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PalmerEldritch666
Reviews
Dune (2021)
Visually disappointing point by point drag
....it could have been good-but it ain't.
Dune the book is quite a long drag, not big on the humor. It's kind of Hamlet-full of characters crossed with Lawrence of Arabia and some Jesus Christ LSD thrown in for spice.
And David Lean wins - on every front. Screenplay, desert visuals, how to tell an epic story, realism (of course no digital effects eh...), actign/ characters and most of all - music. Kyle MacLachlan
Casting looks good on paper but.....Chalamet just looks like he's wearing trendy scarfs for most of the film - and looked like he was flown in from a fashion Paris terrace. Despite being a weak David Lynch film, Kyle macLachlan could do the alien messianic vibe.... Chalamet ...eh, no.
His mother looks too young to be a good bad witch. Everybody else comes up empty handed, characters/actors are introduced and despite looking like a stock character they just die a couple (longish scenes later) without any dramatic impact. One character gets introduced so badly, i couldn't even see who or what she was in her first scene. Blink twice and you missed Shadout Mapes and really why is she in this movie again ? Couldn't they just have left a dagger in the bedroom ?
So no humor, but also ndrama, no epic FEEL, emotions. The visions are totally lacking in inspiration (again Lynch does this better on half the budget). The story limps - yes they do all the beats.....but none of it registers emotionally - to a halfway point. Every Star wars/ Lor/Hobbit movies found better halfway endings to their stories (includ the bad ones). Arakis looks a lot like Syria includ the war, dustdustdust. The worms, yeah nice digital, but hey didn't George Lucas do the sarlac pit and we had Tremors....and despite old spfx and all, and being Herbert ripoffs to start with....well they did it better.
Now for the worst offender : Hans Zimmer. All i remember from the non existent 3D imax is arabic wailing and LOUD, VERY TOO LOUD drams - like YAAAWN.... Never knew ENO/Toto were such geniuses.
Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (1971)
50 years later a wonderfuly stylized, very colorful, truthful, painful and still very relevant classic.
50 years on indeed.....and yes some things have changed immensely and back then one couldn't even fathom the curse and blessing that the AIDS epidemic would be for the gay and LGBTQI scene.
Yet things haven't all changed, some stuff stubbornly and depressingly stayed the same. And even though society is perverse, a lot of the inward critical reflection of this movie still rings true.
On the very big plus side, the film looks gorgeous, the styling somewhere between 70's realism and a full fledged John Waters phantasmagoria - the non-acting actors perfectly cast. Can they act ? Well maybe not in the traditional sense, but like any Waters/Warhol movie the actors themselves rise above the acting by virtue of being true. And isn't that what a million hours of Lee Strasberg actors Studio or Shakespearean training are supposed to give you ?
Tha actors playing the part are 200% believable if maybe their acting is a strange style unto itself (not uncommon in queer cinema).
The costuming, sets, staging is phenomenal. The sort of thing modern gay artists strive for at immense costs here done on ....less than a shoestring ?
I love both the " cliche'd" exagerration, the sterotypes, the comedy, the melodrama and the total earnestness. Which makes this film very unique.
The earnestness - especially in the long drawn out final scene - is A- totally earned and B -at once cutting deep and very sweet.
Mr. Rosa, hats off to you, i bow deep.
Passion (2012)
A different look at.....
Latter stage DePalma.
After some heavy commercial bombs failing to replicate Mission Impossible bank-ability and ending with Mission to Mars, De Palma gave up on Hollywood and made a string of movies about.....movies. Movies about recording (a) reality. Movies in different forms and formats in a world that increasingly became defined by instant recording "reality" on some device or other. A 24-7 filmed reality that became a reality onto itself.
Redacted, Femme Fatale, (to a lesser degree) The Black Dahlia, Passion and Domino all zoom in on the way people act and react to filmed representations of "a reality".
Passion is set in the world of advertising. Advertising is a way of selling (a) reality. Not reality, advertising reality. Visually.
A main criticism of latter stage DePalma is the absence of reality - the plots and actors are so damn unbelievable, preposterous. But there's the catch, De Palma actually wants you to be aware you are watching a "movie". As in Femme Fatal nearly every shot is screaming "dream" but the audience keeps stubbornly clinging to the reality of increasingly surrealistic twists. He pulls the rug out from under them and the audience gets angry not because De Palma didn't advertise this was all a dream, but because they fell for the old believe a movie is reality story.
Passion takes this device even a step further, in a gloriously delirious plot about fake reality sellers nearly every scene hinges on a current "reality recording" device. The story is told through camera's, mobile, laptops, video conferencing. In the ironic twist the advertisement itself ends up being a slice of non-manipulated recorded reality. Not a reality, but the reality. Equally the characters and plot get totally lost in this mirrored hall of appearances and representations. Who are these people? By the end they have lost all semblance of a real person. Even to the point of being alive or dead at one point.
Fitting of course as these characters are basically a bunch of reality-dealers.
At the same time De Palma insists on filming a split-screen murder scene where the audience (incorrectly) clings to the filmed reality of ballet-audience. Only to remind the audience a bit later, hey guys you are watching a movie - this reality was murderer-ballet.
People complaining about the plot and actors cling to the "scripted standard reality" of a Hollywood thriller (which 99% of the cases) don't pass the reality test within 5 seconds if inspected. De Palma doesn't play this game, his play is with the audience...are you aware you are watching a movie? He wants you to question the nature of film (and by extension the world of advertisement) His target is not the cheap tactics of the advertisement industry (or the movie business- De Palma LOVES the cheap movie tactics) His target is the gullibility of the viewer. And the indignant reactions of the critics and audience prove he is dead on target.
Cruel, manipulative? Sure, but so was Hitch and it's all done with a great deal of style, humor and intelligence. You need the good sense to laugh at yourself though.
And the music is genius.
BONUS: shout out to the great mini-scene at the shoe-show. A great stunt is involved. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
Elle (2016)
Razorsharp & hilarious
Saw this great little comedy of manners, cleverly disguised as a thriller/whodunnit. The first image of the coldly distant, observing cat puts the spectator in the right frame of mind. A very clever script that makes every scene count, peak and slice away. A brilliant mise-en-scene that refuses to heighten the emotions or prettify. Isabelle Huppert absolutely shines, balancing all the minute emotional ticks in every scene, perfectly in control. She leads an ensemble of actors that play the diverse characters/antagonists to perfection. The story is actually all subtext, the main plot only used to connect all the dots and leading us by the nose to the bigger picture. The movie is marvelously playful, refusing to be dramatic, cute or opt for an easy way out. At the same time everything is done with great style and measured, cooked to perfection. Curiously i felt like i was about the only person in the audience who was chuckling along with every scene, maybe my dark sense of humor or feeling the unmistakably Verhoeven tone more acute with every movie of this great director i get to see. What else - a great score by Anne Dudley and Said Ben Said is getting to be my favorite producer !!! And now quite curious to read the source novel.
L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps (2013)
Perfect on it's own terms (enter the Minotaur's Lair)
This film will be hated by many that cling on to any form of traditional storytelling in film. For viewers that get a kick out of abandoning the rules and diving headfirst into a brave new film-world it's perfect. Not that this movie breaks all the rules, in fact it builds and expands rather rigidly upon time honored film history. At the same time part of the fun is seeing how much the deconstruction and reassembling of the (early German expressionist through classic Hitchcock/ Lang, giallo and surrealist dream) elements of older movies are put through the mind-blender and figuring out what comes out at the other side. As the video-clip (thank you Ken Russell's Tommy) was the successor to the old MGM musicals, The Strange Color
.is a psycho-thriller with all the boring parts cut out. Does this come out as total sensory overload? pretty sure it does. The effect is a bit like a Jungian 2001 Stargate sequence.
This is not an affectionate homage but rather one of the possible next steps to expand the form and genre.
The makers (directing/ photography/editing / actors/ production design) are in complete control of what they want to put on the screen The vertigo and disorientation of the audience are absolutely core business of the genre. It doesn't mean the images are void of meaning, but active interpretation of the images/sounds and symbols is needed and are what makes the movie tick.
As for film and visual and sequential language the bar is raised very high, every shot is carefully composed to a T. Perfect soundscape and retro music. There's also a sly humor in playing with the genre elements (Inspector Vincenticelli and the "Europudding multilingual dialogue" that was so much part of the feel of 70's Italian films - would be great if there existed dubbed Italian/English versions. Red herrings and faux explanations/endings play out as well.
For adventurous viewers, see it on the big screen if you get the chance. Then multiple repeat home viewings to sort it all out.
(and after receiving my DVD
..happy to report, this movie definitely does make sense, does not drop the ball - as most routine Hollywood mystery thrillers do - plot-wise. The devil is in the details, but you have to be willing to enter the labyrinth.)