Movie Diary
1. A History of Violence
I'm not sure what I expected of this, but I definitely expected more. I generally like the whole Cronenberg aesthetic, which this is soaked in with a healthy side order of noir, and Viggo's performance is great. But I kinda got the impression from all the raves that there was some real shock or surprise or post-modern twist in there. Instead it was just, and I'll be vague for the sake of withholding spoilers, a mystery that had 2 basic outcomes, and it made you think it was one and then the other and back and forth a couple times, with a resolution that was completely flat and typical action movie-ish. Maybe it went over my head and I need something about it explained to me, but I think I got and appreciated the points it made, but the way they were made, with stock "nice small town folks" characters and even less realistic stock "big city gangsters" characters and just the slightest ambiguity in between, was pretty disappointing.
2. Flightplan
Another movie that I managed to avoid hearing any spoilers about for a year or two after its release, but found that what I'd imagined the big reveal to be was more interesting than how it really turned out. This one irritated me even more, though, because once the grand scheme was laid out, it was pretty ridiculous and implausible. Granted, it took a few clever alternate routes around the typical airplane-mystery/hijacking scenario, but again, without getting into spoiler-ish territory, the whole idea, once it all came together, seemed to convoluted to me, with so many variables that would have to go in just the right direction, for it to all play out the way it does in the movie.
3. Tape
This movie is like a mini-Dead Poet's Society reunion, with Ethan Hawke and that one guy who's on House now, and Hawke's then-wife Uma along for the ride. In fact, they're the 3 only people in the whole movie, because it's one of those talky Linklater flicks, adapted from a stage play where it's just people in a hotel room arguing for 80 minutes. I have nothing against that approach when it's done well (see: The Big Kahuna), but this felt like a short one-act that was stretched out to twice its necessary length to become a feature film, where the characters repeat the same lines back to each other for dramatic emphasis so many times that you get a weird deja vu (and not, like, snappy humorous Sorkin-type repetition, just people making the same basic point over and over). Also, the title is a corny ha-ha double meaning (because the movie was shot on tape, and at one point centers around an audio tape of a conversation). But there's a good tension between the actors, Hawke being really annoying on purpose for once, and I got pretty caught up in the storyline and really wanted to see where it went, these people who've known each other since high school working out all these tangled up issues and accusing each other of shit and you're never entirely sure what happened back then. The idea kind of interests me a lot, actually, since I have a ton of baggage left over from high school with people that I might not even see again, let alone address the baggage so head-on. But the story just becomes messier and more confusing and harder to resolve once Uma enters the picture, and the ending seemed ambiguous on purpose but still pretty unsatisfying. So yeah, this whole post is about being frustrated by the endings of movies.
I'm not sure what I expected of this, but I definitely expected more. I generally like the whole Cronenberg aesthetic, which this is soaked in with a healthy side order of noir, and Viggo's performance is great. But I kinda got the impression from all the raves that there was some real shock or surprise or post-modern twist in there. Instead it was just, and I'll be vague for the sake of withholding spoilers, a mystery that had 2 basic outcomes, and it made you think it was one and then the other and back and forth a couple times, with a resolution that was completely flat and typical action movie-ish. Maybe it went over my head and I need something about it explained to me, but I think I got and appreciated the points it made, but the way they were made, with stock "nice small town folks" characters and even less realistic stock "big city gangsters" characters and just the slightest ambiguity in between, was pretty disappointing.
2. Flightplan
Another movie that I managed to avoid hearing any spoilers about for a year or two after its release, but found that what I'd imagined the big reveal to be was more interesting than how it really turned out. This one irritated me even more, though, because once the grand scheme was laid out, it was pretty ridiculous and implausible. Granted, it took a few clever alternate routes around the typical airplane-mystery/hijacking scenario, but again, without getting into spoiler-ish territory, the whole idea, once it all came together, seemed to convoluted to me, with so many variables that would have to go in just the right direction, for it to all play out the way it does in the movie.
3. Tape
This movie is like a mini-Dead Poet's Society reunion, with Ethan Hawke and that one guy who's on House now, and Hawke's then-wife Uma along for the ride. In fact, they're the 3 only people in the whole movie, because it's one of those talky Linklater flicks, adapted from a stage play where it's just people in a hotel room arguing for 80 minutes. I have nothing against that approach when it's done well (see: The Big Kahuna), but this felt like a short one-act that was stretched out to twice its necessary length to become a feature film, where the characters repeat the same lines back to each other for dramatic emphasis so many times that you get a weird deja vu (and not, like, snappy humorous Sorkin-type repetition, just people making the same basic point over and over). Also, the title is a corny ha-ha double meaning (because the movie was shot on tape, and at one point centers around an audio tape of a conversation). But there's a good tension between the actors, Hawke being really annoying on purpose for once, and I got pretty caught up in the storyline and really wanted to see where it went, these people who've known each other since high school working out all these tangled up issues and accusing each other of shit and you're never entirely sure what happened back then. The idea kind of interests me a lot, actually, since I have a ton of baggage left over from high school with people that I might not even see again, let alone address the baggage so head-on. But the story just becomes messier and more confusing and harder to resolve once Uma enters the picture, and the ending seemed ambiguous on purpose but still pretty unsatisfying. So yeah, this whole post is about being frustrated by the endings of movies.
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on Friday, February 23, 2007 at 4:17 PM.
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