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Movie Review: Buried (2010)

October 10, 2010 in Movie Reviews

I feel I must break my usual code and begin with a kind of spoiler as a warning to all potential viewers.  Buried, the new thriller starring Ryan Reynolds, is filmed almost entirely in one location with one actor from start to finish (I’ll say ‘almost’ so you won’t know what the ending is).

Accordingly, there’s a couple of ways you could look it.  The first is that it is one of the most inventive and intelligent films of the year because, as far as I know, it’s never been done before for a mainstream feature film.  Somehow, despite these constraints, the Rodrigo Cortes-directed film manages to tell an entire 94-minute story (and a thriller, mind you) in this manner.

On the other hand, you could consider Buried a stupid, boring and frustrating film that never really gets you anywhere because the protagonist is stuck somewhere he can’t get out of.

In my opinion, Buried is a bit of both, though I liked it a lot more than I disliked it (my wife was the opposite).  It was a pretty amazing film that kept me, for the most part, interested in what was going to happen.  The way they paced the film, the way they wrote the dialogue, and the way they built up the sense of claustrophobia and suspense, were all very commendable.  Conversely, because they had to fill up the running time, there was indeed a fair bit of repetition and what I would consider time-fillers.  It did get a bit frustrating and tedious after a while, and I was desperate for more to happen.  On the whole, I still quite liked it.  I wouldn’t call it a great film but it’s good to see movie studios producing something new every now and then rather than simply sequels and remakes.

3.5 stars out of 5

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Ted Hughes’s ‘Last Letter’ to Sylvia Plath

October 7, 2010 in Blogging, On Writing

 

A page of Ted Hughes's 'Last Letter'. Source: The New Statesman

 

A few months ago I studied poetics and became fascinated with the tragic lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (I even wrote a post about it).  Yesterday, a friend and former classmate brought my attention to ‘Last Letters’, a newly discovered poem by Ted Hughes that was not published in Birthday Letters.  The most amazing thing about the poem is that it was about the night Plath killed herself.  When I read it it sent chills through my entire body.

(Super quick update for those who don’t know the story.  Plath and Hughes were both superstar poets that got married and had two kids.  Hughes began an affair and Plath killed herself by sticking her head in the oven.  The woman he had an affair with later killed herself and their child in the same manner as Plath. Hughes was vilified for years but never broke his silence until 1998, when he published Birthday Letters, a collection of poems about his relationship with Plath.  Hughes died shortly after.  Hughes and Plath’s son Nicholas committed suicide in 2009.  For the full story read my earlier post.)

Apparently, the new poem was ‘discovered’ by the New Statesman in the British Library archives and will be released in full in the paper’s hard copy edition.  Excerpts have been released and they paint a haunting image.  The poem begins:

What did happen that Sunday night?

Your last night?  Over what I remember of it

Double-exposed to my last sight of you

Burning your farewell letter to me

As if you had not meant it

Yet with that strange smile.  As if you have meant

Something different

Had it reached me sooner than you planned?

Had you thought out a plan?

Another part of the poem imagines those final hours:

What happened that night, inside your hours

Is as unknown as if it never happened

What accumulation of your whole life

Like effort unconscious, like birth

Pushing through the membrane of each slow second

Into the next, happened

Only as if it could not happen

As if it was not happening

And it ends with the words:

Your wife is dead

Shudder.  I can’t wait to read the poem in its entirety.

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Movie Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

October 7, 2010 in Movie Reviews

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (let’s just call it Wall Street 2) is one of those sequels that probably didn’t have to be made.  It’s well-made with good performances and all, and it takes advantage of the GFC to tell a story, but at the end of the day, it didn’t have a whole lot to offer.

The plot is relatively simple.  Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglass) is released from prison after his misdeeds from the first film.  Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is a stock broker (the ‘new’ Charlie Sheen) dating Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan).  Josh Brolin is some ambitious rich dude from a big bank.  Throw in the GFC and some Oliver Stone mastery, and there’s your movie.

For me, what made the first Wall Street so memorable was that trading floor intensity, that cut-throat environment, the making and breaking of fortunes in an instant — essentially, the adrenaline rush of Wall Street (the street, not the film).  I didn’t get any sense of that in Wall Street 2, even though, 23 years after the original, there were a lot more zeros at the end of all the numbers.  For the majority of the 127 minute running time, the film felt slow, flat and uninvolving.  We all knew what was going to happen.  That didn’t mean the story couldn’t be exciting, but I never really got into it.  Maybe it was because I just had no sympathy for any of the characters.

Gordon Gekko is a terrific character, and it was an interesting angle to see him rejoining a society that appeared to have moved on without him.  Michael Douglass injects that same slickness into the character he did 23 years ago, but makes him an even more sad and pathetic man this time.  That said, I still knew what was going to happen, and was not at all surprised by the turns in the film.

Shia LaBeouf felt wrong for the part.  I liked him in Disturbia and thought he was well-suited to Transformers, but I couldn’t picture him in this role.  To me, he still seemed too young, too scrawny, too juvenile.  Don’t get me wrong, I still think he is a terrific actor, but he didn’t convince me as Jacob.

As for Carey Mulligan, well, she played a pretty thankless character.  I know she’s the next big thing but I didn’t like her in this movie.  Again, solid performance, but I had no sympathy for her as Gekko’s daughter.  And she always had these retarded expressions on her face that really irritated me.

The standout had to be Josh Brolin.  The dude can flat out act and he was by far the most interesting character in the whole film.

So as I said at the start of this review, Wall Street 2 didn’t have to be made.  It was well-executed, well-acted and provided an insight into the nature of greed at one of the most tumultuous economic times in history — but for me, it didn’t add anything to the Wall Street legacy, and it wasn’t much more than average.

Oh, and I hated the ending.

2.75 stars out of 5

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Movie Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

October 5, 2010 in Movie Reviews

After missing two preview screenings, I finally got a chance to catch The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second film in the hugely successful Millennium trilogy based on the books by the late Stieg Larsson.  This time, I went into the cinema not having read the book (which I have, but have been too busy to tackle), which got me a little excited because I had no idea what it was about.

At the end of the day, The Girl Who Played with Fire was okay.  It’s not as horrible as some reviewers say it is (like this one that gave it 0/5 stars), though it’s certainly not as good as some others say either (like Ebert, who gave it 3.5/4).  To me, even though it was adequate and engaging for the most part, it was still ultimately a disappointment.

The Girl Who Played with Fire takes begins shortly after the end of the first film, with the titular character, Lisbeth Salander (played once again in a brilliant performance by Noomi Rapace), on a ‘break’.  The man whose life she saved in the first film, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is back at Millennium magazine and looking into a potential article on the sex-trafficking trade in Sweden.  Like the first film, the two main characters carry the film despite leading separate paths, and to be honest, it was almost like watching two separate movies at times.

Also like the first film (and the book), this one is also what I would consider a ‘slow burn’.  Actually, the pace is probably even slower.  I don’t have a problem with that, but to me, the plot was not as exciting as what I had expected.  Instead of a slick detective adventure into the seedy underworld of sex-trafficking, The Girl Who Played with Fire is really a more personal tale about Salander’s past.  Even when there were murders and a couple of mysteries involved, it never escalated into the adrenaline-pumping thriller I hoped it would be.  It remained mildly interesting but the story simply plodded along with a few unsurprising twists and left me feeling a little empty by the end.  Don’t get me wrong, it is still an above-average thriller, but that’s all it is.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but is it wrong to expect more out of a film based on the biggest selling books in the world right now?

3 stars out of 5

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TV is affecting my crazy dreams!

October 3, 2010 in Blogging, On Writing, Shows, Study

Lately all I had been dreaming about was my writing assignments.  However, the other night I had a most unusual dream that felt frighteningly real.  I dreamed that I was living in a house very similar to the one I lived in as a young child.  It had a big backyard, and somehow I was the owner of about 10 dogs, which all lived in a garage behind a 12-foot fence.  Adjacent to it was a swimming pool area, which may or may not have had a lion living in it.

It was late at night and one of my dogs leapt over the fence right in front of me.  I could tell it was desperate to tell me something.  I followed it into the garage to see all the other dogs, whimpering and in concern over one of their mates, who seemed to be badly hurt and was dying.  It was a Saturday or Sunday night, so I knew the vets wouldn’t be open, but I desperately needed to find an animal hospital (do they even have those?).

It then suddenly occurred to me that I had been neglecting these dogs for months (I don’t know why, but it felt so real), meaning I hadn’t fed them or anything, and they had just lived on their own.  A sickening thought crossed my mind as I wondered how they had survived this whole time — perhaps they were eating their own shit, or worse, each other.  And what about the poor lion?  Should I check on him?  Would he eat me?

I panicked as I flicked through the yellow pages, and it was around this time that I woke up in a cold sweat.

Isn’t it funny how dreams that seem so real when you’re in them instantly become silly when you wake up?  I was trying to figure out what it all meant when I suddenly realised where the dream had come from.  A few nights ago, I stumbled across an episode of Top Gear (for the first time), where these guys were riding through a safari with these little battery-powered cars.  I remember thinking how terrifying it was as these massive lions ran alongside them and kept bumping into their extremely lightweight vehicles, threatening to tip them over.

And on the night of the dream, for some reason I watched this show called Bondi Vet (also for the first time), which featured this poor dog that was hit by a car and a snake in a suburban swimming pool.

Threre, dream explained.  Injured dog, swimming pool and lion.  I need to watch happier shows.

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