bnymph Reviews

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

caper flick with great characters

[9/10 · 22 December 2006]

I don't _think_ this contains a spoiler, but am playing it safe.

An engrossing, funny caper movie. I saw it in theaters when it came out, and liked it just as much seeing it on cable tonight. The casting is very good, across the board, and it's fairly clear that everyone involved is having a lot of fun (Carl Reiner and Don Cheadle especially). I find that something essential to a caper, or gambit, movie, is that violence is restrained, and con artistry is involved. Also essential is an ensemble cast that works well together. This remake succeeds on both counts. One thing that I find interesting is that many people who comment on this film don't seem to be able to count: Ocean's 11 is Ocean plus the 11 others in his platoon, not 10. Possible spoiler: if you do the math, the booty divided by 11 does not equal the proposed cut. It equals the booty divided by (Ocean+11) ie. 12. Soderbergh plays a LOT of games with the viewer, and you practically have to see it a second time to figure it out -- his tribute to Kubrick. Every member of Ocean's platoon is crucial to the gambit, but they flicker in and out of visibility -- another aspect of great gambit flicks. Some of the 11 do a lot, and others do only small but critical things. Working this out is a big part of the fun of the movie. Trivia: the first Ocean's Eleven was an inspiration for a great reggae classic.

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

best screen vision of a classic novel

[10/10 · 7 December 2006]

I'm not a fanatic Austen-film follower, but I'm always interested in screen versions of her novels, particularly because I read a lot and also work in film and video games (CG programmer). I think this is the best staging of _Pride and Prejudice_ I have seen. (And I believe I've seen most of them.) It wasn't a mini-series version of a three volume novel, it was a _movie_, and yet stayed true to the novel itself. As much as I admire Ang Lee's film version of _Sense and Sensibility_, this one is better. Since the actress/screenwriter Emma Thompson was involved in both, I suspect she got some ideas from the prior experience with S&S. However it happened, it's a well-done screenplay. It diverges in certain ways from the novel, but how could it not?

This version employed two interesting tactics -- picking out the most striking bits of dialog from the novel, and then filling them in with some more direct dialog; and replacing the many contemplative, letter-reading portions of the novel with cinematography. The fact is, Austen began this novel in the 18th century, when gentlefolk read a lot. And wrote letters. This is almost incomprehensible in the current day. The many scenes in Austen's novel where the heroine goes out for a walk to study a letter, or just to contemplate her family, are replaced with film work that conveys her mood and thinking.

The casting was also excellent. Austen wrote to her sister from London that she looked in some museum (the BM?) for a picture of her heroine. When I saw the movie, I felt that I was really seeing both Elizabeth ('feisty') and Jane Bennet (Jane's 'celestial' good looks). Austen would have approved.

There is a lot of musical anachronism, in this movie, yet the score works very well, and supports the cinematography.

I don't understand why anyone would want to make screen versions of Austen's novels, any more than I understand why they made TV versions of Trollope's Palliser novels. Something to sell to Masterpiece Theater USA, I suppose. But this version is both true to cinema and true to the novel. Something that could be compared to Visconti's _Garden of the Finzi-Continis_ and Karel Reiscz's _Who'll Stop The Rain._

Soapdish (1991)

hilarious 4 the crew

[8/10 · 8 November 2006]

I'm not sure that this comment contains an actual spoiler, but I'm playing it safe, so don't read this if you haven't seen the movie.

I adore this movie, and so does everyone I work with -- and that is the point. I spent a large part of my working life in cinema, without being an actor. Such people are the _sung_ heroes of this movie: the gaffers, the pullers, the on-air directors, the lighters and writers, the costume people etc etc, and the whole thing is told from their point of view, at least to a great extent. Most actors are nuts and self-absorbed to the point of absurdity, which is what this movie spoofs so well, but you have to have worked with actors to recognize that this movie is real-life drama! Possible spoiler alert: in one great scene, the two leads, both actors, are _discussing_ how to _discuss_ something personal, something entirely 'out-of-script', with another actor, and they start making up lines, rehearsing them, and critiquing each other's performance.

Since this movie appeared in, what was it, '91, it has become fashionable to do this, especially on TV. But hardly anyone has done it so well.

Cookie's Fortune (1999)

yet another Altman ensemble pearl

[9/10 · 19 October 2006]

No spoilers here. The movie is about love, deception, "rapscallionality" and other cool things in a small town, with the kind of cinematography we associate with Altman.

Pearl is the right term to use for some of Altman's ensemble pieces: they are layers on layers on layers, and they are built up very slowly, just as a pearl grows.

I don't admire everything that Altman has done; there are a number of his movies that didn't rock my socks, but when he hits it, he hits it (as with Short Cuts, McCabe and Mrs Miller, and recently with Prairie Home Companion), with scary precision. You sit there in the theater seat feeling as if not just the director, but the whole cast and crew have you in their sights. Part of this has to be due to Altman's working so much with so many of the same actors. But also, he is simply a great ensemble director.

Cookie's Fortune starts out in a quite leisurely fashion, and I had to warn some of my friends not to go to a late night show, but it gets quick fast. While I think the whole cast was great, for me the on-going show-stopper was the performances of Glenn Close and Charles Dutton. It was so clear to me that these two actors, both with considerable stage experience, were having a lot of fun chewing up each other's scenery, and their voice control is what one would expect from them.

In Altman's best films there are a multitude of small gem parts, and this is no exception.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

a superb, grim, cold, moving film

[10/10 · 8 October 2006]

A preliminary note: anyone who liked this movie well enough to read comments should know that a considerable amount of detail in both it and _Apocalypse Now_ had origins in a 1968 Japanese novel called Into a Black Sun, by a Japanese war correspondent working in Vietnam at the time. It took about 20 years to be translated into English, but it's in American paperback now. I recommend it.

I just saw this movie for the first time since it was deployed in movie theaters in '87. As then, I was knocked out by what a great film it is. I can't help but contrast it with such movies as Apocalypse Now and Barbarians At The Gate, both movies that I admire, but let's face it, they are florid and melodramatic. Full Metal Jacket is anything but. It is so cold and hard in tone that it freezes your bones. At the same time, both the cinematography and sound track are so good, so effective, that the watcher can't look away from the movie.

This is classic Kubrick, in my opinion: the correct correlation of visual and audio information, with a plot that is so horrifying that one lies awake for awhile.

One, Two, Three (1961)

a wonderful, loony comedy by some of the great artists to invade Hollywood in the WWII-and post years

[10/10 · 21 April 2005]

I don't _think_ I'm going to be writing any spoilers, but I figure, it's better to forewarn and confess beforehand, than risk being sent to the Gulag For Seditious List Participants.

'One, Two, Three' is a wonderful piece of black comedy, and it shares, with 'Harvey,' and possibly 'Arsenic and Old Lace,'the distinction of being one of the few so-called American comedies to be dubbed successfully into German.

What makes this movie so enjoyable is the combination of snappy writing and some very tasty cinematography. Just the scene of an OB on his way from a checkup call on a young client, singing Wagner to himself, is, well, enough.

Some Mother's Son (1996)

Some Mother's Son

[13 September 2004]

break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, oh sea

I saw this movie when it first came out, and just watched it again last night. I still feel that it's an important movie, and also that everyone in the audience except for me <insert smile here> is missing the point. It's not about the right or wrong of the IRA/Sinn Fein or Thatcher's administration, it's about a more-or-less unprecedented friendship that evolves between two sons' mothers, and how they deal with their sons' impending self-imposed deaths, a friendship that quite suddenly excludes class issues, precisely because it is about _mother's sons_.

This is evoked in many subtle ways: Mrs Quigley's daughter leaves her job at the bank because no one trusts her after her brother has been arrested, and ends up tending bar somewhere outside North Ireland -- rather declassee for a young woman who'd been working in a bank; Mrs Higgins lives her life on a bicycle, gets a driving lesson on the sea-strand from Mrs Quigley, and they both end up getting saved from an incoming tide by British/North Irish soldiers. If you check the screenplay, you can see the change in the use of forenames and last names between the two women -- it's unfair to expect Yanks to pick that up. I can't even begin to explain it to my friends, and hell, I live in a border state.

There's a unifying theme in this movie and it's the sea: the sea the mothers are connected to, and that their sons are not permitted to see.