Gone Girl

     

Very good thriller, sharp and dialogues are mostly well written. Rosamund Pike is great as a psychopath. But, in fact, the movie is a faithful portrait of normal, everyday family relations only over-dramatized for the screen.

Yet, as in "Yellow" Hollywood producers have a strange view of a lifestyle of ordinary American. Community college adjunct and part-time blogger live in a grand, 4+ bdrm. house.

Another of their biases--correct as I suspect--is that hicks, no matter how friendly they might look (I mean a girl in an apartment complex who "befriends" a heroine and her boyfriend) are all money-hungry thugs inside.

Yellow, by Cassavetes.

Still from www.yellowthefilm.com 

The movie is a labor of love--his romantic companion plays the lead and mom/stepmom? plays somebody--but it spins out of control as the life of the lead character. Styles mix freely--All That Jazz'-style singing and dancing numbers appear amidst masked cartoon characters.

The setting is surreal--assistant teacher in LA lives in a condo with a swimming pool adorned by artwork, wears designer dresses (and that is despite her drug habit) and her pedicure is impeccable even when she goes miles in Oklahoma desert over the rail tracks. Her debilitated unemployed sister played by Sienna Miller drives a Jaguar and the heroine is not afraid to leave children to her when she departs. Cassavetes cannot be accused of inattention to detail--one scene includes one slowly falling piece of torn bill in total defiance of gravity--but the director, as well as the author, should not love the characters he creates otherwise they take control over him.

Interstellar. Christopher Nolan.

This movie (metaphor of another critic) is a cross between "Inception" and "Gravity" and not in a good way. Presumption is ridiculous: the civilization, which builds starships cannot genetically modify humans or at least corn to survive in lower-oxygen atmosphere. Yet, the same ubiquitous corn appears later on a space station. If it grows at the orbit of Saturn, can they grow enough on Earth? Space travel progresses but medical technology... not so fast. The whole movie is a mess of special effects, thin philosophy and even its battery of A-list actors cannot rescue it from a free fall.

Birdman by Inarritu

A really good movie. Mexican director out-New Yorked New Yorkers. Has nothing in it reflecting on the subject of this blog.

Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen's version of "Pygmalion" is not a moralistic flop like his Blue Jasmine, but it is, in words of one critic, "undercooked." Dialogues are stale; characters are underdeveloped. It is fair entertainment for boring Saturday evening; that's about that. Talents of Colin Firth and Emma Stone (I did not know she can act) are fit into cut-out characters of this movie. Because Ms. Stone is obviously too old to serve as Allen's romantic companion for the shoot, he hired three female assistants to Colin Firth, which appear only in one episode of the movie.

Calvary

Director's desire to follow passions of Christ as close as possible deformed psychological veracity of the characters in the movie. But the actors' play is sublime.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn is a most wanted antidote to the brilliant war propaganda series by Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker and, especially, Zero Dark Thirty). Being more-or-less standard as cinematic fare it is great as a polemic piece about the modern warfare. Namely, the careerists aided and abetted by mindless squares always win leaving death and destruction in their wake.

         The hero played by untimely gone P. S. Hoffman represents traditional intelligence/police methods: hiring of recruits, imbibing them with sense of the mission and internalizing it with them, etc. etc. When he is about to let off the hook a broken Chechen terrorist, a crooked Swiss banker and a mullah willing to look the other way to terrorist funding going through his charities in order to get to the really big fish in the terror international, a CIA woman with steely eyes [1]  and German prosecutors arrest them all. Recruited son of the cleric is at large and will obviously become a jihadist if be believe the logic of the movie.


[1] She is played by Robin Wright and obviously modeled on the legions of State Department/CIA/NSC banshees: Wendy Sherman, Vicky Nuland, Condi Rice, Samantha Power, Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. etc.

Lucy

Whatever illogical turns this hack job of Luc Besson takes (enhanced brain capacity allows its bearer to violate laws of physics, there is a need to secretly smuggle the substance absolutely unknown to anybody, etc.) the most improbable of all is that lower-middle class girl from Pennsylvania drives the car in Paris for the first time in her life.

Grand Budapest Hotel

 S. Zweig (1881-1942)

This is a step down from his masterpiece, the Moonrise Kingdom. But if Wes Anderson were to produce masterpiece after masterpiece who would he then be? A freaking Fellini? Everything which is organic and sensual in Moonrise here is visceral and invented. Ours (and which is much worse) his emotional connection to his characters is tenuous as the pre-War life he nostalgically adores and even understands, to a certain degree, but never is capable to emotionally connect with. His cinematic imagery is falls flat wandering in the snowy expanses of the Eastern Europe.

Bond, James Bond

I realized why garish, illogical and frequently silly James Bond movies have such success. They are structured as a FAIRY TALE. I. e. the hero overcomes (imaginary but) impossible odds, beats the crap out of villain and gets the broad. This is precisely the adventures of a fairy prince.

The Monuments Men

It takes a lot of work to make Bill Murray not remotely interesting. George Clooney obviously spent too much time with his CIA cronies planning the dismemberment of Sudan (South Sudanese now free, how 'bout that?) that he got completely detached from a moviemaking process.

The movie looks like a cheap piece of Cold War propaganda with characters pronouncing poorly written bathetic monologues obviously borrowed from the Voice of America of the "Red Scare" period.  America is a force for universal good, Russians are the cartoonish enemy and Germans are so non-soldierly (children warriors or psychopaths) that they evoke compassion or disdain, rather than being presented as a dangerous foe. Of course, no American philanders, even in Paris, or drinks in excess. The only "our" guys killed are those "furriners" (Brit and Frenchman), who are even more schematic than the majority of characters and their death does not register as a tragedy.

The director of "Good Night and Good Luck" stooped to the level of McCarthy-level agitprop. So what? Christian Socialist Dostoevsky returned from the penal colony as anti-Semitic, Prussian-admiring imperialist. Jacobin General Bonaparte became the Emperor Napoleon and... a Catholic. Power, or the illusion of it, makes wondrous transmutations of character.

Massacres in now "free" Southern Sudan.

Anna Karenina

                                 Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina. Still from the official site of the movie. 

"Tolstoy, you proved with art and talent,

That woman should not make it up

When she is mother, duly married,

Nor with court chamberlain, nor with aide-du-camp."

Epigram by poet Nicolay Nekrasov, Tolstoy's contemporary

Seriously, Tom Stoppard despite his (being a good Czech) disdain for the Russian culture did not do a bad job in translating Tolstoy for a Hollywood screen. Small fault is that he did not understand that Tolstoy hated Karenin and everything he represented but, as a great artist, did not want to succumb to caricature. However, the  most surprising, for somebody living in Britain, is Stoppard's complete lack of understanding of the aristocratic culture. He could read Proust better to understand the difference between "very" and "not very noble" ... Duke. Vronsky family are obviously post-Petrine upstarts. Prince Oblonsky is a Ryurikid and Lowin, as a natural fiancee for a Ryurikid Princess belongs to the lineage of the old boyars (as did Tolstoy himself, though his family's title of Counts was relatively new). Settling him, as director did, in a rich peasant's hut is bizarre. Calling his looks "bourgeois" would be considered a humiliation and result in a duel. 

American Hustle

The first really good movie since unappreciated but genial "Moonrise Kingdom" by Wes Anderson. Though traditional in its cinematic rendering, it has smart dialog, excellent acting and fast, efficient plot. The first half of the movie seems to be wrong on tempo, tangling more plotlines that the director seems to be capable to untangle but it all makes sense in the end.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Brothers Coen must have had a very beautiful childhood and comfortable youth to imbibe that much degree of misanthropy. But unlike, e.g. "Burn After Reading", in the "Inside Llewyn Davis" there is no human emotion one can relate whatsoever. The characters are drones/zombies, who populate the bleak urban desert of 1960s (sic!) America. Their motives and actions are as incomprehensible and alien as in their earlier violence porn "No Country for Old Men" and impress the viewers as little.