MovieComment

Monster

Posted by Player under Drama

What is it with depressing naturalism films that makes them so prone for Oscar nomination? By now there’s Hilary Swank’s performance as a girl who wanted to be a boy in Boys Don’t Cry, to Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, and now Charlize Theron helped produce and star in Monster, a film based on the life of a prostitute who turns serial killer.

Theron won the academy award for her performance, so obviously the acting is superb by Theron in Monster, but is it really a good film?

The story starts out with Theron’s character contemplating suicide. She is not a drug addict, but a prostitute who has lost her youthful looks a long time ago, and who has never known love ever in her life. She decides to spend her last five dollars from her last job, by walking into a gay bar, in which she meets a young innocent gay girl played by Christinia Ricci. She soon discovers that the young lesbian reminds her of her own youthful innocence before she discovered that in real life, the optimistic saying: “All you need is love,” is a bunch of bullshit.

But even with her best attempts and intentions, she can’t escape the life of prostitution and after being raped and killing her attacker, she begins a downward spiral of killing johns and trying to live out the fantasy of having a lover, even if that lover is another woman.

Perhaps the strangest but best line in the whole movie is when a john asks her to call him “Daddy”, and Theron saids, “Why? Do you like to fuck your kids?”.

Overall Monster is just as depressing as most naturalistic movies like Requim For A Dream, Monster’s Ball, and Boys Don’t Cry. There is no happy ending, and no love just doesn’t get you anything. This is evident when Ricci’s character is literally told that it is better to just give up the gay life, get married, fuck your husband, and live with it, cause that is what is expected of women.

The DVD has a good a picture as expected from a drama, and while surround effects don’t figure much into the film, there is a DTS Soundtrack which will sound more than adequate. The choosing of old 80’s love songs sung by likes of Steve Perry, is oddly appropriate in this film.

Overall Theron’s acting is superb, Ricci’s is not as spectacular as the short young lesbian, but does well enough to support Theron. Again, Monster, is not your typical feel-good feminist film, it is dark, and stays that way for its entirety.

Requiem For A Dream

Posted by Player under Drama

In our day and age, most of us do not appreciate or even get the opportunity to view great art. Our busy lifestyles are filled with work, family, and an occasional movie, so to most of us, film has become the one artistic form that can at times be great art for us. I am discounting music, because the proliferation of commercialism has taken something away from popular music that somehow at least in my mind has cheapen it. What I mean by great art, is art that allows us to view something in a completely different way, and which may not necessarily change our opinion, but will in fact give us pause, reference, and at its height understanding. To me, most films do not do this, I do not get much pause from say “Austin Powers 2″ or even a good movie like “Gladiator”. These films are entertaining but not great art in that they extend outside the genre of film to be more than what they are, which is just a good movie. However there are times when a movie can achieve a great art status and such a film is rare, not in that there are few of them, but that you rarely choose to view one. Such a film as Requiem For A Dream, does achieve the status of great art and so this is why I implore you to view this film at a time when you feel that you can enjoy some great art. Let us now begin…

Story line:

The story line is very naturalistic, resembling something that maybe Zolar (the founder of French Naturalism) would write if he would be alive today. Naturalism for most people is depressing, but its foundations have more to do with how human nature will digress to a point of “moral decay”, from which there can be no return than simply depicting depressive states. In Zolar’s novels this naturalism was founded in one of his character’s exposure to laundry work, and how that led to her downfall; the hidden meaning being that exposure to people’s filthy clothes will eventually decay your moral fiber. Most people will identify more with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which depending on who you ask, may or may not be a naturalist work. The same decay of morality, of civilization is rooted in Heart of Darkness as in Requiem For A Dream, but instead of colonialism, the driving factor is drug abuse. Requiem For A Dream follows the moral decay of a lonely old woman, her son, his girlfriend, and his best friend, as they deal and try to survive their drug abuse. From simple dreams of being on TV to opening a store, each character is highlighted than drawn down into a spiraling downfall. The story line implicates drugs in general and makes no distinction between a cup of coffee, prescription drugs, or street cocaine. The sin is the same if you crave it, you are an addict.

Acting Notes:

I did not recognize any of the actors except for Jennifer Connelly and one of the Wayan’s brothers who plays the best friend. Connelly’s performance is excellent even though I still regard her as an unproven actress, she is perhaps the most convincing flighty airhead addict since Courtney Love’s performance in Larry Flynt. Wayan’s performance is equally superb and subtle. The other characters are even better and have larger roles. There is both emotion and probably the most hard to capture moments when the scene entails feelings that for the most part cannot be spoken.

Look and Feel:

The film is definitely concerned with sound and visual depiction. While Zolar’s novels are very detailed and paint very concrete backgrounds and scenes, Requiem For A Dream, establishes this in film by using very simple but effective techniques. First of all most of the dialogue in the movie is shot with close-ups of the face and eyes. The director manages to bring out the dialogue by focusing directly on facial expressions, in this way the camera inspects the truth and half truths of faces, so you not only get the inflection, but you can verify it visually if the words actually mean something else. The other method the camera uses is to show quick shots of drugs, cigarettes, cocaine melting, coffee being slurped, pills being popped. While the shots may sometimes be artsy, the effect is not, it is a quick glimpse into not only how casual these strange and abnormal behaviors can be as well as their effect on both the consciousness of the camera and the actor. Lastly the camera uses some sped-up film sequences to show how life can span quickly when things do not matter, when happiness supposedly takes place. In this way the film focuses entirely on the despair and the jeopardy of the characters. Audio is perhaps the second most important depiction, the director chooses his sound effects very carefully from the snorting of cocaine, to the relief of downers to the boiling of crack on a spoon. Most of the artsy shots of drugs are done with effective sounds that bring out the quickness and direct effect of drugs. Besides sound effects that are precise and distinct, which the director repeats often throughout so that you can become accustomed to them and their effect, a spectacular musical score accompanies many of the scenes. A minor scale in D or F maybe, is chillingly echoing through out many of the scenes and entirely throughout the ending sequences. It is a simple score like most of the other techniques in the film, but one that is immediately recognizable and at the same time enchanting.

Final Notes:

The DVD format usually is touted as being the best format for movies like Star Wars with large amounts of SGI and surround effects, but yet with all the precision of a multi-million dollar project like Star Wars, Requiem For A Dream manages to outdo most films in all three important aspects: Character acting, Camera use, and Audio accompaniment. Some may want to compare this film to a movie like the 3-hour film Magnolia which starts off as a naturalist depiction, but somehow happens to find a happy ending for most everyone, but they would be wrong. While Magnolia has almost the same feel, and its score is also amazing, Requiem For A Dream is a much better naturalist work, for it is simplistic in every individual form, but is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Garden State

Posted by Player under Drama

Though I missed it in the theaters, as I’m sure a lot of other people did, Garden State is one of those films that you either will like and appreciate for what it is or pass on without much malice toward its creater and director Zach Braff (you know the goofy guy from NBC’s Scrubs).

In his debut as writer and director of his first movie, you will be impressed cause Garden State does not look or feel like a first attempt at a serious drama/comedy. As for the story, well it is not exactly all that original, but it is pretty good.

In the story, Zach plays Andrew Largeman, a little known actor who returns to his roots in New Jersey upon learning of his mother’s death. For the first time in years, Andrew decides not to take his meds and just wing real life. Back in Jersey he discovers the same old friends he had are still the same people, but without his medication, he starts to feel again, to feel life as it is unstead of how we want it to be. Part of it is also his new found companionship by Sam (played by Natalie Portman). Sam is herself messed up, but not in the same way as Andrew. The two end up understanding that what they have found in each other is good, even if everything else is messed up. In this part the story is a love story. The other thing to life is that you have to not just love, you have to forgive those you love, and Andrew learns this too with his father.

In the end, Garden State won’t make you happy or make you rethink the world, but it is an enjoyable and somewhat funny movie. It is ten times better than most movies out there, but it is not award winning either. It just is an interesting movie with a good cast and that is why I can’t say anything bad about it, other than perhaps the hype was just that hype. It is a good movie. Not great.

Donnie Darko

Posted by Player under Drama

Wow, just when I had given up on movies, comes Donnie Darko. This is a superb film. Go watch out!

Donnie Darko tells the story of a teenage boy who sees a human size bunny rabbit whose name is Frank. Frank is warning Donnie that the world is about to end and that he must prepare for it. In the real world Donnie goes to private school and puts up with much of the same crap that other high school kids put up with, namely bullies, girls, and crazy teachers. At the same time that this is going on he meets his first real girlfriend who also has a messed up life, and the two seem rather happy. But of course Frank is still warning Donnie of the end of the world and Donnie’s psychologist doesn’t seem to get the fact that Donnie really needs help.

Eventually all of Frank’s warnings start coming true and the clues that Donnie gathers all start pointing him to the idea of time travel and the end of the world.

While we may think Donnie is just mental, you can’t quite fault him too much either, cause the real world seems to be just as crazy with people listening to con artist motivational speakers and having hypocritical morals.

In the end Donnie is right about the world, it does come to an end, and who are we to judge him, for it’s Donnie Darko’s world and he’s only letting us see it for a while.

After watching this film, I kind of wanted to compare it to American Beauty, but Donnie Darko is a better film, because it’s characters are more grounded and you can relate to them better. Darko’s parents are not over dramatic, they make jokes, they try not to let life become too serious, they love their son and are concerned for him. But most of all Donnie’s fear of dying alone is the most universal theme of all, because while none of the other characters admit to eachother that they share Donnie’s fear, they are undeniably connected to him in the end because of it.