danz radikle reviewz

that’s almost how long ago it was that i watched this. i remember i thought it took a while to get its footing - some of the ‘dormitory life’ blocking seemed a bit forced, and the first shakey handheld as we follow otilia to the bus felt a bit out of place. but i really appreciated the payoffs on both of these. the handheld bit set up the tense creepy walk at the end (and after that scene when they finally have a small cut in time - whew, what a relief that was.) but most compelling for me were that all the relationships i thought reached the level of realism they attempt in the opening scene. otilia and her boyfriend - especially during the dinner party when he’s whining in his room. the abortionist and both the girls - how they each have a different level of trying to keep the relationship normal. gabita with her cakes, otilia with her nervous attempt at a conversation (’i was afraid we would miss each other…’) and the abortionist with how he treads the line of helping them but still letting them know he has zero sympathy. the centerpiece seemed to be otilia and gabita, and much of the point seems to be to slam gabita for her weakness and how she uses her weakness to get her way.  so i found that particular relationship annoying in its purposefulness but it was so well-observed and sharply drawn i still appreciated it. i also really liked marinca as otilia.  something about her expressions and rushed casualness really helped the feel.

i did think it was a bit too much to have otilia agree to the abortionist’s demand.  maybe it was realistic for that time/place and what needed to happen, but it felt unnecessary to the narrative.  yes, otilia had her own concerns in mind, but she was already going to ridiculous lengths to help gabita.  and tension and weight-wise i thought things were pretty tight and heavy as they were.  when otilia finds the knife that was enough for me. 

gabita’s dinner was also pretty awesome. 

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i guess in any movie about kids i’m most concerned about authenticity and minimal manipulativeness.  antoine is pretty believable - not too smart or too cool.  his defiance at school compared to his submissiveness at home rounded him out pretty well.  his parents are pretty believable screwups with some texture as they each change their attitudes.  but all the other authority figures left me skeptical.  maybe that’s really how things were, but it was just hard for me to buy that the teachers are so clueless, the social workers are just like ‘yeah you can’t handle him, let’s throw him in juvie’ and the cops just put him in jail with a criminal.  it seemed an unnecessarily harsh and manipulative string of events that were hard for me to buy.

i like with movies about kids the freedom and necessity to change tone scene to scene to an extreme.  the music when they skip school is maybe over-the-top happy-go-lucky but it’s still fun.  the mischievous touches like ‘bonjour madam’ helped these bits seem less forced.  i also liked the patheticness of their grand plan to steal a typewriter.  that seemed like the real deal to me.

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the masturbatory nature of this annoyed me quite a bit and made it difficult for me to enjoy anything else about it.  i think there should be a decent amount of enjoyment in seeing defoe and malkovich ham it up so much, and izzards’ and elwes’ characters were supposed to carry this further.  but the whole thing felt too clunky for their showiness to be anything but a lot of hand-waving to me.  expositional dialogue and no clear sense of space in most scenes left me feeling very little atmosphere.  they worked the hell out of that antique train though.

when shreck and murnau have their first scene alone and establish the ‘filmmaking is dangerous, predatory work!’ theme they lost me completely.  i watched it last week and don’t remember the specifics of the scene though.

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on the downside this was annoyingly cutesy and the resolution felt much more manipulative and contrived than in darjeeling. but just like in darjeeling i couldn’t help but admire the joy anderson takes in his cutesiness and his resolution. nothing about the resolution was interesting, emotionally real, or emotionally satisfying to me, but you really get a warmth from how much he clearly likes to feel good at the movies.

i really liked the use of zissou’s own films and especially his scores. the guitarist also i thought was great so i wish he would have just left out any actual pop songs altogether. the design details were fun but a big source of the cutesiness for me (along with the non-realistic effects on a movie with a $50 mill budget.) i’d say they got in the way but there wasn’t really anything to get in the way of. i liked defoe’s character but i would have liked a non-name there to emphasize his confusing nature. especially his angry appreciation of the flag on the helicopter.

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this was pretty horrible, but i was kind of distracted the whole time watching it so i made it through pretty easily. mostly it just needed some tighter editing. the dialogue and acting was bad but if there just weren’t so many shots of people walking to cars or the dude pouring his evian it’d be a lot better. the big angry over-the-top ending made it worth it for me i guess. the other 2 things i really liked: the pickpocket’s suit! and the line from the 2nd wife about the 3rd: ‘her split is not horizontal, but vertical.’

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i liked this quite a bit but i feel like it was kind of stretching a little too far for profundity.  mostly i just don’t see how the addiction theme tied into the sell-your-soul theme very well.  the sell-your-soul theme seemed more about conformity and success with your peers and there just wasn’t much there with the addiction theme.  it seemed kind of tacked on and manipulative, especially clayton’s talk to his kid about raining shit.  it was a very affecting scene to me but it just didn’t fit anywhere else.

but the sell-your-soul theme i loved and arthur’s monologue was great.  and i liked clayton’s reasoning with him of waiting, letting the revelation wear off.  the ending was a little much with the redemptiveness, and how’d they organize a whole sting in, what, an hour?  oh, also i found it funny that the realm and conquest book was bright red. 

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there’s certainly plenty to criticize with the dialogue and acting and some clunky construction - the scene when he goes to buy the motor in particular, shot in a bunch of closeups with no sense of space and just wooden all around. but there are so many nice well-observed moments to overlook these problems.  my favorites were the girl singing to the radio while her mom puts on her makeup and then the slow dance scene.  that one ends a little too stagy with the cry, but is still a beautiful scene in just one shot. 

i didn’t even know the story of this until after i watched it.  and even not knowing it was a student film by a 21! year old i enjoyed it immensely.  

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i guess my main problem is just not liking the songs.  it’s just not a genre to my tastes and i don’t enjoy listening to them.  besides that they leave very little room for subtlety or nuance in the story, so it’s kind of a double whammy if you don’t like the songs so there’s just not much there for me.  a lot of scenes should have been more fun for me, like ‘a little priest’ and all of cohen’s and rickman’s scenes but i was just kind of drudging through.  the anthony and johanna characters were also ridiculously over-the-top wide-eyed and innocent. 

the gore was a bit disappointing too in its repetition.  there was a little variation with some piles of meat, but mostly it was just the neck spray over and over.  not very creative.   

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i loved the first half of this, of course.  little dialogue, little plot, and big ballsy score.  the score puts this huge weight on every step and it has this big ‘this is what happens’ allegorical feel to it where i don’t question anything the characters do.  even when we do get to little boston the scenes feel sparse enough that nothing is really nailed down.  we have daniel calling eli’s sermon a ‘goddamned hell of a good show’ and eschewing his blessing of the well, but the nature of their relationship and the overall arc of the themes still feels open and ambiguous.  i loved that for sure, and loved the freedom to read into it what i will.  i just started ‘king leopold’s ghost’ and thought this start could be a suitable metaphor for the insanity of that or another imperialistic story.  each side with some clear motivations but twisted not just for the outside world but between the two knowing parties. 

i think the turning point for me is after daniel’s baptism.  i liked that scene a lot, but from there on it’s simply character study and less interesting.  it’s also my failing as a viewer that i just don’t really want things resolved but they had to come to some conclusion on daniel’s character and motivations.  the fireside chat with his brother has some interesting observations, but i wanted a followup to muddy the waters on his competitiveness.  and the final showdown with eli, as fun and watchable as it was, i thought was a bit redundant and not illuminating at all.

and to answer jefe’s question, i didn’t realize they were two different characters until the bowling alley scene when daniel mentions giving paul $10k.  i realized they were using two different names at various points, but figured it was his middle name or something.  i think the big problem is when daniel’s doing his first purchase and eli is so knowing combined with daniel’s obvious deviousness with the quail hunting and their awkward handshake. 

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Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
it’s a challenge

Posted on January 15th, 2008

this felt pretty half-baked.  they never match the tone or energy of a good screwball romance, and i guess i was hoping more that they were going to try and update it to be a bit more contemporary instead of just trying to mimic it in parts.  oh brother i thought they successfully updated the musical genre to make it more accessible to a discerning and modern audience and i think they could have done something similar here.  just move the artifice around a bit to places we mind it less.  i can’t really remember many scenes i liked - maybe the courtroom with ‘the intruder’ - but a lot i didn’t, including pretty much all of cedric the entertainer’s, and especially the top partner in the law firm with the life support stuff.  it was mostly enjoyable though in part cause i thought the leads were up for it. 

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