Bringing Out the Dead, spoiler free
Very episodic. It reminded me of a very dark sitcom, like a psychadelic Barney Miller, but very depressing, and with paramedics instead of cops. Nicholas Cage is a wonderful actor but can’t do voice-overs worth a load of dingo’s kidneys. It was funny in Raising Arizona and heinous in Con Air; in this movie it just made me impatient.
All the actors were great for their roles. If I were to make a movie, I think the whole cast would be Ving Rhames (sp.?) “Who should play the cocktail waitress?” “Ving!”
I used to think Scorcese had a love-hate relationship with New York City, but now I’m wondering why we never see the “love” part. I think he hates it more than I do, and I don’t even live there. His whole career could have been called “Mean Streets”. I still haven’t quite figured out the whole “it’s a small city after all” vibe I get from this and a lot of New York movies. I mean, everybody knows everybody in this movie. Oh, that random guy walking down the street? Yeah, he used to be married to my cousin. This made it seem more like a TV series, with a limited number of recurring characters.
Gladiator, with some vague spoilers
A real thrill. The Max von Sidow role was played by Richard Harris (that’s a joke son, I thought the guy was von Sidow and it turned out to be Harris when I saw the cast). Surprisingly genuine emotion (mostly despondent). I couldn’t help thinking I would have liked it more had I seen fewer movies. I’ll compare it to another movie at the end of this review, so you’ll have time to quit reading if you don’t like spoilers.
The sets and extras were incredible. Perhaps the most impressive I’ve seen. “Impressive set” movies never impress me that much; Titanic looked like a ship (I’ve seen ships before); castles never look like much of anything in movies. These sets blew me away. I am still looking for the pieces.
It was sort of gory. Seven still makes Gladiator look like an episode of The Teletubbies. I personally didn’t mind the blood and steel, and I really liked the flying burning pitch, but my mother was apparently shocked at the level of violence. In a movie called “Gladiator”. Hmmmm.
The sound in the cinema may have been weird, or else the sound design was really spotty. Too many seens had background noise (folks being gutted, Roman incendiary projectiles hitting trees, hooves), lots of music, and somebody saying something important(?) and inaudible in the background. I liked the score, which sounded like Dead Can Dance. My mother thought she was singing in French but I don’t think she was using any language.
Editing? Remember that? They cut all the “explanatory frames” in certain scenes, as if they were low-budget college filmmakers trying to trim out the parts that were not convincing. It wasn’t a low-budget movie though.
The dialogue varied between “classic grand oratory” and graceless prose written to explain Roman customs to an audience big enough to pay for the sets. That is, a general would say make a reference to Elysium, and then explain that if you are there you’re already dead. He could have said, “If such-and-such happens, you’re in Elysium, and your troubles are over since you can’t die twice”. But the hack they hired to insert verbal footnotes wasn’t that artful, apparently. “In a Republic, the Senate has the power.” That one was inserted for people who have never lived in Republics?
The main question I have is, why did it follow Braveheart character for character and (almost) scene for scene? Was it,
(a) purposeful, as part of a serious spoof (which I thought was an oxymoron),
(b) accidental, and purely coincidental, or
© a result of profound uncreativity, i.e. the writers tried to be original, but the only movie they’ve ever seen is Braveheart so they didn’t have a lot of room to grow?
I bet it was ©, which is sad.
If you’ve seen it, and you’re wondering about any real historical basis of the characters, well my knowledge sums to a paragraph or two. (Right here you can insert your diatribe against stupid people like Boris who believe everything they see in movies. Got that out of your system? Good.) Marcus Aurelius is fondly remembered by history. He was very well-read and a great writer of Stoic philosophy. He spent the vast majority of his Emperorhood abroad, in Germany among other places. He died in Vienna, of “plague”, which I suppose means bubonic plague, but I don’t know how sure we are of this. His son and successor was “sanguinary and licentious”, which pretty much sums up his movie character. He was murdered.