Yikes, La La Land opened here in NZ on Boxing day, so I saw it at an evening session on its second day of release (with
-
swanstep — 9 years ago(February 11, 2017 05:51 AM)
TE isn't nom'd for Best Picture but is close to a sure thing for Best Foreign Language Film, is one of the year's best films, and is destined for a (probably Oscar-laden) Hollywood remake that brings Jack Nicholson out of retirement.so let's talk about it here!
TE is a 2 hour 40 min worldwide comedy hit from Germany - a rare beast! The story of a retired father trying to (re)connect with his business executive daughter who's consulting in Romania mostly TE feels somewhat specific and gritty and real (it's mostly (totally?) shot hand-held and with very loose, catch-as-catch-can framing) but the story is also pretty universal. It could be remade very successfully I think. TE's tone is not a million miles removed from that of Alexander Payne's films, esp. About Schmidt and Sideways and Nebraska. There's also a bit of James L. Brooks in there somewhere albeit filtered through the more verite stylings and with a bit of the cringe factor comedy that one associates mostly things like Louis CK and The Office on TV. TE has two great roles - the father and the daughter and both will be automatic Oscars noms and probably wins if the remake turns out well. There are 3 or 4 instant classic scenes and some good monologues here - meaty stuff. And there are at least a couple of scenes that, while very good, don't quite fulfil their potential in my view - I can just see a Payne or PTA or David O. Russell rubbing their hands at the thought of having a crack at this material.
TE doesn't strike me as a perfect film by any means - other takes on this underlying strong material could improve it possibly making both funnier and more poignant. And I'm bemused by Sight and Sound choosing it as the best film of 2016 (one suspects that if essentially the same film had come out of Hollywood then it would have been condescended to by that publication as very middle brow, white people's problems).
But TE is a classic script/scenario and good fun and poignant throughout with two peach roles for an older man and a middle-aged woman. People are going to crawl over broken glass to get these roles in the US remake. It sounds as though Jack Nicholson is going to come out of retirement to play the father, and it appears that he'd be perfect for that role. The same reports suggested Kristen Wiig had been offered the daughter-role. She could work but the German actress playing the daughter is exactly half-way between Cate Blanchett and Jessica Chastain. Both will undoubtedly be pressing their cases and sending 'Please explain' notes to the relevant studios if they aren't closely considered. But every other actress of note with a line in uptight and skinny is also going to compete like crazy for this role - all your Watts's, Paltrows, Therons, etc are going to demand a shot. We know Jack likes JLaw - that might make the difference (although she's a little young as she often is!). All power to Wiig if she can hold off all of the competition that's coming. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 12:28 AM)
Ha, Passengers is not a contender at all but I just got around to seeing it and there's something interesting I believe to say about its reception, so here goes
I read four or 5 tepid reviews and antagonistic semi-think-pieces about Passengers on its release and they were enough to convince me to wait to watch it at home. The striking thing now I've seen the film is that while the reviews and think-pieces were right that Passengers is a dud, the reasons that I recall being offered for that judgement are way off the mark.
The big complaint I remember people having, especially in the think-pieces, was that they thought the film didn't grapple sufficiently with the ghastliness of Chris Pratt's character, Jim's decision to wake up JLaw's character Aurora (ha! sleeping beauty, screenwriter Spaihts just can't stop himself can he? - more on him later) from hibernation (and then not 'fess up that that's what he did), the stalkerishness of how Jim selects Aurora to be woken, and so on. The ending of the film (in which
Aurora has the chance to go back to sleep but decides instead to stick it out with Jim
)in particular was singled out for being an instance of 'Stockholm Syndrome' disgustingly posing as a happy ending.
Having seen the film, I think that none of this basic feministy, 'right on' criticism has any merit whatsoever. Indeed that people so reflexively advanced a kind of snarky supposedly pro-woman agenda at the expense not even trying to understand the film they were watching is almost enough to have me think things like 'Hey, maybe those Trump-voters have a point about "political correctness gone mad"? (Ditto for when I recently heard a young woman on a podcast talking about The Terminator (1984) and suggesting that Kyle Reese was such a jerk for 'mansplaining' to Sarah Connor about robots, etc.)
The film dwells at length on the unique terribleness and understandableness of Jim's decision to wake up Aurora. She literally almost kills him when she finds out what he did, and does not even begin to reconcile with him until they have to work together to save the whole ship from destruction.
Without going into spoilerish detail the movie does offer redemption to Jim both in our eyes and in Aurora's because it turns out that the collisions that led to Jim waking up did also cause slowly spreading damage to the rest of the ship. Without him and also Aurora awake to do something about that the ship's destroyed. It just does change the moral calculus if it turns out that Jim's waking of Aurora allowed them to save their own lives and those of 5000 others. The film is perhaps guilty of not hitting this basic point hard enough, but you have to be a bit thick or politically blinded to not get it.
Why according to me is Passengers a dud if the principal criticisms of the film are so weak? The big problem is Spaihts's script at the nuts and bolts level. Two thing that judging now from his scripts for Prometheus and Passengers that Spaihts just can't do:- Write causal dialogue that feels alive. Some people from Shakespeare to Mamet and QT have this talent and some do not. Spaihts does not - he needs to bring in a dialogue specialist to fix his damn scripts on this front. (Truly this script is a reminder that QT could have made a very good living even if he's never made anything after Reservoir Dogs just doing dialogue polishes on other people's scripts. Pratt and Jlaw both when they're chipper and when they're stressed out and screaming come across as flat and finally unbelievable. Their dialogue is so bland in fact that we don't like either of them and have no interest in their relationship. Both their voices, and especially Lawrence's end up very exposed and grate on us (this film is a disaster for JLaw - cut-price J-Law in Mag 7 is much better, has much better dialogue to work with).
- Write good philosophical exposition. Good films and especially good sci-fi often has a few big ideas floating around and there's an art to writing them up in expository dialogue or VO so that they capture our imaginations and don't sound trivial. Spaihts on the evidence of these two films doesn't know how to do this.
I think the basic story outline/treatment-level for Passengers is actually quite good - this film could have been a minor classic if someone else, Duncan Jones say, had written the actual script from the treatment.
There's a lot more that one could say about this film but it's not clear that it's worth it.* Passengers is sort of fascinating: it's an unjustly lambasted but nonetheless deserved big flop that really needn't have been.
- The Physics seemed a little undeveloped. The seemed to be uncertain about how they were generating gravity (it's supposed to be through spinning, which is the sort of thing that can't be turned on and off instantaenously - it'll alsways take enormous amounts of energy to stop or start spinning in a relatively gravoty-free vacuum - but at some points a 'gravity drive' that can be turne