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Alphas (2011)
The Method Acting version of superhero cinema
I've just started watching the second season after getting hooked from season one. I saw on Youtube a few weeks ago the actors discussing the show at Comic Con in San Diego, and I was very disheartened and unimpressed. They seemed so relaxed, quietly interested in their work, a little intimidated about being in front of the audience, but not polished or sparkling and certainly not larger than life salespeople.
They just weren't that into themselves!
David Strathairn and the whole cast are just not very outgoing people. They're a bit intellectual, actually, maybe even nerdy.
Maybe with the possible exception of Malik Yoba. He seemed to have all the charisma on that day.
They were just nice folks discussing their work. Were they putting less into the second season? Did they care less about these characters we've come to love? They seemed to enjoy themselves. They were so unassuming, humble and polite, very quiet, as though each and every one of them was a shy individual not accustomed to presenting and selling what they do.
Well, the second season has finally started, and it is remarkable. Exceptional, phenomenal. No, they aren't selling their performances. This isn't representation. This is Method acting. They are living the experience directly in front of us. They have crafted characters and situations that are REAL in capital letters. And most importantly, truthful down to the bone.
I don't say this with respect to the show's budget, or special effects, or even the basic story lines. The actors are amazing. The writing is incredible, and the directing awesome.
This is a low budget show with a handful of actors that on screen are so engaging, so engrossing that they will take you places inside yourself you may have never visited.
There is no hint they are even acting. They have it totally down. There is nothing formulaic regardless of similarities in basic story to other cinema and television. Yes, it's science fiction, but it is first and foremost remarkable drama, acting and direction.
The relationships between this team, their conflicts and their sincerity is palpable.
I loved Fringe, I love Supernatural, I like Warehouse 13, I really like Falling Skies, but this is something altogether deeper and more layered and simply more wonderful to watch. In those other shoes you are watching actors act. And they do a great job.
But the characters in Alphas are remarkable and fully realized people, in all aspects, clothed as ordinary folks you and I know and see every day. They are not "acting" but living the characters they have created, and doing so seamlessly in a way that draws us in, so we aren't watching. We are there participating with them. What they feel, we feel with them.
It's better than 3D HD. Better than IMAX. We are there with them, living through it with them.
Brando, Julie Harris, James Dean. That is what we are watching every week. It's a gift to the viewers.
We are seeing in season two a depth of their personal lives, and their reactions to what is happening, their growth, backsliding, trauma, and re-emergence that is mesmerizing to watch. In every line, glance, expression, these actors have poured themselves heart and soul out onto the screen and into creating their characters in extremely, painstakingly detailed and amazing ways.
It's wonderful to watch. As a viewer, I am more than happy not to have that interrupted with a murder-a-minute; fifty explosions per episode; a high-tech gadget or gun with every action scene; and every death punctuated with a humorous quip; as seen in larger budget films that get lost in all that.
Some reviewers here have clearly been brought up on that baby food and want their formula.
This is for grown-ups.
The pain and pathos, the fear and the friendship in the subtlest of actions which run well outside the script is fascinating to see.
These are working actors, working directors who have it down. They've figured it out. They've gotten to the soul of their art on a shoestring, and season two is even better, by several factors, than season one, which was quite excellent.
I don't know how the casting agent was able to pull this caliber of talent together, headed by Strathairn, Yoba, Ghanizada, Cartwright, Mennell, Christie (in front of the camera and behind it Penn, Karnow, Copus, Hastings, Wolfe, Behr, Chamoy, and Levy) but I will tell you that each episode is a motion picture, a fully realized morality and passion play of the highest literary caliber. The writers are giving the actors a lot of space to work with, and the ensemble cast, along with their directors, are running with it and taking us along in their journey.
If you are tired of the melodrama, the soap opera plot twists week after week, and the bludgeoning shock and awe special effects and explosions scene after scene that have left behind what used to be artistry; ready for some real food for the soul, watch this show!
Inception (2010)
A great action flick, but pounds the eye, ears and brain a bit with a sledgehammer
I thoroughly enjoyed this elegant puzzle-film / hard-driving action flick but thought how much more it might have been.
It takes on the complexities of the dream world in a way that mirrors the MATRIX, or TRON, an alternate-world film where the laws of physics can be bent, and the same people can play many different roles.
The fact that one person is killed every minute or so, and occasionally more, in the midst of crashing, explosions, beatings and other mayhem actually interferes with the ability for the observer to enjoy the story and care about the characters. This isn't a gentle ride, this isn't a roller coaster. This is a beating. And so it's every man and woman for themselves - especially the audience.
There is no time for us to care about the characters, except the protagonist, because, oops, the walls are crashing down and three people are shooting at us!
The dream world also is multi-layered, but Nolan's layers are not subtly tied to each other, just as the cast's relationships do not exist apart from the single story layer.
For example, every layer looks real and very similar. The entire movie is about dreams, but there is only one surreal element in them : the juxtaposition of buildings. In true dreams many things that could not exist including people, personalities, decisions, even time-lines, are molded, twisted and amalgamated in remarkable and unreal ways.
It would have been a better use of the opportunity to explore those layers rather than making them just different sets in the same James-Bond like world filled with testosterone and adrenaline.
Where old houses are mixed with the modern, it simply doesn't work. The beloved house from youth just looks like a heap. The characters who created those places loved them, and they could have been shown with greater love.
What might have been? Characters that are mostly from one dreamer but infected by the sentiments of another, one world slipping into another world altogether - Paris and China mixed up on the same street.
What might have been? The story elements themselves reflect emotions. The walls are made of feeling, and when they are threatened they fall, but often they are loving us, protecting us, encouraging us. When we fall in love with that world, it falls in love with us and we fall deeper and deeper into the dream. And yet that dream at ever deeper levels, tells us more directly about what is truly inside us. Yes, even the dreamworld would be warning us about the dangers.
The film buys shock and confusion but pays with lost character, story and sentiment.
Dreams can be confusing and shocking, and in this way the story certainly is dreamlike.
In Dom's testimony at the end to his wife he says she is not really as deep and multi-layered as his real wife. Well, that applies to every character in the film except Dom.
What might have been? The most multi-faceted and interesting of characters and relationships in the dream world, not the "real" one.
That would also have helped us understand the sentiment at the end, about coming to peace within one's own self, and finding a richness within, love within our own selves that may indeed be the real source of our happiness,the hidden reality that informs the dream world we live in during our waking lives.
And indeed, Dom's inner Mal might be much more subtly in-tuned to Dom than any flashback of her. Dom's Mal is not just memories, as the film suggests. Characters in dreams can be as fully fleshed out as we are because they have the full resources of the subconscious, which "awake" people do not. They can be much funnier, wiser, stronger and helpful than we are.
And if Dom realized that the woman who killed herself was not really the woman he loved, but a stranger with an obsession he could not save her from, a woman who loved her dream more than her husband or children; and that the woman he really loved, who was really caring and filled with self-sacrifice was a part of himself, his own projection, that might have helped him let go.
That "inner" Mal might explain that Dom made a tragic mistake and to forgive himself as he forgave the real Mal her obsession. That inner Mal would remind Dom that he did indeed spend a lifetime together in that second region with the real Mal, and that somehow she got lost, addicted, unable to get out of the honeymoon, unwilling to do so. He failed to save her,but she was already lost before he planted the doubt in her mind. She didn't want to leave that dream world anyway, and so doubt was the only hope for her escape, though it failed.
The story Nolan crafted was brilliant, but he did not bring it fully to life.
In the absence of that depth, we are just left with a man who accidentally caused his wife's death and who cannot really escape, except into fantasy. How much more this film might have been!
And then the audience might have walked away with a deeper insight: Each of us only knows the other by the image we make of that other person, and that image, fed by our senses and the other's behavior, is the only way we can know them in this dream world in which we live.