Ida (2013), dir. Paweł Pawlikowski
Anonymous asked:
Speaking of film adaptations, have you watched Cloud Atlas?
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New Trek New Thoughts
Star Trek (2009)
WELL THIS WAS REALLY DISORIENTING.
If it were just stylistic differences due to the staaaggering advances in film technology over the decades, well that would be one thing. I could totally settle into contemporary lighting and camerawork the way I settled into the ‘80s Star Trek movies after watching TOS. But the style shift spilled over into the spirit of the movie too. To be honest, it’s probably partly due to how many filmmakers these days like to show off their ~movie magic~ abilities through destruction — more explosions, more stunts, more shatter and boom — and so in turn, their plots tend to revolve around conflict, conflict, conflict. So I guess this could be responsible for how we went from cozy colorful space adventures with your friends, to a lot of flashy hostility in a high-flying Apple store.
And y’know what was so demoralizing? That I distrusted even the eventual tableau of camaraderie in the final shots, because I still distrusted the heart of this new Captain Kirk. But THANK GOD, I went to see Star Trek Beyond before posting anything, so now I can spare you all a lengthy discussion of what is lovable and heroic about William Shatner’s Kirk’s grandiose self-confidence, compared against the entitled arrogant jerk they saddled Chris Pine with at first.
One thing I do want to mention quickly though before jumping ahead to JOY — against incredible odds, Zachary Quinto found something really wonderful here in his impossible task of being New Spock, while our beloved Leonard Nimoy was also there being Spock. And that’s on top of having to make his way through a plot expressly designed to Break This Sad-Eyed Vulcan in every act! My god, that got so cruel…
Anyhow, most everything else I’d have to say is either irrelevant now or AMPLIFIED IN GOODNESS in:
Star Trek Beyond (2016)
AND I WEPT WITH HAPPINESS, AND MY TEARS WERE THE *STARS*
I hardly even know where to begin! Literally everything was better, I mean they even smashed up that cold, glossy white ship and put the crew back in THE ENTERPRISE, with grays and colors and proper Treksome blockiness hell yeah. And this one was about Hope again, and being brave & brilliant not for your own glory, but always to help one another. O my Star Trek!
Ok let’s talk about Bones now, it is high time to heap love on Karl Urban, who like, idk, has a circle of rose quartz in his trailer and is keeping a steady channel open to DeForest Kelley or something. He is a PERFECT Leonard McCoy, his Bones feels good and right and sometimes I get all teary and emotional just watching him?? It’s lovely. He also brings something fresh and interesting — which is an important thing in these sorts of projects and I’m a staunch advocate for it — in how his Bones is significantly more able and likely to just manhandle you into sitting still and getting healed, damn it, which is a look I find I really like on Dr. McCoy.
Annnnd they paired him off with Spock in an extended hurt/comfort-action/adventure mashup for the significant majority of this one, so I was on SPACE CLOUD NINE. Bones’ constant grumpy attentive doctoring! Spock’s constant collapsing and begging McCoy to leave him and go save Jim!* Both making an effort to try to have real talks about ~feelings~ because fuck it, we’re probably gonna die. Uughh my morbid bickering sweethearts! And GOD, another rendition of Spock & Bones’ tacit agreement to each shoulder a share of some painful knowledge they must keep from Jim, following their unspoken accords as the members of the Jim Kirk Protection Squad. Roll me into an alien sun about it honestly.
Also, I know George Takei had misgivings about this decision, but oh my heart, tears sprang into my eyes when we saw Sulu’s husband and daughter. Oh and I loved pairing him and Uhura for this one, that was such a nice call-back to how they were often paired in TOS! It’s such a good screen combo, Uhura’s warmth and presence of mind and Sulu’s effortless stylish badassery.
Alright, to wrap this up for now, let me beam credit where credit is due: BLESS YOU TO THE STARS AND BACK SIMON PEGG, YOU ARE THE HERO OF THIS PIECE AND I CHERISH YOU <3
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*Because my magic power is falling into inadvertently amazing double-features, before going to see Star Trek Beyond I watched TOS 3x23 ‘All Our Yesterdays’, aka the one where Spock & Bones get trapped on an ice planet together, \o/, and this time it’s Bones who is the one constantly collapsing and begging Spock to just leave him and go save Jim. Just, every variation of this emotional triangle, always, forever, thank you.
- me, rocking up to my fifth film showing in a week, wondering if we talk about movie hangovers because movies are like drinks that last days instead of hours, and maybe that’s why I feel like I’ve been pre-gaming this one since last Friday: I Love the Cinema.
Sure have! Watched the movie first then read the book, as is MY WONT.
Now granted this was in 2012 so bear with my memory, but when I read the book I remember being really pleased with how the Wachowskis + Tom Tykwer had chosen to adapt the structure. Film is an inherently different medium, and what’s neat and affecting in a novel isn’t always the same thing that’s neat and affecting on screen. Folding the sequence of stories neatly in two as David Mitchell had done, going up up up in time then back down step by step, is so stunning in book form, like there were transitions there that had me wailing out loud in joyous sorrow. Meanwhile, the movie was able to approach the multiple storylines differently. What they chose, and what I think was a better impact choice for cinema, was to build these sweeping assemblages of fractured, layered visuals and moments strung together with that score, and I remember just being awash with goosebumps in the theater during some of those sequences. And that’s what I want out of my adaptations: show me that your loyalty is to feeling. Be creative and boundary pushing with your choices like the author was with theirs. It might mean you step away from what’s on the page, but in doing so step closer to the heart of the matter.
Now if I recall, there may have been some other changes in how the reincarnation/soul fluidity worked? But honestly that slash is there because I was never super clear on that in the book either! So I didn’t mind. Strictly laying out what was going on there was not a priority of the novel, so I feel like you’re free to adjust that in your movie if you want.
(Also, because you can’t talk about Cloud Atlas without mentioning this, I didn’t find it to be an ethical problem that the actors also played small roles as characters of races besides their own, but only because this was a multi-racial cast who were ALL playing other races at various points. It sometimes looked ridiculous, I take issue aesthetically, but not morally in this case. However, while I saw the race-bending to be egalitarian in principal, I know that for some simply seeing a white person in makeup to play a non-white character is painful regardless of context, and saying how I personally may have felt is not meant to presume my experiences are universal, nor should be!)
Jarmusch’s picture was the second-last to screen in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the weary audience were right in step with its drowsy, meditative tone. When the film begins, the two lovers are on opposite sides of the globe. Adam is in a crumbling mansion on the outskirts of Detroit, a city that itself looks thoroughly bled dry; Eve resides by a souk in Tangiers.
Each has a reliable supply of fresh blood at hand: Adam from a bribable haematologist at the local hospital, and Eve from Kit Marlowe – yes, that Kit Marlowe – who, in the Jarmusch world, is also a vampire, is played by John Hurt, and wrote the complete works of Shakespeare.
Early on, Eve flies to Detroit and the couple are happily reunited. They drive around the city at night visiting points of interest to vampires – “Look, there’s Jack White’s house,” says Adam – and sup top grade Type O Negative plasma from dainty glass goblets. Afterwards they slump backwards in a spaced-out state, utterly bloody-minded.
The Telegraph review of OLLA (via andrezel)
Speaking of Hiddleston, and Swinton, and movies I urgently need released in this country.
Literally gays invented classical music and continue to be the only ones who understand it
I was listening to Nico muhly on classical chops and he was like “every minute of Peter Grimes is so delicious you want to kill yourself. The whole time you’re like ‘what?? Who are these people? Now there’s a chorus?!’” Gays enjoy having questions instead of answers and that’s what you need
(I do think the process of understanding yourself as a gay person forces you to find comfort in knowing you don’t know everything and this is an advantage academically artistically and in life although it requires some discomfort first. But I’m at work and don’t have time so this is posed in joke format instead)
Of that classic genre: lush sweeping Merchant-Ivory period film about how if only the men had stayed out of it and let the women manage things we could have saved a lot of trouble. Interesting that this seems to be what became of the Shakespearean comedy three hundred years later. That was a joke but now that I think about it, these Edwardian novels do hinge a lot of the plot and entertainment on mistaken identities and mix-ups and secrets and marriages. Only it is certainly a drama now. It’s funny, but it’s a drama.
And romantic. There are a lot of passions, and even more Reasons and Rules why these passions should be restrained, which is of course the most romantic thing the Western canon knows of. Personally the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen is in this movie, which is HELENA BONHAM CARTER’S HAIR. It is IMMENSE, just cascading down her back in thick wild rumples. She tries but that hair will NOT be restrained, it must grow free, and there of course is the metaphor.
Voted by you, the August watch was Howards End! Spoiler-free review above, spoiler-full live-notes here on Patreon 🌹
True crime was always a miss for me, but then Sandi Tan made a documentary about Shirkers, the indie film she shot as a teenager on the streets of Singapore in 1992, which was subsequently stolen from her and friends by their mysterious older mentor when he vanished with all their footage, and now I get it. This shit is riveting.
A bit on Shirkers, just released last month on Netflix and really good!
I love Luca Guadagnino, because he makes cinematic mood poems that happen to also have plots. I’ve just completed his self-described “Desire trilogy” with this one, and while they carry over no characters and are thematically linked only by perhaps the most common subject in film, they are still a trilogy, because Luca made them. I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name have different feels and different looks, but they all have Feel and Look, piles of it, swaths, songs. You can feel the clothes, which are, to the last character, perfect. You can feel the architectural spaces of it. You almost feel you could catch a tan from the tangibility of the bright Italian sunlight pouring over skin.
So A Bigger Splash is that Luca thing, but like, the more manic, rich-trashy version of it. The sun might be a little too hot white. The perfect costumes are frequently coming off. It still has that languid, hang-out pace (and length), but what’s contained in those summer beats is spikier.
I mean obviously go see Sorry To Bother You. There has never been anything quite like Sorry To Bother You. You know how it feels utterly lacking when people call David Lynch weird? That’s how I feel about Boots Riley’s first feature film, but on an entirely different plane. Here’s some other words I will say to try to build up a picture here, hopelessly aware that I won’t be able to capture just the ineffable quality of the thing: a bitingly conscious laid-back off-the-wall racial-social-political-economical satire in which you wonder at first if maybe critics have mistaken magical realism for “sci-fi/fantasy” but they have not, at all.
Sorry To Bother You has the feel of an internet video that crashed your local cinema like a party, and I mean that as a big compliment, and also a specific critique that we’ll get to.
Get to it here! Spoiler-free, though I do list a few non-plot things I loved a lot, in case you want to go into this ~pristine~
