both mean and complicated
Much movie-watching to start the new year! I consider this to be a good omen. Of course, much movie-watching has also resulted because I've finished watching Season 4 of Supernatural, woe is me, and will have to possess my soul in patience (as befits the subject matter) until Season 5 finishes and gets its (cute) butt onto DVD. Season 4 was ... dark. Very dark and angsty, and featured angsty boys being dingbats and being led around by the nose by both angels and demons while apocalypse lowered. Given how absolutely steeped in Christian mythology the whole series is, I'm surprised I'm enjoying it as much as I am. On the other hand, the writers really are throwing their hats into the ring on the whole "Judao-Christian notions of God lack all sense or logic" issue, which is probably helping.
Anyway. This weekend I watched two movies: Brick, on DVD last night, about which I say wow, and Sherlock Holmes on circuit this morning, about which I say yay.
Brick is, when you get down to it, a completely bizarre little film: high-school drama told in the noir idiom. It's a bloody clever, beautifully shot and scripted, well-cast and well-acted project driven by an entirely original and individual vision. It's actually uncanny how well the incredibly recognisable tropes of the noir thriller slide onto the high school setting, like a grimy glove onto a grimy fist. You know, for a start, not to trust any of the women, who are either femmes fatales or, basically, victims and dead. There's also both an inevitability and a curious dislocation in realising that the main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is a damn fine actor and whose 500 Days of Summer I really must see this week) is simultaneously a smart-arse high school kid and a hardboiled detective - the slightly grim, wearily competent, basically ruthless and soiled paladin of Hammett or Chandler. The seamy underworld is perhaps a bit unrealistic, high school kids dealing in hard drugs and hard knocks, but the occasionally very funny intrusion of school-kid reality, together with the emblematic treatment of character and landscape, are compelling and easily overcome any logical disconnects.
Above all I found the writing, particularly the kids' use of language, to be superbly realised - clipped, enigmatic, rapid-fire noir slang, much of it early-20th-century and extremely dated, becomes teen patois without batting an eyelid. I was pretty much blown away by this film - intense, intelligent, slightly indescribable viewing that demands a lot from its audience but repays that input magnificently.
Sherlock Holmes was bloody good fun, and not quite in the way I expected. I must cop to being a drooling RDJ fangirl, but actually the actor is beautifully submerged in the character here, far more so than in Iron Man, which I think mined the actor's personality far more than this did. I have to applaud Guy Ritchie for making something rather more than simply another tired trotting-out of the Holmes tropes: this film dances off the screen with its own energetic vision, simultaneously remaining amazingly true to the spirit of the Conan Doyle stories while imbuing them with its own iconoclastic life. I thought the women were a bit weak, but Jude Law does a more than creditable job, becoming likeable in a way he hasn't for a while, and Holmes himself (as one expects from RDJ) was spot-on. Reading between Conan Doyle's lines, the great detective always was an impossible man, quite likely bi-polar as well as obsessive, driven, antisocial and unstable as all get-out, but also vulnerable despite his near-infallible intellect.
I didn't find the action elements at all out of place, although they are obviously exaggerated beyond the slightly repressive Victorian intellectualism of the originals. And visually the film is stunning, not just clever Ritchie action choreography, but a truly grimy, dark and threatening Victorian London with absolutely no idealistic gloss. (Look out for the beautiful pen-and-inks of the closing credits). Mostly, I think I enjoyed the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, their well-delineated old-married-couple bickering particularly (my subject line from a Jude Law quote, incidentally, seen amusingly here). I was also incredibly happy that the film's heavy dose of occultic hokum resolved itself in the true Baskerville-hound fashion; anything less would have struck a horribly wrong note. Like Brick, this is definitely one for the DVD collection.
This week: Avatar! alias Thundersmurfs!. And probably 500 Days of Summer, just to show the world that I do too have a brain.
Anyway. This weekend I watched two movies: Brick, on DVD last night, about which I say wow, and Sherlock Holmes on circuit this morning, about which I say yay.
Brick is, when you get down to it, a completely bizarre little film: high-school drama told in the noir idiom. It's a bloody clever, beautifully shot and scripted, well-cast and well-acted project driven by an entirely original and individual vision. It's actually uncanny how well the incredibly recognisable tropes of the noir thriller slide onto the high school setting, like a grimy glove onto a grimy fist. You know, for a start, not to trust any of the women, who are either femmes fatales or, basically, victims and dead. There's also both an inevitability and a curious dislocation in realising that the main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is a damn fine actor and whose 500 Days of Summer I really must see this week) is simultaneously a smart-arse high school kid and a hardboiled detective - the slightly grim, wearily competent, basically ruthless and soiled paladin of Hammett or Chandler. The seamy underworld is perhaps a bit unrealistic, high school kids dealing in hard drugs and hard knocks, but the occasionally very funny intrusion of school-kid reality, together with the emblematic treatment of character and landscape, are compelling and easily overcome any logical disconnects.
Above all I found the writing, particularly the kids' use of language, to be superbly realised - clipped, enigmatic, rapid-fire noir slang, much of it early-20th-century and extremely dated, becomes teen patois without batting an eyelid. I was pretty much blown away by this film - intense, intelligent, slightly indescribable viewing that demands a lot from its audience but repays that input magnificently.
Sherlock Holmes was bloody good fun, and not quite in the way I expected. I must cop to being a drooling RDJ fangirl, but actually the actor is beautifully submerged in the character here, far more so than in Iron Man, which I think mined the actor's personality far more than this did. I have to applaud Guy Ritchie for making something rather more than simply another tired trotting-out of the Holmes tropes: this film dances off the screen with its own energetic vision, simultaneously remaining amazingly true to the spirit of the Conan Doyle stories while imbuing them with its own iconoclastic life. I thought the women were a bit weak, but Jude Law does a more than creditable job, becoming likeable in a way he hasn't for a while, and Holmes himself (as one expects from RDJ) was spot-on. Reading between Conan Doyle's lines, the great detective always was an impossible man, quite likely bi-polar as well as obsessive, driven, antisocial and unstable as all get-out, but also vulnerable despite his near-infallible intellect.
I didn't find the action elements at all out of place, although they are obviously exaggerated beyond the slightly repressive Victorian intellectualism of the originals. And visually the film is stunning, not just clever Ritchie action choreography, but a truly grimy, dark and threatening Victorian London with absolutely no idealistic gloss. (Look out for the beautiful pen-and-inks of the closing credits). Mostly, I think I enjoyed the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, their well-delineated old-married-couple bickering particularly (my subject line from a Jude Law quote, incidentally, seen amusingly here). I was also incredibly happy that the film's heavy dose of occultic hokum resolved itself in the true Baskerville-hound fashion; anything less would have struck a horribly wrong note. Like Brick, this is definitely one for the DVD collection.
This week: Avatar! alias Thundersmurfs!. And probably 500 Days of Summer, just to show the world that I do too have a brain.