But I found it slightly disappointing and for a good 30 minutes in the middle I was bored beyond belief; I won’t spoil why.
I regret not seeing it in the cinema, though, as it’s better than most films of this … variety. To a large extent reliant on spectacle (for that’s what it is), I suppose these aesthetic qualities demand a big-screen experience rather than a god-knows-what-inch £55 second-hand Chromebook.
It gets a lot right – the stunning visuals, the world-building, the casting, sandworms that aren’t ‘Pure LOL’, and the spirit of the book. And most importantly, it isn’t the David Lynch version.
This movie quietly defines the quietly adventurous. It’s so basic Mise-en-scène and placid and it should be boring but it isn’t because there’s a reasoning behind the dull stylistics. These were Edwardian times; apparently you couldn’t say what you think and lived a life of repressed longings (to speak) or whatever.
Hopkins is out of this world here; he is incapable of ‘normal’. He can barely hold a conversation with another actor; almost everything he does is a monologue. He is unique and he didn’t become Hannibal for no apparent reason.
Despite their apparent quaintness, Merchant–Ivory did make some crackers. The Remains of the Day (1993) is their undoubted masterpiece, a Hopkins masterclass again. This is the prototype for these type of movies, of which there are more and more these days because they are a safe bet. None are any good, however. I took one look at a recent upstairs-downstairs thing and turned it off after 178 seconds.
Most of this shite is just … shite we send to our former colonial subjects. They think we are actually like this.
Clint – we all go by first-name basis with the living legend (LL) – has perfected the ultimate grizzled angry old man with latent empathy. He long ago (even as early as the late ’70s) mastered fading masculinity and here especially he is thoroughly believable because of the asshole that he is. I’ve read many times that he goes for the ‘PC brigade’. I really don’t think he does; he’s just making movies about what he knows, the type of characters he does best, and he simply runs with his instincts as a filmmaker. He’s not exactly going to star in or direct a sequel to The Birdcage (1996).
He is extremely funny here, and the jokes don’t come from the racial slurs; it’s the fact he’s this hard-as-nails old geezer and no one in the movie either expects it nor can handle it.
“Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while who you shouldn’t have fucked with? …. That’s me.”
He’s quite hit and miss as a director, but when he stars in a film, or one of his own, it’s usually very good.
It’s when Begbie goes zombie-Begbie and becomes a raging, snarling contagion, spreading the virus in the safe room in what is quite possibly the most terrifyingly claustrophobic sequence ever put on film.
And then immediately after this a certain Stringer Bell therefore decides to shoot them all.
It’s better than its precursor. Much better, and this is despite it getting a bit too silly towards the end. And I have no interest in the undead genre.
He’s off the charts in this, he really is. It’s the most self-effacing acting job in years. He defines scumbag ‘junkie’ but by the end you realise the bloke does have a heart and everything he does is for a reason, though he usually fucks it up. It’s a redempton story and one of the best because it’s REAL.
That last fight scene is the damage. It’s drama and technique. And it actually happened.
And the perfect movie. Disturbing, very clever, incredibly paced. Acting off the charts.
It defines ‘slow-burning drama’, and there is a joy in every scene with its peculiarities and what-you-think-are-pointless details. The explosions of violence are exactly that because they rarely happen but when they do they … do. It’s a noir that like the best of noirs becomes more than a PI job, ’30s Los Angeles the personal and the metaphorical. Best scene – J. J. “Jake” Gittes winding up the batty secretary to no end with his seemingly … pointless questions. Nothing in this movie is pointless.
It’s cliché to talk about masterful portraits of ugly capitalism. But this is one of them.
Andrew Dominik is the real deal – Chopper (2000), The Assassinationof Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and this hidden gem.
This is such an unusual crime thriller with its entirely unexciting shoot-outs and dearth of brash or loud moments. The movie mostly comprises a lot of miserable criminals engaging in very convincing conversations about their jobs; none of this standard mafioso talk. And it’s especially memorable for James Gandolfini losing the plot in one of his last roles. It says a lot about the quality of the actor that Tony Soprano never once popped into my head throughout his scenes.
Despite coming out in 2012, the film exists in a weird Great Recession/2008 United States presidential election bubble, and for a reason. If a clue was ever needed as to the movie’s statement, Pitt’s furious monologue at the end is for you:
‘My friend, Jefferson’s an American saint because he wrote the words, “All men are created equal.” Words he clearly didn’t believe, since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble, and they went out and died for those words, while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy [Obama, acceptance speech on the TV] wants to tell me we’re living in a community. Don’t make me laugh. I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.’
I barely understand half of the stuff that went on but the movie somehow reaches an inexplicable transcendence in its last 30 minutes. I believe Terrence Malick is some kind of anomaly. He didn’t make a movie for two decades and now he’s putting out a picture every other year.
‘Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I’ve seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and it lacked Malick’s fierce evocation of human feeling. There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in 1973.’
I mean, it’s bloody, as in baddies die and it’s graphic (which violence is). It’s Denzel doing his best Denzel; the opening sequence hilariously exposes his OCD by having the lad use a toothbrush to manicure his sneakers. You see him at work in a Walmart factory or whatever and he’s dedicated to the job. You get the feeling he’s hard as nails, though. And he turns out to be in the most Denzel way feasible.
The antagonist has a personality and is interesting; this is a rarity in the current action-thriller landscape. The soundtrack/score also works.
And Denzel utilises a nail gun.
Also, I’ve never seen the Edward Woodward TV show. It’s too late now to bother with it.
There exists an incredible canon of Carpenter movies from the ’70s and ’80s – Carpenter pulling out one sublime picture after another. A wee bit of snobbery swirls around commentary on him, that he can’t do a period drama or handle anything another other than horror and thrills, which is making an obvious point. And I keep referring to him in the past tense. Because I haven’t seen a new movie from the lad for decades.
As much as I would ascribe the term ‘auteur’ to the truly multi-skilled Carpenter, folk read way too much into these films, always seeking for the allegorical or the profound statement. They are all cult B-movies where very little acting nuance is needed, high-concept affairs elevating the primacy of the image and the economy of the edit. You’re in it for 90 minutes and then afterwards that’s that. It’s not Antonioni.
And to The Thing (1982) and that score, the landscape, the constant menace, and yet with the wackiest visual effects, brilliant for their time and curiously not dated at all.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 