09.11.08
What’s wrong with me #2 (There Will Be Blood)
And there was leaving. Not on my part though. The hype had been huge, my friends were stoked, and so I went to this movie that I hadn’t quite bought into. Thankfully, this made it all the less of a disappointment since I only had my expectations met. The people I went with, while they didn’t find it totally living up to the hype still seemed to think it was good. And all I could think about, aside how the entire “milkshake” would end up being classic (and it has, I would say) was the couple that left two hours into the movie.
Only a couple times in my life have I not finished a movie. And in neither case, I hadn’t paid for a ticket or a rental. Both of which will, likely, be the subject of futures posts in this series. They were “What the %$&@ Do We Know?!?” and “Dances With Wolves.” Though the latter is simply entertaining as one of the many who are inexplicably entranced by the new Battlestar series. In both of those cases, I borrowed it from someone else, so I felt no need to “get my money’s worth” from the situation. For the sake of this conversation, “Dances With Wolves,” is more relevant.
Both “There Will Be Blood” and “Dances With Wolves” make me think of what the Oscars are all about. Undeserving films that reek of someone trying desperately to be artsy and proactive, while only coming across pretentious and dull. In other words, I see what the critics saw, I just never bought it.
DDL, as far as I’m concerned, deserved the Oscar. In many others (Gangs of New York come to mind) I wholy respected his talent and performance but still found the overall package of a movie dry and dull. When a movie blatantly attempts to be gritty, it feels false, and its hard for me to get sucked into the world and find it believable. And I found that to be the case here as well. That being said, there is no way that he lives up to the hype surrounding it. Would there have been a bigger upset (Norbit winning for makeup aside) at the past Oscars if he hadn’t won? I feel like this wasn’t due to his competition, or him having a legendary performance that will be held in an Anthony Hopkins/Silence of the Lambs sort of way. He was fabulous. A character completely driven by competition, will his only regard being how to 1-up himself and everyone around him. The movie opened with such promise, seeing this man push himself beyond the point of injury, and with no one crackin’ the whip above him. Self-made man and all that stuff. But were we so desperate for an interesting in a fictional biopic that anyone willing to become a tortured soul and expose the darkest parts of himself will make us stand and cheer? Granted, flipping through recent nominees for Best Actor, very few performances that “stood above the crowd stand out. PSH as Capote is the only other nominee/winner that made me pause to wonder. So maybe we were just due, and we were going to embrace whatever movie came along. But the over-hype kills it.
If I’d gone in expecting a grand performance and a solid movie, I think I could have left ok. But the critics lead you to believe that this was going to be the Next Big Thing. The acting is done well (I forgot to mention, kudos to Paul Dano for his preacher/scammer/who-knows-what performance) but the characters just leave you feeling like your watching segmented whiplash. It never comes together. You watch acts, the earth explodes, you watch people well past the brink of insanity, and then back. Sure, it is all connected, but for something that tries to hard to be a “era-piece” I just never cared or felt I could enter the world created. And the more I felt the movie trying to force me, the more I resisted and became aware that it was just trying to hard.
So in the end, I found a movie that was, taken in parts, OK. Lots of fun conversations could be had peering into these little windows of religious zealousness, family, greed, and too many things to distill. The sum of its parts were just mediocre, and especially in (mercifully) not winning “Best Picture) I can only hope is will have a quick death and fade away from everyone’s “Modern Day Top 100 Lists.”
But here’s an interesting note. Did you know that the milkshake bit was non-fiction? True story…from the Teapot Dome Scandal. Check it out…Senator Albert Fall is the original milkshake drinker.
08.17.08
What’s wrong with me #1 (What Dreams May Come)
There is a fascinating human psychology that I will not attempt to explain or understand. But it is easier to complain, whine, kick and scream…and people tend to enjoy it more anyway. More to the point for me, I can justify not re-watching the movie right before writing about it. So, this seems a fitting place to start.
There’s something that fascinates me about this series I will try to write. I’ve often joked that I’m going to start ranking my friends and assigning point values based upon if their movie recommendations, in the past, have been accurate to my tastes. It’s not that they are wrong for liking certain movies, but it sometimes boggles my mind that they can recommend 10 movies in a row that I adore, and then something will come up that is such a far cry from good, to the point of being downright unwatchable, that I am left puzzled as to what is wrong with me.
So without further ado…to all of you who liked What Dreams May Come. What did I miss?
The cast and characters, I wanted to like. Robin Williams can do the serious thing as far as I’m concerned, including parts of Good Morning Vietnam, One Hour Photo, and to a certain extent Insomnia. I’m ok with this path in his career, though I’m growing weary of all of the funny men of old trying their hat at serious. Whatever floats your boat, I suppose. But I can’t handle him in this movie, and considering he’s on-screen for 99% of it, that did NOT bode well. I don’t know if I can put my finger on what bothered me though. I guess for what was written, he did well enough, but the plot and bothered me more than its actual execution. Cuba Gooding Jr…he’s never wowed me, but never detracted from a movie. I find he did more of the same for me here. His character seemed wholly drawn out and unneeded for a majority of the film. It’d be bad enough to call him a device, but if he was a decide, what the heck was he a device for?
Plot wise…it felt like it was trying to be deep, but it never accomplished being deep. It was asking these greater questions of things beyond humanity without actually arousing me at all. But it wasn’t in a pretentious “We want an Oscar” way, it was more a matter of “Look at these characters, they are so deeply in tune with their spirituality,” and yet by the end of the movie, it was hard to tell. And again, I’m ok with ambiguity, but I felt I’d been trying to buy into something and never got anything in return. Love also played out as a huge overarching theme…and yet I just found no reason to vest in the characters. Kinda spoilerish, but only in a “you read the back of the box” sort of way, death is a hugely profound altering circumstance. Maybe I needed to like the wife more before I could care. Maybe the surreal-ness that was supposed to make me feel real just never quite clicked. But I didn’t care. There was no sorrow or joy about the thoughts of this loving couple. I know that makes me sound cold and callous, and I can be, but movies usually make me a sucker for the sentimental. This film just failed epically in doing so. You can’t whiplash me around and go over-the-top to grounded in reality and expect me to like it.
The settings were good, that I will concede. Everything was larger and brighter than life. Extra vibrant when it should be, extra gloomy when it should be, kudos to the art department on this one. And I’m out of praise.
So please, take your cheesy dialogue, your tortured protagonists, your weathered spirituality, and remake this. I wanted to like it, I did. But all I got was a big disappointment.
The Nominee for Worst Movie of All Time…
We stood huddled in the lobby of the local movie theater. While a biting cold awaited us outside, the group gathered to discuss and critique the film we’d just seen.
“Worst movie of all time,” A pronounced easily. “Hands down. Nothing is worse than this film.”
Without hesitation, I argued that she was wrong. The worst movie of all time was the not the film that still had credits rolling in a sticky-floored theater behind us. It was, without a doubt, that catastrophe of a film starring Bjork. Yes, that one. In the year 2000, presumably thinking that the end of the world was looming and the film would never be viewed by human eyes, Lars von Trier wrote a screenplay. His opus, I assume, and his attempt to immortalize himself before all computers failed to convert to 2000 and caused the world to Blue Screen of Death.
Tragically, I was not that lucky. I saw the Dancer in the Dark at the recommendation of friends. They lied to me and are friends no more, rest assured. They claimed it was emotional and powerful. I found it to be exhausting and draining. I’m not an expert on film, screenplays or humans, but I’ve found that when the audience is rooting for the heroine to die, the movie has probably taken a turn for the worse.
Over the past several years, people have encouraged me to watch the film again after hearing my diatribe about the angst this film has caused. “Give it another chance,” they egg. “Maybe you were in a bad mood!” If I was in a bad mood, it was because of that film, not in spite of it. To add insult to injury, I was so disgusted by the movie that I ignored its existence on my coffee table for days. What could have been a $.99 rental and two hour waste of time languished in my living room and became a $5.00 rental.
And the movie I valiantly defended to keep it out of the worst movie of all time slot? Eight Crazy Nights, an animated anomaly about Chanukah and Adam Sandler. Not Sandler’s finest moment, but at least he’s never shown up anywhere wearing a dead swan around his neck.
That’s just not Kosher.
