[QUOTE=ianzin]
[QUOTE=lynne-42]
I watched Adaptation because it was about the process of being a writer. I have just managed to get to the stage of being a full time writer so I am naturally intrigued by anything about my trade. I liked a lot of it, but found some sections unconvincing. I thought the end section in the swamp was rather silly.
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Yes, the end section is silly. It’s *meant *to be. As the film unfolds, you see the clash between the two brothers. One brother wants to really understand what great writing is, and strives to create work that has some artistic integrity (but suffers writer’s block in the process). The other is a cheerful idler who knows nothing about writing, picks up a few lame ideas, and comes up with a dumb script for a popcorn-fodder movie with hardly any plot worth the name and a few mindless action sequences. The former can’t produce anything and has a troubled relationship with the studios. The latter becomes popular with the studios, much to his brother’s dismay and disgust. The film, Adaptation, not only shows this story (of the two twin brothers) but is the result of it. Hence the clear shift of gears from a thoughtful, introspective and rather moody study of the challenges a writer faces to a dumb action drama that looks and feels just like a dozen other dumb action dramas. The movie depicts the story of its own development, it holds a mirror up to itself. It presents a ‘worthy’ idea getting derailed by purely commercial considerations, and we are invited to share the dismay of the actual writer, Charlie Kaufman.
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Agreed. There is a definite shift in tone from the point at which Kaufman talks with McKee (who advises Kaufman that “I’ll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”) and the film derails into exactly the sort of thriller ending that Kaufman was trying to avoid. (“Okay. But, I’m saying, it’s like, I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know…or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end, you know. I mean…The book isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. You know, it just isn’t. And…I feel very strongly about this.”)
The film isn’t just another superficial screed on the vapidness of the film industry and the base tastes of the viewing public (although it does imply that as well); it’s as much a self-criticism of Kaufman himself in trying, and failing, to succeed in writing a story that is an honest adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (which is essentially an episodic narrative with no underlying theme other than Orlean’s digressions into her own lack of direction). Clearly, everybody just wants him to write a script with some story (whatever it may be, but preferably as wacky as Being John Malkovich, which is referred to repeatedly), and the (fictional) twin Donald Kaufman is the avatar of this; the quick and easy route to screenwriting success by applying some trite methods and principles to scripting-writing. There is also the implication that Donald may just be an entirely imaged creation of Charlie, a manifestation of the voice in his head telling him to take the easy route (mirrored by Donald’s inane script for his banal multiple personallity/slasher movie), which clearly doesn’t make sense, but then nothing about the ending really does. (His original script had the deus ex machina as a swamp ape, but that was deemed to be too absurd, so it became an allegator instead.)
As an aside, I once saw Kaufman at a Q&A session at the Arclight following a festival showing of Adaptation, and he admitted that after struggling with the script and finding himself clueless and miserably behind schedule, he just started writing a movie about himself trying to adapt the script, assuming that it would be round filed and that he’d never work in Hollywood again. Fortunately, the same people who clued into to the deeper themes of Being John Malkovich below its essential absurdity also found value in this (and Susan Orlean apparently has a sense of humor, enough that she was actually filmed in a scene which was later cut). It is an absurd, self-indulgent film, but also one that works far better than any high concept description of it would suggest.
[QUOTE=lynne-42]
So there are two of them? Memento and Irreversible? Thanks for that warning about Irreversible. Do others agree with the warning?
Has anyone seen both? How do they compare?
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Irreversible has a couple of very disturbing scenes (starting with a man having his head graphically bashed in with a fire extinguisher). I understand the point the filmmakers were trying to make and why presenting the story in reverse isn’t just a gimmick, but it’s not a film I would recommend. Momento, on the other hand, is a neat little puzzle of a story with a twist in the end which presents a thematic conundrum and suggests that the perspective from which the film is shown (i.e. essentially from Guy Pierce’s character, whose confusion with the progression of events is imposed on the view via the backwards structure of the scenes) is biased. It’s a fairly novel twist on the “unreliable narrator” of mystery fiction.
I could literally suggest hundreds of movies on the basis of bringing something unique or special to cinema, but I’ll just suggest a few more:
Out Of The Past: A Robert Mitchum/Kirk Douglas noir classic about a man betrayed and the dame he just can’t seem to keep away from. Kathy Moffet is one of the nastiest femme fatales ever to grace the screen (only one-upped by Linda Fiorentino’s over-the-top vixen in John Dahl’s neo-noir satire The Last Seduction), and the always-reliable and laconic Mitchum was never better than here.
Chinatown: The best of the neo-noirs, moreso for turning the paradigm on its head. The hard-boiled detective isn’t quite so well-done, the nominal femme fatale isn’t as deceptive as she seems initially, and the real mystery (who framed and then killed Mulray and why) ends up being both a big conspiracy and a personal excursion), and the bleak ending (originally opposed by scriptwriter Robert Towne) is as devastating as it is inevitable. It also has one of the best, most multi-layered final lines in history of film: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Nothing deep here, just Spielberg’s take on the old cliffhanger serials, and IMHO the best movie he’s ever made or going to make. It’s a nonstop ride of increasingly audacious action set-pieces, populated by cartoon Nazis, and stops just long enough to catch your breath but not enough for you to question some of the fundamentally ridiculous flaws in logic and history (like, what is the German army doing running a massive excavation in British-controlled Egypt, or the fact that if Indy had just stayed home grading papers and reading H.Rider Haggard novels the end result would have been about the same). The fantastic final scene is both homage to Citizen Kane and brilliant in its own right.
Die Hard: No, seriously! This movie spawned a series of imitators (including three increasing preposterous sequels of its own) but none matched the clockwork logic of the plot. Nothing, and I mean nothing in this film happens without ultimately contributing back into the plot; even the smallest early character moments end up giving rise to later events and consequences. This isn’t the sort of film you’re going to do a frame by frame analysis of, but it is worth repeated viewing to follow the trails of cause and effect, like how the advice of a fellow traveler in the opening scene (“You want to know the secret to surviving air travel? After you get where you’re going, take off your shoes and your socks then walk around on the rug bare foot and make fists with your toes.”) sets up for a happenstance that impacts the protagonist for the rest of the film. (“Karl, schieß auf das fenster…SHOOT the glass!”), or Holly flipping the family picture on her desk down incidentally delays discovery of something else (note how she looks at the picture after talking to Hans the first time). There is a lot of violence here–some of it gratuitous–but it is worth watching for understanding how a script should be tied together, and also for Alan Rickman’s menacingly velveted performance as a criminal with style, composure, and intellect. Even Bruce Willis–normally irritating as an actor who seems to be outside of his role–is perfect here as the “fly in the ointment” who really just wants to collect his wife and get out of the way rather than some kind of intentional hero.
Brazil: Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece of a dystopian satire, with retro set design and bizarre obsession with cosmetic surgery and ducts, centered around a protagonist who is perfectly happy being a minor functionary in a mindless bureaucracy as long as he is left alone to his fantastical dreams of escape and romance, but is drawn into to an accidentally created conspiracy (the result of a literal “bug” in the works and a mistake that no one in the bureaucracy wants to own up to) and ends up trying to fight the system, only to unintentionally bring his own demise. The story (an particularly the romance subplot) has some structural problems, but the sheer imagination and audacity of the film are overwhelming, requiring repeated viewing. Gilliam brings his Monty Python influence to a more serious story, with characters saying and doing the most absurd things in a serious, unself-conscious manner which is not just slightly reminiscent of existing justifications for the War On Terror. The terrorist bombing subplot may be entirely a red herring; the world in Brazil is of such failure-prone ad hoc construction stuff may just be blowing up out of fundamental ill-construction, but how convenient it is to blame it on “the terrorists”, even though the only real insurgent that is seen to exist is rogue repairman Harry Tuttle (played by Robert DeNiro in an almost unrecognizable character role before he started lampooning his own image for big bucks) whose singular offense is fixing defective heating systems without filling out the proper forms, and whose “invitation to assist the Ministry of Information in certain inquiries,” (and mistake pertaining thereto) creates the essential motivation in the film. Writer Harlan Ellison has declared this the finest SF film ever made, and the funny thing is that there really isn’t any science fiction/space opera-type stuff in the film; it’s basically 1984 as reimagined by Hunter S. Thompson on acid. The movie is not only brilliant in and of itself, but impacted commercial filmmaking and especially video advertisements at least as much as Citizen Kane did before it, and like that movie, it was almost its director’s undoing and very nearly did not see commerical distribution. (See the book The Battle of Brazil by critic Jack Mathews, or the documentary of the same name found on the Criterion Edition DVD set, for more information on the making and unmaking of Brazil. The Sheinberg Edit (a.k.a. the “Love Conquers All” TV version), a cut make by Univesal President Sidney Sheinberg which he believed would make the film more commerically palletable, is worth viewing once just to see how unartful editing can turn a masterpiece into an unwatchable piece of shit.
Blade Runner: Blade Runner is really all about its future-noir/proto-cyberpunk atmosphere (which it has in spades–never once do you doubt that Ridley Scott’s version of an ecologically devastated, multi-cultural, perpetually rainy, neon-lit degenerate Babel of Los Angeles in 2019 actually exists somewhere), but beyond that it delves into deeper themes about what it means to be human, the nature of memory, and the morality of survival at any cost. Scott seemlessly integrates Biblical and other mythical imagery (stigmata, the eye theme, et cetera) without making some purile derivation. The story has some issues (including a scene which could be interpreted as forceable sex, although given the character’s indifference it’s hard to make that condemnation categorically) and the plot is really pretty straightforward, but the themes it develops but never resolves in simplistic fashion will keep you thinking. See the Final Cut version, but ignore the debate on whether Deckard is himself a replicant (clearly he’s not, whatever Ridley Scott may say). There are some parts you may need to turn away from, gore wise, but none of it is really gratuitous.
The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs may be slightly better, but The Wild Bunch is a film that is both figuratively and literally about the end of the Western, and the lifestyle of train-robbing gangs like the Bunch. Set in the early 1900s, the aging bunch and their time-worn leader (played by William Holden in one of his two or three best roles) is looking for a last heist, and then scoot down to Mexico to escape from bounty hunters sent by the railroad and some well-deserved retirement. But what are a bunch of lawless criminals without families or any roots going to retire to? The final scene–a brutal, sacrifical bloodbath in which the Bunch redeem their own warped sense of morals–is bloody in the bright red paint sort of way, but also the only way the film could possibly end. This film (and Peckinpah’s depiction of violence) is notable for how it influenced films after it; the mosaic stylized, slow-motion, personalized violence has become an almost ridiculously pervasive visual, but few mainstream directors today seem to understand that the point wasn’t to glorify violence but to brutalize it, to demonstrate that death by shooting and stabbing isn’t clean and neat but messy and harsh.
Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf: Should be seen if for no other reason that how it broke the back of the Production Code. Today you can say the word “screw” (in the sexual context) on the televisor without getting more than a couple of protest letters from Legions of Decency, and “Hump the Hostess” is probably the title of an upcoming reality shot, but back then it was a shot across the bow of repressive morality. It’s also good story, although pretty hard to watch. No doubt Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor brought some off-screen acrimony to their roles.
The Passenger: Michalangelo Antonioni is better known in the U.S. for Blow Up (another film which broke the Production Code by going right around it), but I think this film is better, and one of Nicholson’s best, non-histrionic performances. When he takes on the identity of a traveller who dies in the night, only to discover the man to be an international arms dealer, it seems like Locke, a television journalist, is on some kind of hard core investigative effort, but instead the film explores what identity is, and how you can’t escape being someone. The camerawork on this film is amazing, and the efforts that Antonioni went to get the next to final shot is worth a few essays in its own right.
Five Easy Pieces: Nicholson in another role before he totally sold out. The movie is worth seeing if for no other reason than Nicholson trying to order breakfast just the way he wants it, despite the restaurant’s “No substitutions” rule:
“Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.”
“You want me to hold the chicken?”
“I want you to hold it between your knees.”
Should be paired up with The Graduate as a comparison between protagonists who are trying to rebel within “the system” and those trying to fit in outside of it.
Goodfellas: Counterprogramming to the romantic mythology of The Godfather (which is really a Greek tragedy masqurading as a Mafia movie), about some working class Mob soldiers. Henry Hill is pathetic and sociopathic, and yet still comes off as being at least more sympathetic than pretty much everyone else in the film. The “finding the corpses” scene (over which the long Duane Allman coda to Derek and the Dominos “Layla” is played) and the extended, increasingly paranoic sequence where Hill is preparing for what ends up being his final drug deal are brilliant pieces of quick editing (for which Thelma Schoonmaker won an Oscar). This film successfully straddles the line between Scorsese as a director of personal films and as a qualified commercial directory. Notice the several minute long tracking shot entering the Copacobana.
Stranger
The environments in the film feel so authentic and concrete, they lack that ‘‘unreality’’ that CGI tends to have, where you feel you are looking at a fantasy. Everything in the film seems very immediate and intimate.
films like american in paris and carousel among others were designed for that aspect ratio and that is how they should be seen. i even have the divemaster now buying letterbox. my dvds, with the exception of those from the golden screen era, are all letterbox.