Some thoughts on the trailer for The Road:
I’ve waited a long time for this. The movie, as many of you might know already, was supposed to be released last autumn. Obviously, it didn’t make that deadline. It looks, though, like it will be released this coming autumn. Thus, the trailer.
I’m not pleased with what appears to be some manner of sorta kinda little bit of an explanation for what the hell happened to the world. I love the fact that McCarthy never specifies, that he leaves it at “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions,” that the book never becomes, explicitly, a political screed or environmental warning.
Maybe, though, the kinda sorta explanation won’t make the film itself. Maybe?
And I’m not pleased with the truck that belches smoke from both sides. Sure, the image communicates, as an image should, and sure, it looks threatening, and, sure, it conjures up a lot of associations (all scary), but it goes too far. It’s too much.
And I’m worried about the camera that swoops up into the sky during what appears to be a chase scene.
And I recognize that the trailer may very well be sending a dramatically different message about the film than would otherwise be warranted. In some ways, it makes sense, financial sense, to market the thing as a post-apocalyptic thriller. And, hell, in some ways it is a post-apocalyptic thriller. It is the tone, though, the tone that needs to be right.
But, I’m excited about a lot of what I see, too. The look of the bridge with the abandoned semi is fantastic. And I love the bulk of the clothing the father is wearing and the desolation and fatigue visible on the characters. The dunes and the beach look amazing.
I’m intrigued by the way in which some of the father’s thoughts have been given to Charlize Theron as dialogue. I look forward to seeing how they handle other aspects of the strong “interiority” of the novel.
And, especially, I’m glad the thing is going to get released.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Thursday, December 4, 2008
There Will Be Blood
I watched this for the second time a week or so ago. And here's the deal:
I'm not sure it's making all that complex an argument.
I'm not sure I like the Johnny Greenwood score that much.
But I like the movie. A lot.
Maybe it never gets better than the opening sequence (excepting the big ol' crash-em-up Greenwood chord), but the whole thing works and works well.
And if it gets better than Daniel Day-Lewis underground, or in the early oil-digging shots, it does so only when Plainview and HW are first on the train together. Brilliant, almost-silent filmmaking.
I'm not sure it's making all that complex an argument.
I'm not sure I like the Johnny Greenwood score that much.
But I like the movie. A lot.
Maybe it never gets better than the opening sequence (excepting the big ol' crash-em-up Greenwood chord), but the whole thing works and works well.
And if it gets better than Daniel Day-Lewis underground, or in the early oil-digging shots, it does so only when Plainview and HW are first on the train together. Brilliant, almost-silent filmmaking.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Quentin's Soundtracks
I saw Death Proof a couple of months ago and didn't like it at all. It didn't work as homage, it didn't work as trash, and it didn't work as entertainment.
(Though I was entertained when a student insisted to me that it was a "perfect homage to all of those great 1970s drive-in movies and car chase movies and ultra-low-budget New York gore movies" and then couldn't name or honestly claim to have seen a single one such film).
I at least expected entertaining dialogue and, while there was certainly a lot of talk talk talk, all of it read like juniors desperately trying to write what they think Tarantino movies sound like.
But, what it did have was a brilliant soundtrack. And, sure, that's to be expected, but this one had truly surprising things on it. Most prominently, and most brilliantly (with an honorable mention for "Chick Habit") are these two:
1. "Hold Tight" by the improbably named Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. How I had never heard this before is beyond me. It's the perfect blend of fuzzed-out guitars, melodic (but ever-evolving) simplicity, rhythmic complexity masquerading as simplicity, '60s harmonies, and the adherence to maxim that anything sayable in fewer than three minutes shouldn't be padded out to four. I picked up a collection by the group and much of it is just as good. There's no doubt that they're a bunch of Brits; the songs have got those little melodic quirks that you find in, for example, work by the Kinks, and that never seem to show up in otherwise-similar American songs (not after 1950, anyway).
2. "Staggolee" by Pacific Gas and Electric. A traditional song, and a badass one at that, and this group, whoever they are, take it and treat it like The Band had grown up not in Canada and Arkansas but in Watts instead -- and a Watts burning simultaneously with soul glory and psychedelic frustration. And while there are probably 38,000 versions of it in existence, at the moment, I'd be willing to argue that it's the best version of the song ever set down, easily eclipsing Dylan's version from World Gone Wrong, or that of RL Burnside, or (believe it or not) Neil Diamond, or Mississippi John Hurt, or even the Isley Brothers.
(Though I was entertained when a student insisted to me that it was a "perfect homage to all of those great 1970s drive-in movies and car chase movies and ultra-low-budget New York gore movies" and then couldn't name or honestly claim to have seen a single one such film).
I at least expected entertaining dialogue and, while there was certainly a lot of talk talk talk, all of it read like juniors desperately trying to write what they think Tarantino movies sound like.
But, what it did have was a brilliant soundtrack. And, sure, that's to be expected, but this one had truly surprising things on it. Most prominently, and most brilliantly (with an honorable mention for "Chick Habit") are these two:
1. "Hold Tight" by the improbably named Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. How I had never heard this before is beyond me. It's the perfect blend of fuzzed-out guitars, melodic (but ever-evolving) simplicity, rhythmic complexity masquerading as simplicity, '60s harmonies, and the adherence to maxim that anything sayable in fewer than three minutes shouldn't be padded out to four. I picked up a collection by the group and much of it is just as good. There's no doubt that they're a bunch of Brits; the songs have got those little melodic quirks that you find in, for example, work by the Kinks, and that never seem to show up in otherwise-similar American songs (not after 1950, anyway).
2. "Staggolee" by Pacific Gas and Electric. A traditional song, and a badass one at that, and this group, whoever they are, take it and treat it like The Band had grown up not in Canada and Arkansas but in Watts instead -- and a Watts burning simultaneously with soul glory and psychedelic frustration. And while there are probably 38,000 versions of it in existence, at the moment, I'd be willing to argue that it's the best version of the song ever set down, easily eclipsing Dylan's version from World Gone Wrong, or that of RL Burnside, or (believe it or not) Neil Diamond, or Mississippi John Hurt, or even the Isley Brothers.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Still Catching Up
Way too much reading and listening to try to deal with after months away from this, but here are a few quick (I promise) thoughts:
Joe Henry's Civilians is brilliant. I've listened to it already much more than Scar or Tiny Voices.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had great moments. But a lousy ending (in the sense that it was both cheap and predictable).
Tree of Smoke is fantastic, but more in the abstract of its writing, its chaos, and its scope, than in the reality of its characters or coming to care about any of them.
Pinker's The Stuff of Thought was interesting. And it held together better than a lot of contemporary "accessible" science literature, most of which sets out a great introduction, a fascinating first chapter, and then a disheartening series of iterations and reiterations, each of less interest and relevance than the one before. Whatever that means.
George Saunders makes me laugh. And despite the weight of what he sometimes addresses, his style is light enough to make for acceptable three a.m. rocking a baby to sleep reading.
Thanks to Zach's recommendation, I read Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say, which was great. Especially in its discussion of films.
The Coen Brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men gets less impressive on repeated viewings. And it becomes more and more a betrayal of the heart of the text, too.
Six discs of Miles Davis On the Corner is overkill, but hearing the original album with more depth, if not more clarity, brings the fear in a way that the previous CD couldn't. Plus, if you buy the whole box, you get another excuse to listen to "He Loved Him Madly," which is one of the most brilliant (or at least entertaining) explorations of nothing happening quickly that I can think of. It's like "Once Upon a Time in the West." And just as Greg Lawson insisted that if you don't like that movie, then you don't like movies, I would argue that if you don't like that song, then you don't like music. Or not. Maybe "Gimme Shelter" is a better example of such a dichotomy.
And, having used the word dichotomy, I am forced to publish.
Joe Henry's Civilians is brilliant. I've listened to it already much more than Scar or Tiny Voices.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had great moments. But a lousy ending (in the sense that it was both cheap and predictable).
Tree of Smoke is fantastic, but more in the abstract of its writing, its chaos, and its scope, than in the reality of its characters or coming to care about any of them.
Pinker's The Stuff of Thought was interesting. And it held together better than a lot of contemporary "accessible" science literature, most of which sets out a great introduction, a fascinating first chapter, and then a disheartening series of iterations and reiterations, each of less interest and relevance than the one before. Whatever that means.
George Saunders makes me laugh. And despite the weight of what he sometimes addresses, his style is light enough to make for acceptable three a.m. rocking a baby to sleep reading.
Thanks to Zach's recommendation, I read Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say, which was great. Especially in its discussion of films.
The Coen Brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men gets less impressive on repeated viewings. And it becomes more and more a betrayal of the heart of the text, too.
Six discs of Miles Davis On the Corner is overkill, but hearing the original album with more depth, if not more clarity, brings the fear in a way that the previous CD couldn't. Plus, if you buy the whole box, you get another excuse to listen to "He Loved Him Madly," which is one of the most brilliant (or at least entertaining) explorations of nothing happening quickly that I can think of. It's like "Once Upon a Time in the West." And just as Greg Lawson insisted that if you don't like that movie, then you don't like movies, I would argue that if you don't like that song, then you don't like music. Or not. Maybe "Gimme Shelter" is a better example of such a dichotomy.
And, having used the word dichotomy, I am forced to publish.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Children of Men
I just read PD James' Children of Men and it gave me a lot more respect for the film. The book is good, in its own way, but it's surprisingly staid, almost sedate, and its concerns are fairly different than those of the movie. Characters are dramatically altered, the ending is completely changed. And all of the best moments of the film -- the refugee camp, the final battle, the impossibly slow car chase, the carjacking, the David -- are nowhere to be found in the novel. Likewise for the book, with its descriptions of the children of the last year of fertility as evil, emotionless bastards and the booming doll industry and the women who push dolls around in baby carriages, cooing at each other's children, etc. And that's fantastic for both the book and the movie. It's not just an adaptation, not just a reimaginging, but a reinvention. Sure, both have their clumsy moments (the diary feels forced to me in the book, as forced as much of the dialogue and the occasional overwrought image felt in the movie (the manger, the repeated exclamations of "Jesus!")), but, still, good good good.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Mo' Movies
And I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth last week.
And I reacted to it essentially as I reacted to Children of Men, which is to say that I liked it, found a few sequences to be brilliant, but could not understand, in the end, what all the fuss was about, really.
Children of Men had an amazing sense of itself visually. And it was wonderful to see something that understood, for the most part, the power of a single image. But the writing? Awful. I loved the fast car chase, the slow car chase, the broken David, the Pink Floyd pig, the long, long tracking shot in the climactic sequence, the distance that we're forced to keep from the death of Michael Caine's character, and the terrifying madness of the refugee camp, but the dialogue killed me at almost every turn.
Plus, someone seriously needed to scale back the Jesus imagery.
In any case, Pan's Labyrinth has, like Children of Men, a couple of amazing components (the close miking of everything, the eyeball guy, the ambiguity of the treatment of the resistence, the performance of the lead), but lost me with its insistence that El Capitan be completely and worthlessly evil, and, in a mind-boggling reversal of so much that the film seems to espouse in the conclusion when our hero finds paradise to be, in essence, a monarchy.
That's the opposite of fascism? Rule by a king and queen?
Please.
Sure, in fairy tales, the kings and queens (when not wicked) tend to take the interests, the hopes, the dreams of their subjects to heart -- but, those subjects, those people, those individuals, are still subjects.
And I reacted to it essentially as I reacted to Children of Men, which is to say that I liked it, found a few sequences to be brilliant, but could not understand, in the end, what all the fuss was about, really.
Children of Men had an amazing sense of itself visually. And it was wonderful to see something that understood, for the most part, the power of a single image. But the writing? Awful. I loved the fast car chase, the slow car chase, the broken David, the Pink Floyd pig, the long, long tracking shot in the climactic sequence, the distance that we're forced to keep from the death of Michael Caine's character, and the terrifying madness of the refugee camp, but the dialogue killed me at almost every turn.
Plus, someone seriously needed to scale back the Jesus imagery.
In any case, Pan's Labyrinth has, like Children of Men, a couple of amazing components (the close miking of everything, the eyeball guy, the ambiguity of the treatment of the resistence, the performance of the lead), but lost me with its insistence that El Capitan be completely and worthlessly evil, and, in a mind-boggling reversal of so much that the film seems to espouse in the conclusion when our hero finds paradise to be, in essence, a monarchy.
That's the opposite of fascism? Rule by a king and queen?
Please.
Sure, in fairy tales, the kings and queens (when not wicked) tend to take the interests, the hopes, the dreams of their subjects to heart -- but, those subjects, those people, those individuals, are still subjects.
I Want You Back
Look, I've never begrudged a single three-minute stretch of my life that I may have spent listening to the Jackson 5 work through "I Want You Back" (or "The Love You Save," for that matter, two of the best damn singles of all time, the last two decades of Jackson Madness nonwithstanding), but, I have a few hours that I want added back to my life.
First, I want back the two hours that I spent watching Spike Lee's Inside Man. Not because it's Spike Lee. Not because it's a heist film. (Let's face it: Spike Lee has made at least two good films; and, likewise, there have been some damn good heist films in history). And not even because Willem DeFoe doesn't get enough screen time. But just because it's a lousy Spike Lee movie, a lousy heist movie, and a waste of my two hours.
But, then, I watched it all. Via DVD. So, I have no excuse.
And, then, I want back the 90 minutes that I gave to Borat. Or, if I can't have all 90 back, I'll spot you 10 and take 80. I enjoyed the rodeo. I enjoyed the frat guys in the motorhome. And I enjoyed the last minute of the first prostitute sequence. And I enjoyed an isolated minute or two in other places. But, given everything, I want 80 minutes back.
Selfish, maybe, but I think I deserve them.
First, I want back the two hours that I spent watching Spike Lee's Inside Man. Not because it's Spike Lee. Not because it's a heist film. (Let's face it: Spike Lee has made at least two good films; and, likewise, there have been some damn good heist films in history). And not even because Willem DeFoe doesn't get enough screen time. But just because it's a lousy Spike Lee movie, a lousy heist movie, and a waste of my two hours.
But, then, I watched it all. Via DVD. So, I have no excuse.
And, then, I want back the 90 minutes that I gave to Borat. Or, if I can't have all 90 back, I'll spot you 10 and take 80. I enjoyed the rodeo. I enjoyed the frat guys in the motorhome. And I enjoyed the last minute of the first prostitute sequence. And I enjoyed an isolated minute or two in other places. But, given everything, I want 80 minutes back.
Selfish, maybe, but I think I deserve them.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Bloody Sam
See, now I was going to come up with a real post while the kitchen floor dried (three batches -- six gallons or so -- of beer bottled, plus one big ol' stout put in the fermenter), maybe bring some righteous political anger, or some Cosby-style parenting speak, and instead, I find myself distracted by the shuffling up of "Bloody Sam" by Go To Blazes on the iPod.
I'd call it wisdom, but it extends beyond that.
So, now I'm too distracted to offer anything beyond the following baseline requirements:
1. Find a copy of "Anytime, Anywhere" by Go To Blazes and listen to it. That might prove difficult; I have no idea what the in-print/out-of-print status of their albums might be at this point.
2. See "The Wild Bunch," directed by Sam Peckinpah, paying particular attention to the opening sequence and loving how those kids -- in an almost throw-away moment -- chase each other down the street playing guns. And the closing sequence, in all its fatalistic glory. And the train robbery, in all its silent brilliance. And the presence of Ernest Borgnine in something that isn't "AirWolf."
3. See "Ride the High Country," the best of Peckinpah's more or less traditional westerns. The ending of this is heartbreaking.
4. See "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and get your Dylan love on. Also, enjoy the death of Slim Pickens and figure that the pathos of that scene makes up for the obvious nature of the scene in which Garrett shoots himself in the mirror.
5. See "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," not because it's a great film, because it's not, but because it has a sweet premise, an amazing title, and, once you've seen it, you can't imagine a buddy film in which one of the two buddies is not, in fact, a severed head. (Danny Glover eat your heart out, no?)
I'd call it wisdom, but it extends beyond that.
So, now I'm too distracted to offer anything beyond the following baseline requirements:
1. Find a copy of "Anytime, Anywhere" by Go To Blazes and listen to it. That might prove difficult; I have no idea what the in-print/out-of-print status of their albums might be at this point.
2. See "The Wild Bunch," directed by Sam Peckinpah, paying particular attention to the opening sequence and loving how those kids -- in an almost throw-away moment -- chase each other down the street playing guns. And the closing sequence, in all its fatalistic glory. And the train robbery, in all its silent brilliance. And the presence of Ernest Borgnine in something that isn't "AirWolf."
3. See "Ride the High Country," the best of Peckinpah's more or less traditional westerns. The ending of this is heartbreaking.
4. See "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and get your Dylan love on. Also, enjoy the death of Slim Pickens and figure that the pathos of that scene makes up for the obvious nature of the scene in which Garrett shoots himself in the mirror.
5. See "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," not because it's a great film, because it's not, but because it has a sweet premise, an amazing title, and, once you've seen it, you can't imagine a buddy film in which one of the two buddies is not, in fact, a severed head. (Danny Glover eat your heart out, no?)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)