the Coen Brothers obviously seem to think they have something to prove with No Country For Old Men; its every step is as focused and mean as Javier Bardem's unforgettable Chigurh (who here gives Hannibal Lecter a run for his monstrous money), as if the Coens are apologizing for their recent slump with a middle finger and a shrug. in many ways it's a return to form, as airtight and flawless in its scripting and execution as the Coens' best, but despite debts to the relatively straightfaced pulp of Fargo and Blood Simple (plus an ending that loses a bit of solemnity when put alongside Raising Arizona's) they step pretty far outside their comfort zone, and even their audience's. the witty performance flourishes are there in subdued bit parts, and the Coens' sensibilities meld surprisingly with McCarthy's own nihilism, but much of No Country also seems uncharacteristically clinical where the rest of their films brake at giddy precision. it may well be that the brothers needed a comedic palate cleanser after the one-two stumble of Intolerable Cruelty and The (underrated) Ladykillers, and No Country For Old Men is certainly that, but even as it repeatedly assures their seat among the cinema's living masters, its pitch-black efficiency repels nearly as often as it provokes. No Country For Old Men is unfathomable in its raw quality, but the bleak misanthropy of nearly every frame leaves it distancing, as hard to like as it is to disrespect.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
the coen brothers' NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)
the Coen Brothers obviously seem to think they have something to prove with No Country For Old Men; its every step is as focused and mean as Javier Bardem's unforgettable Chigurh (who here gives Hannibal Lecter a run for his monstrous money), as if the Coens are apologizing for their recent slump with a middle finger and a shrug. in many ways it's a return to form, as airtight and flawless in its scripting and execution as the Coens' best, but despite debts to the relatively straightfaced pulp of Fargo and Blood Simple (plus an ending that loses a bit of solemnity when put alongside Raising Arizona's) they step pretty far outside their comfort zone, and even their audience's. the witty performance flourishes are there in subdued bit parts, and the Coens' sensibilities meld surprisingly with McCarthy's own nihilism, but much of No Country also seems uncharacteristically clinical where the rest of their films brake at giddy precision. it may well be that the brothers needed a comedic palate cleanser after the one-two stumble of Intolerable Cruelty and The (underrated) Ladykillers, and No Country For Old Men is certainly that, but even as it repeatedly assures their seat among the cinema's living masters, its pitch-black efficiency repels nearly as often as it provokes. No Country For Old Men is unfathomable in its raw quality, but the bleak misanthropy of nearly every frame leaves it distancing, as hard to like as it is to disrespect.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
a failed experiment / cleaning my plate
ok, so here i am, almost eleven months into this thing and two months removed from my last entry. shameful. writing about every film i watch took a surprisingly long time to become tiresome, but in the end it was wedding preparation that waylaid this thing for good. and once you get backlogged (it first happened to me, i think, with Danny Boyle's Sunshine, which i liked quite a lot but made the apparent mistake of sharing my thoughts on via email, after which i felt i'd said what i needed to say, and never bothered to translate here) there's no hope.
so i'm rebooting this thing. for the sake of completism i'm posting empty entries for the films i've watched since i took a powder, with the hopes that i'll go back and fill them in.
but i've spent the past few weeks putting together a pretty nice little home theater, which is to my mind primarily an investment to the same effect this one is.
oh god, the movies, i love them so much.
so i'm rebooting this thing. for the sake of completism i'm posting empty entries for the films i've watched since i took a powder, with the hopes that i'll go back and fill them in.
but i've spent the past few weeks putting together a pretty nice little home theater, which is to my mind primarily an investment to the same effect this one is.
oh god, the movies, i love them so much.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
robert zemeckis' BEOWULF (2007)
Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis’ latest firm shove at the envelope of cinematic technology, is an oddity wrapped in a gimmick, and it’s genuinely hard to say whether such a curious juggling act is what keeps the film afloat, sinks it in the end or both. the gimmick in this case is, of course, the latest confluence of waning ticket sales and America’s hot-and-cold love affair with the (cue big reverb) Third Dimension. the oddity? it’s an animated film “for adults.”or at least it would like to think of itself that way. miles from the edgy realms of Heavy Metal, Fritz and the like, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s adaptation of Britain’s oldest epic slouches for the most part toward the considerably easier task of being an animated film for teenage boys: noisy, dark, violent and awkward in its embrace of sexuality.
more than that, though, Beowulf flubs its aspirations to maturity by playing unintentionally fast and loose with its tone. by all appearances, the film wants to be taken seriously; there are somber moments and others that carry the gravity of death and monstrous destruction. but there’s also grand miscalculations, none more egregious than Beowulf’s in-the-buff showdown with Grendel, which counterbalances its tension and brutality with blithe genital-obscurance visual gags. (sensitive though I am to inappropriate laughter at the movie theater, Beowulf earned every awkward guffaw.)
it’s admittedly no great surprise Gaiman and Avary cast a re-interpretive eye toward Beowulf’s heroes-and-villains simplicity; the millennium between the poem’s transcription and its inevitable apex of being “that movie where Angelina Jolie is all golden and naked” has seen its share of changes in how we approach concepts like good and evil, and the script makes plenty of room for shades of gray. but their deconstruction of the heroic ideal muddies as it wrestles with Zemeckis’ spectacle, which ends up casting aside the quotation marks in favor of an honest-to-god hero.
as destabilizing as that is to the film’s intellectual identity, though, it’s the spectacle that really defines Beowulf. using the same motion capture technology he pioneered on his Polar Express (and honed significantly with last year’s underrated Monster House), Zemeckis achieves a look that hovers, as the story itself does, between truth and myth, and it, too, may be thematically appropriate that both Grendel (Crispin Glover, in an obscenely perfect piece of casting) and the Dragon achieve a greater verisimilitude than any of the film’s human inhabitants. Beowulf himself looks fine throughout, but he obviously received the bulk of the animators’ attention (especially with regard to actor Ray Winstone’s considerably less chiseled physique), while most of the other characters, women in particular, parade the array of imperfections that keep computer animation from yielding passable photo-real people, including the damning “uncanny valley” effect, suggesting that the closer these figures come to humanity, the more off-putting their appearances can be. (kids are still having nightmares about The Polar Express.)
overall, however, it’s to the animators’ credit that such evident flaws somehow fail to derail the film visually. though about 20 percent of the animation can be distracting (even occasionally cringe-inducing), the remaining 80 percent redeems it confidently, and its 3D presentation strengthens it further. anyone who’s ever seen a film in 3D knows the “oh my god it’s coming right at us” drill, and Zemeckis isn’t entirely above such parlor tricks, but neither does he pander to the format; there are a few visual flourishes that draw unnecessary attention to themselves, but by and large, the film subdues gimmickry in favor of an enhanced depth of field, pushing the unreal that much further into reality.
still, Beowulf confounds. it’s tempting to suggest a more conventional mix of live action and CG would have yielded a work of greater dignity and depth. (most of the film’s performers seem to have embraced the challenge of shining through such clumsy avatars, but i’d much rather see John Malkovich’s Unferth in his real-life glory.) but without the tech-demo trimmings, would it be as fun, or even as engaging? it’s hard to say, but the questions themselves betray Beowulf as a fair deal short of satisfying.
(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)
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