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Reviews
The Great Gatsby (2013)
Best Luhrmann's film so far
I never really liked Baz Luhrmann's movies. Too many colors, too many gaudy details, too many objects, too many camera movements, too many shots edited too quickly. Too much of everything. Too far from the cinema I like, which is a cinema that takes its time, that shows without showing itself. Roméo+Juliette and Moulin Rouge! left me with a visual indigestion that made me want to watch nothing but Bresson's films for a while. So I have to admit I was reluctant to see Luhrmann's new film. I didn't particularly liked the 1974′s version, nor loved the novel, so I wasn't scared to be disappointed. I just thought of taking some Alka-Seltzer with me just in case I needed to neutralize the big baroque pudding I was going to be fed. So is my stupidly prejudging the film helped me like it? Maybe yes. I guess it's easier to be pleasantly surprised with a film you already hate. After the first minutes, I'm already reasonably irritated by the stupefied air of Nick's character, and even more by the very unsubtle and unnecessary tracking shots of a camera flying across the bay between West Egg and East Egg. And then something happens. I enter the Buchanans' mansion. And there, in a very bright scene, in both senses of the word, I meet Daisy, and I get in just a few shots all the illusion of her character, made of frivolity and unhappiness. Then I follow Nick and Tom in their ride into town, and, in Tom's secret apartment, I find myself in the middle of an animated David Lachapelle's photograph, and I think yes, Lurhmann is great at capturing the essence of the party. Another party scene, that time at Gatsby's, and again I'm amazed at the filmmaker's mastery of rhythm, sounds and visual effects. Lurhmann's frenzy is no longer emetic, it's orgasmic. In many ways, Luhrmann's movie is more explicit than the 1974 version, and than the novel. The frenzy, the hysteria of sights and sounds serve the tragedy because they underline the emptiness. Luhrmann's Gatsby might lose a little bit of his mystery, but he gains in vulnerabilty and in humanity. We feel close to him. DiCaprio with his juvenile looks is perfect for the part. Gatsby in his pool is Jack at the end of Titanic. We love him, we want Daisy to love him, and we want his dream to come true. Luhrmann's Gatsby is not a madman, His love is obsessionnal, he is madly in love, but he is not sick, society is. Of course, and it is intentional, Gatsby and his relationship with Daisy eclipse all the rest. Nick is merely a filter through which we see Gatsby, and his relationship with Jordan Baker is completely overlooked. The two by the way I thought more clearly sexually ambiguous than the characters of Capote's script. Luhrmann loves mannerism and anachronisms, but here, it works fine. Amy Winehouse, Lana Del Rey, André 3000, The XX, etc., surprisingly fit. I did not feel like I was watching MTV like I did for Moulin Rouge!. This new version of The Great Gatsby is an ambitious and intelligent movie. All throughout the film, Luhrmann plays with codes, with the history of cinema, with our gaze. He does get carried away sometimes, but more often he is in the right. Read more reviews on http://filmcritiks.wordpress.com/
Mama (2013)
well done and beautiful
In 2008, the Argentine Andrés Muschietti directed "Mama", a 3-minute short-film that Guillermo del Toro watched and liked so much that he decided to produce a longer feature. In the 2008 version, a little girl wakes her sister up in the middle of the night and tells her that "Mama" is back. They both go downstairs in an empty house. They see something that looks like a woman moving in a room at the end of the hall. The "thing" is threatening. The music is nagging and throbbing. Something is going to happen. Mama walks out of the room and runs at abnormal speed toward the children. She is barefoot and her body is deformed. The girls scream and run back to the first floor. The younger girl slams the bedroom's door and leaves the older out. She looks at Mama moving toward her. The thing's walk is dislocated, her face is hideous. The music panics. The girl screams. The end. The same scene is present in the 2013 movie, which is an enhanced and more explicit version of this primitive scene. After he lost it and killed his wife and co-workers, Jeffrey (best known under the name of Jaime Lannister) runs away with his daughters. They have an accident on the road and find refuge in a cabin by the lake in the middle of the wood. There, Jeffrey plans to shoot her daughters than kill himself, but the ghost in the cabin prevents it and takes care of him. Five years later, two detectives paid by Lucas, Jeffrey's twin brother, finally find the crashed car and the cabin with the girls. They are alive but they live in a wild primitive state and they pretend that they were raised by a supernatural entity they call "Mama". Lucas and her girlfriend Anabel (Jessica Chastain, the actress-chameleon) are thirty something but they live like teenagers. He draws and she plays the guitar in a rock band. Nevertheless, the psychiatrist in charge of the girls decide to give them custody and to lend them a house to raise the girls in proper conditions. As it is often the case, joint custody does not go well and Mama is jealous of the girls' new parents. Childhood is a recurring theme in horror movies. The child is innocent, fragile and defenceless against evil and the corruption of the adults' world. But what the horror genre is interested in is the reversal, and loss, of values, the devilish side of the angels' faces. The trope of the child-victim and child-killer is almost as old as the horror genre itself. After initial ambiguity, the film chooses one unequivocal representation of the child as basically pure and good. Adults don't need to protect themselves from them, they need to protect them. The film is actually pretty unsurprising and uses some of the genre's most common clichés and twists : a cabin in the wood, people visiting the cabin in the middle of the night, scary dolls, weird children, a ghost in the closet, a crazy mother, heavy music, etc. But "Mama" is a genre movie that fully acknowledges these stereotypes. And it works. Muschietti's directing is clever and effective. The main interest of the film is the characterization of Jeffrey, Anabel, the girls AND the ghost. Muschietti managed to find a right balance to make them "real" and make the viewer care for all of them. They are not mere embodiments. Even Mama is not pure evil, she is ambivalent, both motherly and destructive. The film is less based on violence than on anguish. Some ideas I thought were interesting, for example the physical concretization of the haunted house theme. The film is all about atmosphere, about something that is there, lurking, that kills not out of pleasure but because it is suffering. It lives in the walls, it becomes the walls, it corrupts them. It lives in corpses, but it is not really living, it's only articulated death. It takes possession of people's dreams, but it still remains estranged from the living world. Only the child can communicate with it, and love it, because only the child can see the living and the dead as two different but equal things. The end is not like any conventional Hollywood ending. Only that suffices to make the film interesting. But it's not only that. There's beauty in "Mama", there's an impossible love, there's black and troubling poetry. Read my blog for other reviews: http://filmcritiks.wordpress.com/
Upside Down (2012)
not up to its ambitions
Same analysis about Upside Down as about Oblivion, about Solanas as about Kosinski. You don't make good movies only with a good idea and good visuals. This time, the film is not set in the future but on another planet, or two to be precise. Two planets with opposite gravities. Two planets, and contrasts as subtle as a commercial for a laundry detergent : you have black on one side, and white on the other. You have rich people Up Top and poor people Down Below. It is sunny Up Top and rainy Down Below. And the rich bad guys from Up Top exploit the poor people Down Below via Transworld, a big company with big bosses who think they control everything. Of course, Adam, the poor orphan kid from Down Below that seems to come straight out of a Dickens' novel, meets Eden, the posh girl from Up Top. Just looking at the two characters' names, you realize that there is still a lot of work to do before Science-Fiction finds scriptwriters worthy of it. Of course, Adam and Eden love each other, but they can't be a couple because of the laws of men and of gravity. Will they manage to be united and live happily ever after anyway ? This is a two dollar question. The cruel lack of originality of the scenario (Solanas did have a good idea to begin with) and the few incoherences of the film are not its only flaws. Music constantly interferes with the image and the combination of the two makes a bad video clip for teenagers (we feel very sorry for Sigur Rós). Adam's voice-over is supposed to make us understand the planets' history and to make us feel what Adam feels. In fact, it only underlines the poverty of the scenario and Solanas' inability to create emotions. The acting doesn't save the film. It's actually quite the opposite. Jim Sturgess overdoes the naive and mushy dimension of his character, and ends up irritating the viewer. So to sum it up, the film has some nice images, and a lot of soppy scenes. And that's about it.
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The Perfect Family (2011)
Boring
Kathleen Turner was great as a neurotic and psychopathic mom in Serial Mother. When I watched the trailer of The Perfect Mother, I laughed, and so I expected to find in it the same folly as in John Waters' comedy. Eileen Cleary is a mother and a devout catholic. She happens to be nominated against her best enemy for the award of the catholic woman of the year. If she wins, she will receive the greatest prize : the absolution of her sins. To be elected, she needs to be assiduous at church and in her charity works, but she also needs to have a perfect family. The trouble is, her husband is a former alcoholic, her son has just left his wife and kids for the manicurist next door, and her daughter is gay, and pregnant. The accumulation of clichés as obstacles can be funny in a comedy, but not here. The film – except for some good lines and Turner's acting – is pretty boring. I didn't laugh, I barely smiled. It takes ages to actually start, and when it does, it doesn't go very far. Eileen is in a quandary : she has to choose between her family and her faith. What will she do ? I mean come on, this is a comedy, we all know how it is going to end. The problem is not the end really. The problem is that the scenes that are supposed to illustrate Eileen's conflict with her family, and her own dilemma, are not funny, but they are not sad either, or deep. The film remains on the surface so as not to shock anyone. It remains politically correct, full of good intentions, so of course, it fails as a comedy, and it also fails as a drama. Don't waste your time watching more than the trailer.
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Mud (2012)
Outstanding
Anyone who ever dreamed of America dreamed it for two kinds of spaces : the city – high and sprawling, violent and full of energy – and the nature – the desert, the bayou, the swamps, the "wilderness", a word that has no equivalent in French. We dream of America because we dream of the images that created it. There are always images, shaped by other images, and we keep on dreaming of them. The filmmakers know that. Watching Mulholland Drive is watching Gilda and Sunset Boulevard, etc. Watching Mud is watching other images of the South. And the South has always been inhabited by resourceful children, forced to manage on their own to face the adults' violence. And nature has always been for them a way out and a consolation. Watching Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) is like watching Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Idgie in Fried Green Tomatoes, Mick in the Heart is a Lonely Hunter
"This thing I want I know not what", Mick says. Ellis watches the adults, he sees his parents fight, he sees women lie to men, men lie to women. They seem lost. He would like to help them, to belong there, and yet at the same time he is disappointed in them, he is angry. This thing he wants and doesn't want. Mud, and everything that shaped it, is about a passage, a difficult growth from the child's freedom to the adult's responsibilities, it's about the impossibility to understand the world as it is. To understand, you always need a guide, or at least a model. But the adult is weak and needs help. In Mud, as in two other great movies, Winter's Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild (let's remember that Arkansas is in the middle, between Missouri and Louisiana), roles are reversed. The child takes care of the adult, and loses some of his illusions on the way. And yet, despite violence and death, love remains, love between men and women, between parents and their children, between men and nature. Beauty is still out there, in front of which one cannot but wonder. Mud ends in a final shot of the river, which is a character in itself, both dangerous and protective. I love America for all these images, all these stories, all these shots, all these characters. I love the myths America created, and Mud adds another piece to this mythology.
Read my blog for other reviews: http://filmcritiks.wordpress.com/