35th Five Films, 2007
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Gone Baby Gone at AMC Loews Kips Bay. Kips Bay is just far enough away from the subway that it's not very crowded, even though there are plenty of decent stores and restaurants and all that. It's also very close to where I work, so I can easily make a 5:15 show like this one.
Critics love to complain about how regular-guy stars aren't mature anymore, forty is the new twenty and so on and so forth. It's interesting, then, that babyfaced Casey Affleck spends all his time here trying to convince everyone that he is older and more mature than he looks.
This really doesn't look much different from Clint Eastwood's Dennis Lehane adapation, Mystic River, dark and moody but not in an overly stylized fashion. Sean Penn doesn't really have a method-acting counterpart, though, which is fine with me. I like the restrained, deliberative fashion in which the characters deliver their arguments; too often in tense movies like this the moral dilemmas are played out between couples screaming at each other or archrivals bellowing from behind their firearms.
What's probably most noticeable, though, is the extremely overt depiction of class conflict at the beginning. Affleck overloads the screen with cheap jewelry, ancient furniture, bad haircuts, worse teeth, and Jerry Springer constantly playing in the background. The bar scene and Patrick's meetings with his friend the classy drug dealer also zero in on details of the trashy white urban lifestyle.
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High School Musical (Kenny Ortega) at home on DVD with Amy. I have to say, I prefer the half-hour Disney Channel sitcoms. There's no need for serious drama there, so they can mostly just concentrate on hamming it up.
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Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) at MoMA. It was great how the first zombie showed up about two minutes into the movie. Everything feels so swift but not underdeveloped. The crowd loved the posse leader, and with good reason. I particularly liked his answer to the reporter's question about whether the zombies were slow-moving creatures or not: "Well, they're dead, so...." My favorite part was probably when the zombies are sticking their arms through the window and the besieged are trying to beat them back, and some fingers and eventually a whole hand fall off an arm before it is retracted.
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3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves) with Charles at Anthology Film Archives. It's kind of weird that every Western of the past couple decades has been some sort of event, either a calculated career move or a vanity project or Oscar bait. In a sense, there's no real correlation between the kinds of films we have today and something like this. You'd have to look to horror, I think, to find the sort of genre movie that can survive with, at most, one recognizable name in the cast.
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Orphans (Ry Russo-Young) as part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series at Barbes. This seemed to be much more focused on the actors than form or visual style. I guess much the same has been said about other "mumblecore" films, though I would say a very definite director's touch comes through in stuff by Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, or Frank V. Ross. I also get the sense with those directors that a dramatic structure kind of takes shape during the filming and eventually asserts itself in the mind of the contemplative viewer. I didn't feel quite the same here. I like the ideas behind it--the director mentioned Winter Light during the Q&A--and the scenario presents some interesting possibilities.
The scenes didn't seem to flow, but rather congealed together in a sequence that's difficult to remember. This isn't a complaint that I would normally make, but I never got the feeling, like in Syndromes and a Century or the Bergman film mentioned above, that the action was taking place slightly outside conventional time, nor that the action was moving in a particular direction, just an uncomfortable in-between.
The dialogue in films like this is often uneven and incoherent, but tends to add a humorous realism, and generally seems to constitute a stylistic decision, but I'm not so sure here. Mostly, the dialogue here feels dramatic, but maybe suffers from too few shifts in tone. Almost every scene is either uncomfortable or sullen or humorous because/inspite of one of those two moods.
Maybe what I'm getting at here is that Orphans is, despite its small cast and limited setting, more ambitious than most of the films I love about slovenly, indecisive twentysomethings. That is, its themes are more traditional and the drama more high-pitched. That would be enticing to many or most other commentators on this stuff.
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Gone Baby Gone at AMC Loews Kips Bay. Kips Bay is just far enough away from the subway that it's not very crowded, even though there are plenty of decent stores and restaurants and all that. It's also very close to where I work, so I can easily make a 5:15 show like this one.
Critics love to complain about how regular-guy stars aren't mature anymore, forty is the new twenty and so on and so forth. It's interesting, then, that babyfaced Casey Affleck spends all his time here trying to convince everyone that he is older and more mature than he looks.
This really doesn't look much different from Clint Eastwood's Dennis Lehane adapation, Mystic River, dark and moody but not in an overly stylized fashion. Sean Penn doesn't really have a method-acting counterpart, though, which is fine with me. I like the restrained, deliberative fashion in which the characters deliver their arguments; too often in tense movies like this the moral dilemmas are played out between couples screaming at each other or archrivals bellowing from behind their firearms.
What's probably most noticeable, though, is the extremely overt depiction of class conflict at the beginning. Affleck overloads the screen with cheap jewelry, ancient furniture, bad haircuts, worse teeth, and Jerry Springer constantly playing in the background. The bar scene and Patrick's meetings with his friend the classy drug dealer also zero in on details of the trashy white urban lifestyle.
+ + +
High School Musical (Kenny Ortega) at home on DVD with Amy. I have to say, I prefer the half-hour Disney Channel sitcoms. There's no need for serious drama there, so they can mostly just concentrate on hamming it up.
+ + +
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) at MoMA. It was great how the first zombie showed up about two minutes into the movie. Everything feels so swift but not underdeveloped. The crowd loved the posse leader, and with good reason. I particularly liked his answer to the reporter's question about whether the zombies were slow-moving creatures or not: "Well, they're dead, so...." My favorite part was probably when the zombies are sticking their arms through the window and the besieged are trying to beat them back, and some fingers and eventually a whole hand fall off an arm before it is retracted.
+ + +
+
3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves) with Charles at Anthology Film Archives. It's kind of weird that every Western of the past couple decades has been some sort of event, either a calculated career move or a vanity project or Oscar bait. In a sense, there's no real correlation between the kinds of films we have today and something like this. You'd have to look to horror, I think, to find the sort of genre movie that can survive with, at most, one recognizable name in the cast.
+
+
Orphans (Ry Russo-Young) as part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series at Barbes. This seemed to be much more focused on the actors than form or visual style. I guess much the same has been said about other "mumblecore" films, though I would say a very definite director's touch comes through in stuff by Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, or Frank V. Ross. I also get the sense with those directors that a dramatic structure kind of takes shape during the filming and eventually asserts itself in the mind of the contemplative viewer. I didn't feel quite the same here. I like the ideas behind it--the director mentioned Winter Light during the Q&A--and the scenario presents some interesting possibilities.
The scenes didn't seem to flow, but rather congealed together in a sequence that's difficult to remember. This isn't a complaint that I would normally make, but I never got the feeling, like in Syndromes and a Century or the Bergman film mentioned above, that the action was taking place slightly outside conventional time, nor that the action was moving in a particular direction, just an uncomfortable in-between.
The dialogue in films like this is often uneven and incoherent, but tends to add a humorous realism, and generally seems to constitute a stylistic decision, but I'm not so sure here. Mostly, the dialogue here feels dramatic, but maybe suffers from too few shifts in tone. Almost every scene is either uncomfortable or sullen or humorous because/inspite of one of those two moods.
Maybe what I'm getting at here is that Orphans is, despite its small cast and limited setting, more ambitious than most of the films I love about slovenly, indecisive twentysomethings. That is, its themes are more traditional and the drama more high-pitched. That would be enticing to many or most other commentators on this stuff.
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Posted on Thursday, November 08, 2007
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