Strange Magic of Paddington.

The previous subject--an inability of American critics and public to tolerate any degree of ambivalence--manifests itself in the widely diverging reactions on "Paddington" (98% of approval on rottentomatoes,com) and "The Strange Magic" (20% approval). While Paddington is superficially cute, Magic has ugly and self-destructive male lead and her female lead, the warrior princess, does not transform in the end into anything else. Likewise, is her air-head sister. This is intolerable.

Sniper vs Hurt Locker

I did not bother to watch Sniper and my comment is only an educated guess why Sniper was such a success and Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker was a flop. For the Americans there is intrinsic impossibility to understand moral ambiguity. Here are heroes; and there are enemies. That's what the public wants.

Hurt Locker shows a deep deformation of psyche in course of the war up to complete inability to adapt to civilian life and code of conduct. Poor Kathryn overestimated intelligence of American viewing public and its ability for compassion. What is needed is a perfect gladiator who entrenches in the viewers in their comfortable seat the fundamental righteousness of their cause and worldview.

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.