#270605 - 09/07/08 02:43 PM
Re: stuff I've seen lately
|
Member
Registered: 05/11/01
Posts: 4839
|
Yeah: when Dumas would start acting nutty, I'd tell him he needed therapy. Go figure. It was a joke, though: I think it'll take more than therapy to fix whatever is wrong with Dumas, because I tend to assume Dumas would just conclude that his therapist was out to get him.
300: The manliest manly guy-flick ever made, probably, and yet simultaneously probably the gayest also. More effective as a kind of 90 minute Bally's Total Fitness ad than as a story, this movie made me want to hit the weights. It's like a visual celebration of idealized human form. While not gay myself, I couldn't help but marvel at the aesthetic beauty of the taut, shimmering, half-nude bodies that seemed to exist in a heightened state of perpetual, fetishistic slow-motion throughout the duration of this flick. Most of those bodies are male, but even the Queen and the Oracle looked impressively ripped and tight, their perfect tits perpetually threatening to cut straight through whatever translucent fabric clung to them at any given moment.
The eye candy, of course, goes a little further than naked-ish bodies, with Snyder using various CGI and post-processing tricks to breath a unique visual life into the proceedings. There's a definite cheesiness to some of it, but mostly it comes off pretty well, and at times it's quite dazzling. Such measured, fine-tuned use of color, motion, and texture deserves acknowledgement I suppose, and I enjoyed the larger-than-life fantasy elements of the film, like the abstracted wolf and the other beasties that appear here and there. The action itself -- which feels almost non-stop -- is well-choreographed and effectively ballet-ish. 300 semi-nude and completely ripped men coarsing with sweat doing a slow-motion ballet with limbs and blood creating a confetti-like effect around them at all times: that's what the majority of this relatively brief movie is.
While there's nothing wrong with any of that, the story is, like the costumes, barely there, with conflicts that feel canned and a dramatic arc that remains flat, unengaging, and ultimately, unfulfilling. Narratively, the movie only feels like an extended commercial for Manliness itself (and Bally's Total Fitness); rather than let us get to know the characters through action, dialogue, and development, and to let those things speak for themselves, the voice-over narration just continually hammers us with the intended thesis while the visuals hammer us with non-stop action, ultimately leaving no room for the wonder, curiosity, interpretation, or nuanced storytelling a world as aesthetically rich as this could easily invite. Although the fake-ness of the visuals made it a bit lightweight and effervescent somehow, the atmosphere does have a kind of potency and beauty, and I couldn't help but feel the world Snyder created deserved something richer and more complex than Miller's dullish tale, which essentially consists of rehashing a historical legend in a highly simplistic way and throwing in a few beasties. You'd think a film like this would feel epic, but it actually feels very small-scale. I don't mind that aesthetically speaking -- it gives it the vibrancy of a self-enclosed dream -- but it seems worth noting.
All in all, it's good eye candy. I liked it better than Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, anyway: it seemed a more effective synthesis of contemporary influences and ideas, albeit exclusively stylistic pop-cinema ones.
K
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#270606 - 09/08/08 01:50 PM
Re: stuff I've seen lately
|
Member
Registered: 05/11/01
Posts: 4839
|
Originally posted by Charles Reece:
Just watched SIXTEEN CANDLES and PRETTY IN PINK. Is it that John Hughes was attempting to see the humanity in the bourgeois status quo, or arguing for our desire of homogenization? Love of his work reveals an evil in us all. I never saw Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles, but I refuse to not-love Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and embrace its message of resourcefulness and charm trumping the soulless bureaucracy of menial, sheepish do-gooders. Save Ferris! K
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#270607 - 09/14/08 01:56 AM
Re: stuff I've seen lately
|
Member
Registered: 05/11/01
Posts: 4839
|
Whoof. Saw ERASERHEAD and FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF again this weekend, but I've been drinking tonight and will have to post about 'em when soberer, if then. In the meantime here's some article about Hughes I came across on Google. [img]http://www.reverseshot.com/files/images/pre-issue22/ferris2.preview.jpg[/img] Yet even the VCR generation learned to value big screen over little screen pleasures. True, everyone enjoys both, but like coupling versus masturbation, few would voice the reverse preference. Furthermore, maybe it’s the same impulse that categorizes certain works—as we might categorize the onanistic—as “guilty pleasures”: movies that we privately, bashfully adore but sense are not objectively good—either because we fell for them when we were young, with taste unrefined, or because they don’t conform to our mature sense of what makes movies (or sex) good (or cinematic). Now, I’m not going to speak against maturity, or refined taste, or on behalf of badness for badness’ sake. But the distinction, and the high-low arrangement, is as contrived and defensive as film splits past (silent vs, sound, b&w vs, color, cinema vs. television, art vs. entertainment, serious vs. camp, film vs. video, film vs. digital, and on and on). Looking back, we’ve incorporated far more than we’ve replaced, and have consistently expanded our threshold for what we’re willing to see, how, and when. The cinematic vs. uncinematic dichotomy is perhaps the most territorial and destructive, as it attempts to draw a line through the art itself, self-defining by purportedly distinguishing (read: visual) characteristics only, and by a slippery sense of “what it does best,” rather than accepting as its greatest, unparalleled strength its capacity for encompassing and co-opting all other art forms. Zero-sum equations are nigh perverse when you accept that film has sustained itself through countless, rolling additions (while reserving the stimulating right—not cinematic imperative—of subtraction). Beware of the Blob: film in form—if not necessarily format—will sustain itself.
I, like thousands, perhaps millions of people roughly my age, have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off several dozen times. The numbers may no longer matter, but I once wore it and its identifying implications proudly. I watched because it felt right. Because it pleased me and still excited me, even though it lacked newness or surprise, and even though I knew that others watched it too. I miss that unself-consciousness, or rather the conscious pleasure of enjoying what others also enjoyed. Not that I enjoyed Bueller primarily because others did, but I was willing to share. I could try to piece how or why, like so many others, I was willing to do so, but I think it’s more revealing to look at how Hughes’s film bulls-eyed our capacity for such universality, even amidst our emerging self-consciousness and taste for exclusivity.
A teen movie, a road movie, a buddy movie, a star vehicle, a comedy, a valentine to a city—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off covers a lot of ground for an ostensibly teen-market-driven film. Its secret is a focused, impeccably plotted script. Taking place roughly during the daylight hours of a single spring day, there’s a premise, a voyage, a conflict, and a resolution. It sturdily features a main character, two supporting characters, a villain, and a supporting villain turned savior. That much of the film is scored to the sub-linguistic belchings of a band named Yellow never compromises its smooth shape and irresistible tempo. Which is not to say that Hughes doesn’t enjoy tweaking the familiar—indeed he does so at most every turn. It’s that he knows enough to install familiar form regardless of the fickle demands of contemporary quirk. This adherence to classic structure actually allows for the strangeness to thrive. The film’s communal/personal appeal starts here, the familiar bones onto which odd flesh is gathered.
Script duly credited, it’s nevertheless hard to imagine the film working successfully with anyone other than Matthew Broderick as the titular protagonist. Asked to be challenging, off-putting, spoiled yet irresistible, likable, and worth rooting for, Broderick somehow is so, never seeming the colossal dick he deserves to be. It’s crucial to what Hughes has in store for us, but no less remarkable that Broderick pulls it off. The right actor at the right age with the right chops at the right time, Broderick as Ferris was partly how I thought of myself—the dynamic me that never or rarely came out—but mostly he was everything (and I mean everything) that I wished I was: funny, sexy, popular, confident, undaunted, rebelliously entitled, loved. His marauding, resentful sister Jeanie could have been me, but for once she’s not. Identifying with Ferris was a joyous, fleeting privilege. K
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous Topic
Index