Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, Thurs. Sept. 8 at 6:00 pm
People were talking this movie a lot, and the concept---neorealistic suspense in the Ozarks made with local actors---was intriguing, but still I waited until the last showing at the Lryic before it left. Too bad. It would have been good to have been able to recommend it before it left.
As I went into this movie, I was musing on a theory of movie narrative I've been toying with. It goes like this:
Every movie has a climax. At the moment of the climax, the main character or characters typically are forced to make a decision regarding an action. If we only saw that moment of the movie, that particular decision by that character might seem bizarre or incomprehensible. The purpose of the movie narrative is to bring us from complete ignorance about the character to a sympathetic understanding of the motivations of that character at the climax. It does this by taking the viewer through a series of emotional states that accompany revelations about the character(s).
Superior movies tend to be the ones that provide solid and satisfying emotional insight into climax-decisions that would be otherwise completely outside our understanding, were it not for insight engendered by the emotional journey of the narrative.
I tested my theory in Winter's Bone. I wondered what the "climax decision" of the main character would be. In this case the protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl taking care of her siblings in their house in the hills of southwestern Missouri and immediately facing the threat of losing her house and land, unless she can locate her absent father and convince him to show up to a court date.
What is the decision she is forced to make at the climax? Well that would be a spoiler, and there's no good in spoiling this movie. But let's just say it was an auspicious start for my new theory.
Winter's Bone advances horror, suspense, and mystery in tangible ways. It is somewhat in the subject-matter genre of the The Blair Witch Project (1999), but without the POV style, and with a much more sophisticated story. We've come a long way since then.
The story is fresh and unpredictable. There's even a cool dream sequence (cf. Inception), used in exactly the way you would want a dream sequence used. The heroine is awesome in her heroism. She embodies the real struggle of Americans right now in a way that Hollywood is flat out ignoring.
I'll throw my wager in with those saying this is going to win Best Picture next March. Given the last two winners, it's hard to see Hollywood not recognizing when it has been bested.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Inception
Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, at 4:25 p.m. on Sept 10
This was a fun movie-going experience, because I saw it with my dad on his 70th birthday. I bought the tickets, he bought the popcorn. Off the top of my head, the last time I remember seeing a movie with my dad was 1972--and that was with the whole family.
My dad is a hard-core science fiction fan from the early post-World War II days. He has an incredible depth of knowledge about science fiction paperbacks by the great classical writers, and all the pulp of varying quality that came along with it over the years. While I was growing up, those kinds of paperbacks and copies of little Analog magazine filled our house.
After the end of Inception, I was eager to hear what he thought about it. Most of our movie discussions are me just talking about things I've seen by myself.
I offered my cautious entree to get things going, saying that I was "not sure" about it. He concurred. I could see it was a genuine opinion, and he wasn't just following mine.
Over the next couple of hours, it turned into a rout. Then, and over the following afternoon at the celebration my sister held at her house in the north Denver suburbs, we piled thought about thought about why Inception was so bad, and was one of the most disappointing movies I have seen in a long time.
It's so disappointinga movie, and so deceptive about its premises, that I hesitate to open up the catalog of my thoughts again, lest I feel compelled to write a long treatise on it.
Certainly it is solidly in the genre of Hollywood film that emerged in the 1990s centered on the premise that some or all of the primary characters introduced in Act One are either in some sort of alternate reality state and are either unaware of it, or are dead (in which case the characters in flashback are doomed but are not aware of it).
That being said, Inception utterly fails to advance the genre by even an inch. It's a cop-out, a retreat. The twist of the entire movie turns out to be (spoiler........) that there is no twist and the story is completely linear within a world in which lucid shared dreaming exists. The only plot conflict is about a man getting over his deceased wife---nothing else. That I didn't care at all about the characters, who were like video game characters, can be used to support the idea that the entire framing story is thus also a dream state. Ah, that's it. This movie is about the psychological effect of people living their lives by the quest narratives of video games, and missing out on the real world and family. OK, I get it.
Inception reminded me a lot of Shutter Island so much that they seem as variations on the same movie. With Scorcese, I pretty much know that I'm going to hate anything new he puts out, and now I can add Christopher Nolan to the list. I should have known. Inception is also the same movie as The Dark Knight, in that they are both incoherent on a basic level of narrative logic, but in different ways.
The Dark Knight's incoherence is on the level of morality and motivation: it uses the mask of classicism, for example the the prisoner's dilemma that the Joker sets up on the ferry boat, to fool the audience into thinking that the story says something meaningful about Batman's choice at the end of the movie. Inception has a much deeper level of narrative disconnect, almost like the molecular bonds of character structure are being dissolved.
The people who liked this movie--well, I suspect a lot of it is because of the special effects. The last half hour ofInception is amazing long and boring for minutes on end. The too-forced parallel narrative structure of the dream levels each coming to their respective climax had me rolling my eyes. But the anti-gravity scenes in the elevator and hallway were unique and interesting such that they are deserving of an Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win depending on the eventual competition. But not the score. Please not the score.
My greatest anger against it comes from the movie's utter failure to use it's science fiction premise (lucid, shared dreaming) to say anything meaningful about the reality in which we live right now via our shared culture and media. There isn't the slightest hint of this in the movie, really. It's as if one took The Matrix and drained it of all its connotation. You've got some innovative arm flailings enhanced by CGI to be sure, and pretty much nothing else. Is the metaphorical premise of Inception really that "you can't put an idea in someone's head, it has to come from them." That's the only interesting question about psychological that the movie even attempts to raise. To be sure, this was debated in the context of lucid dreamnaut experiences, but the problem is: this kind of dreaming experience doesn't exist in reality. The only meaningful debate is about what this means in our "real" reality.
So is the movie saying that you can't put ideas into people's heads? Is this really a deep philosophical question or is this just the Postmodern shell of the appearance and trappings of rational inquiry? I think it is the latter.
As far as lucid dreamnaut movies go, put Dreamscape (1984) in your Netflix queue instead. I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters back then, back when I'd walk over from our house on Purdue Road to see flicks at the now-long-gone University Triplex. But I thought it was fun when I saw it, and certain images and scenes have stuck in my head from it since then.
This was a fun movie-going experience, because I saw it with my dad on his 70th birthday. I bought the tickets, he bought the popcorn. Off the top of my head, the last time I remember seeing a movie with my dad was 1972--and that was with the whole family.
My dad is a hard-core science fiction fan from the early post-World War II days. He has an incredible depth of knowledge about science fiction paperbacks by the great classical writers, and all the pulp of varying quality that came along with it over the years. While I was growing up, those kinds of paperbacks and copies of little Analog magazine filled our house.
After the end of Inception, I was eager to hear what he thought about it. Most of our movie discussions are me just talking about things I've seen by myself.
I offered my cautious entree to get things going, saying that I was "not sure" about it. He concurred. I could see it was a genuine opinion, and he wasn't just following mine.
Over the next couple of hours, it turned into a rout. Then, and over the following afternoon at the celebration my sister held at her house in the north Denver suburbs, we piled thought about thought about why Inception was so bad, and was one of the most disappointing movies I have seen in a long time.
It's so disappointinga movie, and so deceptive about its premises, that I hesitate to open up the catalog of my thoughts again, lest I feel compelled to write a long treatise on it.
Certainly it is solidly in the genre of Hollywood film that emerged in the 1990s centered on the premise that some or all of the primary characters introduced in Act One are either in some sort of alternate reality state and are either unaware of it, or are dead (in which case the characters in flashback are doomed but are not aware of it).
That being said, Inception utterly fails to advance the genre by even an inch. It's a cop-out, a retreat. The twist of the entire movie turns out to be (spoiler........) that there is no twist and the story is completely linear within a world in which lucid shared dreaming exists. The only plot conflict is about a man getting over his deceased wife---nothing else. That I didn't care at all about the characters, who were like video game characters, can be used to support the idea that the entire framing story is thus also a dream state. Ah, that's it. This movie is about the psychological effect of people living their lives by the quest narratives of video games, and missing out on the real world and family. OK, I get it.
Inception reminded me a lot of Shutter Island so much that they seem as variations on the same movie. With Scorcese, I pretty much know that I'm going to hate anything new he puts out, and now I can add Christopher Nolan to the list. I should have known. Inception is also the same movie as The Dark Knight, in that they are both incoherent on a basic level of narrative logic, but in different ways.
The Dark Knight's incoherence is on the level of morality and motivation: it uses the mask of classicism, for example the the prisoner's dilemma that the Joker sets up on the ferry boat, to fool the audience into thinking that the story says something meaningful about Batman's choice at the end of the movie. Inception has a much deeper level of narrative disconnect, almost like the molecular bonds of character structure are being dissolved.
The people who liked this movie--well, I suspect a lot of it is because of the special effects. The last half hour ofInception is amazing long and boring for minutes on end. The too-forced parallel narrative structure of the dream levels each coming to their respective climax had me rolling my eyes. But the anti-gravity scenes in the elevator and hallway were unique and interesting such that they are deserving of an Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win depending on the eventual competition. But not the score. Please not the score.
My greatest anger against it comes from the movie's utter failure to use it's science fiction premise (lucid, shared dreaming) to say anything meaningful about the reality in which we live right now via our shared culture and media. There isn't the slightest hint of this in the movie, really. It's as if one took The Matrix and drained it of all its connotation. You've got some innovative arm flailings enhanced by CGI to be sure, and pretty much nothing else. Is the metaphorical premise of Inception really that "you can't put an idea in someone's head, it has to come from them." That's the only interesting question about psychological that the movie even attempts to raise. To be sure, this was debated in the context of lucid dreamnaut experiences, but the problem is: this kind of dreaming experience doesn't exist in reality. The only meaningful debate is about what this means in our "real" reality.
So is the movie saying that you can't put ideas into people's heads? Is this really a deep philosophical question or is this just the Postmodern shell of the appearance and trappings of rational inquiry? I think it is the latter.
As far as lucid dreamnaut movies go, put Dreamscape (1984) in your Netflix queue instead. I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters back then, back when I'd walk over from our house on Purdue Road to see flicks at the now-long-gone University Triplex. But I thought it was fun when I saw it, and certain images and scenes have stuck in my head from it since then.
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Expendables
Seen August 29, afternoon at the Fox 5 in downtown Sterling, Colorado.
A strange way to break a month's fast. A spontaneous three-day road trip last month took me out onto the Eastern Plains---one of my favorite places to drive for hours on end without seeing anyone.
After two days of that, little Sterling seems like an oasis of civilization, a space colony in the midst of a void---cleans motels, a lovely museum well kept up, about the Rural Electrification Project.
The downtown multiplex is a coverted single screen establishment off the main boulevard. I arrived just in time to catch this movie, which I call the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of 2010.
Stanley Kramer's 1963 madcap epic was the end of a era, a last hoorah for an entire generation of the cast in many ways. The world was about to change in big ways.
Now, among other things, the action star as we know it is fading into history. There is a sadness among the old men in this movie that there is not a next generation. Cinema has moved on.
But it's much more than that. The mercenaries in the movie somehow know something went really, really wrong with America, and they identify it as stemming from the Serbian War. Very intriguing idea.
It's camp and pretensious on every level, and the action scenes rather bored me at times, but I still liked it for the reasons I've just described.
The finest scene in the film is a short performance by Mickey Roarke, as a hip Austin motorcycle tatoo artist and retried mercenary. He delivers a soliloquy in a close-up while bent into purple light as he concentrates on one of his designs. "We used to stand for something," he says.
I think of his character here as essentially the ghost of his character from The Wrestler, speaking form beyond the grave, mourning the death of the America we all knew and loved, and for which Stallone thought he was fighting, in his own Postmodern way.
I hear ya, brother. I hear ya.
A strange way to break a month's fast. A spontaneous three-day road trip last month took me out onto the Eastern Plains---one of my favorite places to drive for hours on end without seeing anyone.
After two days of that, little Sterling seems like an oasis of civilization, a space colony in the midst of a void---cleans motels, a lovely museum well kept up, about the Rural Electrification Project.
The downtown multiplex is a coverted single screen establishment off the main boulevard. I arrived just in time to catch this movie, which I call the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of 2010.
Stanley Kramer's 1963 madcap epic was the end of a era, a last hoorah for an entire generation of the cast in many ways. The world was about to change in big ways.
Now, among other things, the action star as we know it is fading into history. There is a sadness among the old men in this movie that there is not a next generation. Cinema has moved on.
But it's much more than that. The mercenaries in the movie somehow know something went really, really wrong with America, and they identify it as stemming from the Serbian War. Very intriguing idea.
It's camp and pretensious on every level, and the action scenes rather bored me at times, but I still liked it for the reasons I've just described.
The finest scene in the film is a short performance by Mickey Roarke, as a hip Austin motorcycle tatoo artist and retried mercenary. He delivers a soliloquy in a close-up while bent into purple light as he concentrates on one of his designs. "We used to stand for something," he says.
I think of his character here as essentially the ghost of his character from The Wrestler, speaking form beyond the grave, mourning the death of the America we all knew and loved, and for which Stallone thought he was fighting, in his own Postmodern way.
I hear ya, brother. I hear ya.
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