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MathewIsaac323
Reviews
Remy & Arletta (2023)
Give it a watch - you haven't seen anything like it
I am a big fan of the filmmaking duo, Micaela Wittman and Arthur de Larroche. I loved their last movie, Clairevoyant, a comedy mockumentary, very different from Remy & Arletta. This movie is a coming of age drama about two teen girls and their budding relationship, alongside Remy's turbulent family life. Her mom is abusive and an alcoholic/drug addict. It's not an upbeat story, but it's very well acted and entertaining. It kind of feels like a memory of what it's like to be that age and have your best friend be your whole entire world. If you like independent films, or dramas, or relatable true to life stories, definitely give Remy & Arletta a watch. Micaela and Arthur have a big future ahead of them.
Clairevoyant (2021)
Love it or hate it
This is the kind of movie you either love or hate...it is not for the faint of heart. Very fun/ quirky film. Can be seen as offensive, but a breath of fresh air. I think Wittman is a great actress along with the rest of the cast. It will have you wondering if it's a real documentary. Sweet story with lots of laughs along the way.
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
It knew what it was doing
There were a lot of different cool ideas going on in this film. It reminded me of if Collateral Beauty and Magnolia had a baby. Obviously, Collateral Beauty was....just embarrassingly bad. But this is what it was going for.
Who am I? Am I defined by what I do? What is the meaning of life? Of bad things? Do they just happen? Do they mean nothing? What's the meaning behind coincidences? How will I ever be happy? How will I ever know my place?
The film has a quirky and lighthearted way of delivering answers to these questions. It's not subtle. If you find that to be a negative, we can chalk that up to taste. Magnolia is an example of a film with a similar idea, but it was just much more subtle and took a lot longer. In Magnolia's attempt to show that some coincidences are random and some are not, the film by extension felt...kinda random and kinda not.
I Heart Huckabees is short, concise, and jam packed with goodness. It's funny that some people who enjoyed this film still thought it was a mess, because I believe it knew exactly what it was doing. It was a delicately articulated and intentional mess.
It's also interesting that people find this film to be pretentious, because it's quite the opposite. Exploring the questions it presents is not an easy task, and instead of sitting you down for three and a half hours and explaining the meaning of life to you, it does it through quirky comedy, and the unraveling of wacky characters that mimic us but are not the same as us trying to come to a conclusion, any conclusion. That's been me before. Maybe that's what it takes to like this film. Having "been there done that". Maybe there's no room to appreciate it if you simply can't relate.
I've naturally come to the conclusion that life is a little bit of both, so I saw the twist coming. That didn't make the journey any less enjoyable for me.
The daydream technique sequences, Brad and Albert's faces morphing together, the coincidence of two people being orphaned in completely different ways, characters continuously losing external things that they considered their identity, liking someone not for what they are but who they are, being a fraud, blaming everything bad that happens in the world on one thing, and finally, being connected through our pain.
That's SO MANY IDEAS to try to put into one film. Sounds impossible to me. But, I Heart Huckabees pulled it off only by making it its own unique thing and doing it it's own way. Another lesson in its own.
It was a grand and exuberant show from a distance, but all the little moments were more human and real than a lot of the more serious films I've seen. I do heart huckabees.
Dunkirk (2017)
Gonna take a shot at reviewing this (no pun intended)
I'll start with the good. Nolan's refusal to use sets creates a wonderful atmosphere. I really felt like I was there on the beach with them, I felt the gloom and the cold and the mist and the enclosed spaces. The contrasting sunset on the sea with the catastrophe of war made me feel deeply for the humans who experienced this. I enjoyed the humanity in the beginning, the men searching for water and trying to poop anywhere possible.
However, my red flag went up at the informative slides at the beginning. In one swift move, any chance of mystery and allure was crushed. Obviously this is a historical event so major spoilers aren't really possible. But, this isn't a documentary. Let the stories unfold. Give us information in text if necessary, but omit the end outcome. "The men waited for a miracle."
Okay. So, we now know this movie is about them getting this miracle. Done. We already knew that. Don't tell us, show us.
I personally am not a fan of the way Christopher Nolan directs. In this movie as well as Batman, the audience is left visually lost. There are no point of references, no connected images that help us make heads or tails of exactly what's happening. This movie is unnecessarily convoluted. It took me awhile to understand that we are cutting between three different time lines. This is a fantastic tactic, if done with intention. In Dunkirk, it was all just... kind of happening. The film manipulates you by using incredibly loud sounds, which didn't bother me at first because I felt like I was really there with them, but when the film showed itself to be lacking in other ways, I felt fooled by the cheap trick.
I found a lot of the film to be simply inaudible. I dreaded the conversations between the commander and the colonel. For me it went "blah blah blah, home" "blah blah blah, home" "blah blah blah, civilians" At one point we even discovered that our stowaway friend was French. I thought it was more of an indiscernible English accent, but my French friend who I saw the movie with filled me in afterwards, and he only knew what happened because he speaks French.
Is that a huge negative? Not necessarily. But it felt like I was being left out. There's two types of movies. There's a movie that takes you into it, effortlessly. It isn't something you are watching but something you are apart of. The other type of movie is one that you actively need to watch. You could take it or leave it. It doesn't command your attention.
The main event of this movie was people getting off ships, people getting back on ships, people getting off ships, people getting back on ships. There was no through-line to look to for guidance. It didn't highlight the story of Dunkirk from any specific or interesting angle. Like I said before, it just kind of happened. The point of this movie is that it happened. Which, okay, that's fine. But, on top of that, key ingredients of the actual event were missing!
The real event included French and Candian and Belgian troops all evacuating over a weeks time, with the small boats. It wasn't suddenly one easy trip the way this movie presents it to be. And while this was happening, British and French men had to stay behind and fight in order to let the others escape. In addition to that, we didn't once see a man on the other side, narrowing and dehumanizing this story.
It's oddly convenient that everyone cheered with excitement when the small boats showed up, considering everyone who had gone out into the sea for the past week had been getting slaughtered. Seems less like real men experiencing this in real time, and more like a Hollywood director knowing the end of this story. This part, seemingly the main event of Dunkirk was completely glossed over. Seeing the civilians reach land, seeing the interactions between them and the soldiers, seeing the gratitude and stress and exhaustion is essential. And we got none of it. If your one goal in making a movie is to tell it how it is, at least tell it how it is.