… just get out.

The story clearly shows the amount of polish and creativity involved in the project. A normal author would be telling the following: a man learns how to enter people’s dreams, then finds out you can make a dream within a dream. Something along those lines. In Inception, this is backstory. It doesn’t matter. What you get is what the third part of the trilogy would bring. The third part which is bound to fail because the first and second already established everything there is to know, making the third part just silly (Back to the future? The Matrix?). Because everything what happened before Inception (the development of entering dreams, for example) is unknown to us… the silliness is not silliness it all – it’s unbelievable.

An Execution

But that’s not all. It has to be said: a lot of it is in the execution. Stuff moves: explosions, people getting shot at, cities crumbling… Inception is a roller coaster ride: it clocks at 148 minutes, yet I didn’t discover a single boring or empty moment. Something is happening at all times – even if it’s only a van falling off a bridge and taking 20 minutes to reach the water.

But there’s not just moving stuff. Marion Cautillard is in there somewhere too. That’s pretty much enough said: on an emotional level, Inception keeps it simple and clean. Nolan borrowed heavily from Memento here, using the concept of inception like he used Insulin: to explain the concept he wants to talk about (memory loss versus, well, inception), and then to explain the hero’s backstory wound. One of them, at least. It’s pretty simple, and I saw it coming, but if you say you’re watching this movie for the character drama, you’re in the wrong film.

In All…

These are the movies I like. I don’t care about whether or not stuff moves. I just want to see interesting characters in an unbelievable world where the sky (aka our imagination) is the limit. Inception is oozing with mathematical creativity. Everything’s been polished to a high degree and there’s a lot of food left for a second viewing. The characters might be pretty bland, but the great performances make them memorable nonetheless. And hey, surely you don’t want the characters taking precious time away from your splosions, right?

I love Wes Anderson. Even though I haven’t seen enough of his movies (a fact that’ll change soon, no doubt), it always strikes me how much I adore everything he makes. I guess he makes it seem so easy, so natural, so playful. When I heard he was doing a Roald Dahl movie (one of my favourite authors, but once again I feel haven’t read enough to say), I figured this couldn’t go wrong. And I love being right.

Fantastic

I wasn’t too sure about The Fantastic Mr Fox, though. I was a virgin in seeing stop-motion on the big screen, and it struck me how every little imperfection (that gets built in on purpose nowadays) was enlarged twenty thousand times. Call me a stop-motion nonsavant, but it took some time for my eyes to adjust. The only movie I remember doing that was Cloverfield – and I liked that one too. For entirely different reasons, obviously.

It appears I’m not the only one who believes in Wes Anderson’s genious: the movie sports an impressive cast, featuring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe and many others. Whether you like them or not, they are all more than capable to deliver a wonderful performance, using just the right amount of irony to make this thing works.

Dahl and Anderson

I think I’ve seen just about any recent Dahl movie. I remember seeing Mathilda (garbage), James and the Giant Peach (even worse), Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (awful) and I think I know the soundtrack of the 1970s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by heart (Dahl obviously hated it and he’s right, but oddly enough, I like it with a spoonful of irony).

I think making a movie out of a Dahl book is not easy. Technically, Dahl mainly wrote for children. But then again, he didn’t. To get the point accross, here’s a quote from Mathilda’s first pages:

School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. “Your son Maxiliam”, I would write, “is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else.”

Dahl had a pretty gnarly idea about children these days, and would – like the Grimm Brothers – often resort to cruelty to put them (and their parents) in their place. But – and this is the key and the main difference to the Grimm Brothers – he does it in a very playful manner. This is exactly where Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox comes in. The movie feels more like watching a video game – Wes Anderson is playing through a game and we’re watching the outcome of it. But, in its own playful way, it is pretty cruel: foxes are foxes, farmers are farmers. They eat, they kill, they destroy.

In All…

It’s very hard to capture the essence of why this movie works for me. On the other hand, Anderson seems to know it, and for him, it all seems so easy. I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a cinema experience for the masses: the theatre was nearly empty, but the handful of the people that were there, laughed their asses off.

It’s playful, it’s funny, it’s entertaining. It’s well-written, it’s witty, and it’s got a nice soundtrack to boot. Go see it – and if you’re unsure about whether or not you will get into the stop-motion: wait for the DVD. But not a second longer. And if you’re not rooting for Foxie by the start of the final act, you’re a stone-cold bastard.

I’m going to try and be brief about it. Mainly because I don’t think there’s all that much to be said about Alice in Wonderland (2010). That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad movie – it’s just so mediocre, that there’s very little to say. You either like it, and look over it’s little flaws, or hate it, and inflate the flaws to boiling point. I’m one of the latter people.

Jab-ber-wock-keeeee

The premise is simple enough – and pretty much has the American McGee idea: Alice, returning to Wonderland (now baptised “Underland”, because that’s just a smart thing that no one else ever could come up with), faces the biggest demon of all: her on insecurity. Oh, and a Jabberwockee (did I spell that right?).

Now, with said Wockee comes the first problem the sub-par screenplay runs into: the premise is so absurd that they need to introduce it at the start of the movie in a prophey, then ram it down our throats five more times until we finally believe they would actually pull a stint like that. And the movie does not disappoint in its perseverence: a hundred minutes later, Alice is indeed dressed up as a Pevensie, and fighting that Jabberwockee. You’ve been warned, the movie seems to say. You’ve been warned.

Sticking it to the man

But that’s okay, apparently: Alice in Wonderland – the movie – might be the complete opposite of what the books were about, the movie at least looks good. There’s loads of colour, the constant shrinking and growing is awesome, there’s some excellent acting going on (Helena and Stephen, I’m looking at you), the art design is superb and the costumes breathtaking.

And that’s the tone this movie (and, in general rule, Tim Burton movies) sets: an idiot came up with this story, but at least it looks good. There’s so many dramaturgical inconsistensies, and sometimes I even think I’m starting to nit pick and pull it apart too much, but who am I kidding? These things are just there. Those five characters in the opening of the movie, the ones you don’t get to know nor do you care about them, and they all get to have their asses handed to them by Alice at the end of the movie (because she learned something! and the audience won’t know unless she says it out loud! like in school!)… those characters are just there. Even though four of them shouldn’t be. But they are.

In all…

There you go, off you go now. Now you can watch the movie in peace, knowing what to expect. You’ll probably come knocking on my door afterwards, saying “but Bert, it wasn’t that bad”, and I’ll say that that is because I warned you. So better bring me flowers and candy instead.

I have a confession to make. Because of a mix-up and the fact that we were three sharing one Berlinale pass, I was unable to go to any of the movies I had selected. Thankfully, I was not that fussed about it and got some different tickets. One of them was En ganske snill mann, which I have already reviewed. I had high expectations for that one, but it turned out to be rather bland. The other movie kind of scared me. But, as it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised and traumatized by Caterpillar.

The way to tell the story

Caterpillar is a Japanese movie telling the tale of a wife whose man comes home a cripple at the start of the second world war, in 1941. Because he lost his arms, legs and the ability to speak in China, he is considered a Japanese War God and it is up to his wife to take care of this highly honorable person.

If you think this movie was all about stereotypical misery, you’re clearly mistaken. The first cliche ending gets broken right away: while the opening credits were rolling, I was sure the movie would end with a broken women choking her husband. I was pleasantly surprised to see the movie tackle this in the first five minutes, and then move on.

By doing this, the story instantly became something else: it’s the story of a strong, Japanese woman in war-times, defending her honor and doubting her home country and war in general. Her crippled husband was just a catalist, a way to tell this story.

Eat, sleep, something something

And that’s the nice thing about this movie. It’s not deliberately showing you anything. It just tosses light on certain moments in the couple’s daily life. Through these moments, you are free to construct your own backstory. You are also free not to. It doesn’t matter and the story doesn’t care. It just happens as it goes along.

It’s also good to see a movie making such good use of sex. One of the backstories revolves around it in its entirety, linking the two characters together (and I mean this not just in the physical sense). Sex goes from lust, to disappointment, to rape, to trauma, to an entire turnaround of the trauma and reversed rape. But once again, the movie doesn’t tell you this. You have to enter inside it and look around for a bit. Go for a walk in it.

In All…

I wish I could write like this. I wish I could hide a dramaturgic construct behind an iconic story that is actually just a theme setting for something much larger: a history, a country and a war. I can forgive the movie for taking the educational road (I know how many people died in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the second World War in general, thank you very much). It just doesn’t matter. The rest was just so impressive. There’s at least twenty movies behind this movie. Unbelievable.

There are some genres I like but have not really acquainted myself with. One of these is the wonderful Black Comedy – when I watched in Bruges, I was blown away by the way the story was executed. And I laughed, I really laughed. It was brilliant! So, in order to get a bit more Bildung, I watched En ganske snill mann at the Berlinale.

Giving birth on that back seat of your Mercedes

First things first: I did laugh. The story of an ex-convict trying to pick up his life after twelve years behind bars worked in all it’s absurdity: the women who all figured he must be sex-craved, the new room which was really more like a prison cell than his old one, the people blurting standardized walls of text in order to try and accept him…

It was genuinely funny. But why am I only at the third paragraph and already out of things to say? Because, even if funny, the movie was kind of forgettable. It was a Norwegian take on in Bruges, even going so far as to including a midget and three crooks. Or is this some sort of black comedy convention I know nothing about?

In All…

I reckon that’s the problem: the decent photography and great acting couldn’t save the uninspired script. Surely, you’ll laugh, but in the back of your head you’ll think you’ve all seen it somewhere before. And that’s because you have. On top of that, the better jokes get completely stretched and repeated ad neauseam. Didn’t they know that a joke is only good once?

Hey, by no means am I saying you should avoid this movie at all costs. You shouldn’t, it’s a pretty fun ride with some excellent photography in there. It’s like a slice of cake. You get at your grandmother’s. Every damn year. Only this time it speaks a different language. Still cake, though.

Creative problems ask for creative solutions. This must have been clear to Terry Gilliam when he was in the middle of shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Heath Ledger died. Gilliam didn’t fret, he just shot down production for a month and looked for a solution – a solution which, in my opinion, makes the movie better than it might have been.

George, no Barry

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus tells an ancient story: the pact with the Devil. Immediately, upon the introduction of this Becketian Devil, a little bell started ringing in my head: this movie was either going to be lame or not end well. You see, a Devil’s pact has a slight disadvantage: you can’t win.

That doesn’t mean that Parnassus is automatically a dark movie: sure, it has its dark passages, but it doesn’t traumatise – not in the slightest. One could even say it’s quirky, kind of like Alice in Wonderland, we get to cast a look into someone’s mind; a look very similar to a feverish dream. Funnily enough, Parnassus’ mind is exactly what I imagined Terry Gilliams mind to be like.

No review without Heath

It would be impossible to talk about this movie without discussing Tony, Heath’s character. It should be no secret that Ledger died in the middle of shooting this film, and that – seeing how much time and money had been sunk into it – the team would have to come up with a solution.

In my opinion, they did this brilliantly: Ledger, upon entering the imaginarium, is performed by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. If you think they shoehorned those actors in just to cover Ledger’s death, rest assured: they are a great addition to the story and even add more depth to it.

I’ll start by saying this: every metamorphosis is treated like a reveal. This means that we, the audience, are just as surprised to see a different actor as Tony himself. But it’s not just that – it’s made into a vital character point: Parnassus doesn’t know who he is, we don’t know who he is… in fact, he doesn’t even know himself! The character feels like a chameleon – the change in actor just empathizes this.

In All…

I’m not saying The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a stroke of genious. It’s not, it has flaws (the plot is kind of hairy, it’s very entertaining but never tense, …). I’m saying this movie shows how you can find a creative solution to a very unfortunate problem. And just for that, it’s worth going to go and see it.

How does one go about making a movie based on a picture book fifteen pages long? Obviously, to fill ninety minutes, you’d have to add stuff here and there. But that raises a new question: how do you make sure your additions stay true to the source novel – if it’s really that short? Apparently, Spike Jonze, who ironically has Kaufman’s exquisite “Adaptation” on his name, found an answer.

We’ll eat you up, we love you so

There is so much to say about Where the Wild things are, but I’ll start by saying this: this movie is a perfect example of how book to movie conversions should be done. Writers are focusing on the dramatic aspects of their source materials too much, causing them to be too plot-driven. Books are gargantuan masses unable to make it to movies, so you basically have to choose what you want in there. What if the mistake writers have been making – and typing this, as a scriptwriter, will shock me – is that they have been trying to tell too much story?

Maybe we ought to consider making less plot-driven conversions, and focus more on what we felt when we first read the book. For me, this is something The Lord of the Rings does aswell – but it’s even more apparent in Where the wild things are. Mind you: the story essentially stays the same. Max, acting like a wild thing, has a falling out with his mother and then sails away to a far away land where wild things live. He proclaims himself the king of wild things and then… they play.

Pedagogical Island

The movie is the same: it’s a movie about children’s games. In its most bare form, the movie is nothing more than that: there’s wild games (the igloo, the dust clod battle), there’s construction games (building the fortress), there’s just your general wildthingery (jumping on top of each other) and there’s the central game, the one that is inherent to the story: roleplaying. Because, of course, you’re watching a game Max is playing, a game in which Wild Things exist.

Where the movie truly shines, is those very Wild Things . None of the Wild Things have a name or an identity in the book; in the movie they have been fleshed out into living, breathing, well-rounded creatures, who act like children, play wild games all day… but someday have to grow up.

So what do you expect? Exactly: a typical story in which there are Good Wild Things and Bad Wild Things. Fortunately, this is not the case. It’s (a lot) better. The only conflict in this movie, is a conflict of age. And once I realized that, I suddenly realized something: I was Max. I was a kid once, I played Wild Games, I broke stuff and my mother would get mad at me… but most importantly: I had an older sister. I know what it felt like having a sister outgrow oneself and see her move on to different things. Not being able to play games with her anymore, because it just didn’t work.

It’s almost Freudian. Being the combination of an education scientist and a scriptwriter, I can go on for hours and hours on the symbolism of this film – like the fact that it’s set on a pedagogical island. But that wouldn’t do it justice, because I felt something much deeper, something I had forgotten: what it felt like to see your best friends grow up around you. It meant losing them for ever. I felt the betrayal Max (who performed a brilliant, brilliant part) felt, I understood why he had to destroy Claires room.

In All…

And, with that destruction, I also had to understand why he had to leave. And I understood even more why leaving made me so deeply sad: because Max would one day be me once more, but a different me: the me I am today. No more play, no more games. He won’t (and can’t) go back there, the place where the Wild Things are is gone forever.

It’s something we all experienced. Spike Jonze, should you ever read this: is this what you hoped to achieve? Or am I really insane?

(A little disclaimer: I wrote this review in 2009 and I did not get this movie. It’s hilarious how much I did not get it. Then again: Getting this movie is the ultimate proof that you’ve become German, so take that as you will. I will leave this review on here just to show my ignorance.)

When I left the theatre yesterday, I was angry. It was a strange experience (movies rarely make me angry) which I’ve only come to understand this morning: Das weisse Band makes a promise it doesn’t keep. That’s the only problem I have with the movie, the only thing keeping me from saying that this is the best, most chilling stuff I’ve seen in ages. And the thing keeping me from wholeheartedly being able to tell people to go and watch it.

Purity: The Good

Das weisse Band starts around 1912. It follows a small German village for two years, focussing on its different inhabitants and their intrigue. Mysterious crimes are sweeping the surroundings, with no apparent solution. At the centre of the story is the school teacher, a nice man who falls in love with a nurse. Next to that, we also focus on the town priest, the baron, a farmer, the landlord, a doctor… All of these have either a wife or children.

What’s beautiful about this story is that it quickly becomes apparent that you’re watching “real life”: it doesn’t go anywhere. The thriller subplot is relatively unimportant; it’s the beautifully rounded characters that matter. The actors portray them accordingly: I got sucked into the story fast, and was amazed at how well they performed. I actually believed the children – can you imagine how hard it is to explain the year 1912 to a five year old?

The movie has a distinct, black and white style. There is relatively little panning going on (and you can forget about zooms entirely, if I remember correctly there’s just none at all). This causes the entire film to get a very chilling, claustrophobic atmosphere. There is no reality outside of the village – kind of like a horror movie. Add to that the absence of music and you’ve got a very dark experience (even if almost nothing happens).

Sin: The Bad

Warning: spoiler ahead! (even though I think it would actually improve your experience with the movie)

So why was I angry? That all sounds wonderful! My big gripe with the film is the thriller subplot: someone is killing, burning and torturing people – and it never gets resolved who. This makes the ending – the culmination of everything regarding these strange events – very anticlimatic: the last twenty minutes build only on the start of the war and the war inside the village. If it’s not important who commited these crimes, then why have them in your plot at all?

In All…

Why couldn’t this have been just a character drama set in the 1910s? It doesn’t need the thriller elements; the movie is much better, much creepier without them. I know why Haneke did what he did: he wants us to think about it and come up with our own solution. That doesn’t work for a thriller. It works for the open-endedness of some other plot lines towards the end, but not for a thriller. Have you ever read a thriller?

What a dud. Now I can’t recommend this movie to anyone. And it is so good too…

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.