March 22, 2004
Highly Recommended
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
asparagus drizzled with olive oil and roasted in the oven
carrot cake
wiffle ball
spending all day at the park and getting a sunburn that will remind you of what grass feels like, what fried chicken tastes like, and what touch football sounds like for at least a week
(Not recommended: Mystic River. It's bad. Shockingly bad.)
Umm... I watched ESOTSM this past weekend (as well as catching the revisionist version of Dawn of the Dead). Loved both of them actually.
But panning Mystic River? Seriously? I thought it was pretty true to the book and acted beautifully. Why didn't you like it? Specifically. Was it the story? Acting? Direction? Was it boring? Inquiring minds want to know!
The acting by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, and kid who played Katie's boyfriend was wonderful. Kevin Bacon was okay too, although he wasn't given much of a character to work with. Everything else about the movie was terrible terrible terrible. The writing was atrocious. Many of the lines were not only unnatural and insulting to even a dense audience's powers of perception, but they were wholly unnecessary. Once you've given away the twist and the audience is in on the secret, the director shouldn't allow the movie to proceed as if it's still a mystery. A black police chief named Whitey Powers?! Two leather-jacket-and-gold-chain-wearing thugs known only collectively as the Savage Brothers?! The completely extraneous wife whose face you never see until...?! The theme music was never appropriate and yet, they kept playing it; I hate when directors use music to tell you how to feel instead of the scenes commanding your emotion of their own inherent power (for another failure in this aspect, see LOTR). I have seen finer child actors in cereal commercials.
I could go on. And on.
The major fault of the movie, I think, was that it was trying to be something it wasn't. Had it been played as a murder mystery (perhaps as a tv miniseries), it could have worked better. The pacing would have been picked up and the cliched dialogue would have been easier to swallow. As it was, Mr. Eastwood directed it as a Shakespearean drama probing the depths of the human soul. Not a good idea with this story because it was far too conventional of a cop flick.
I think this movie got rave reviews from the Academy because of the subject matter alone (i.e., murder and child abuse). It's like doing a movie about the holocaust. No one can pan a movie about the holocaust without risking looking like a heartless monster. Just because the storyline treats a subject of high drama and therefore has greater potential to be "great," doesn't mean the film does it justice. In this case, the story was interesting and intriguing, but it was directed out of its genre and fell flat the way Intolerable Cruelty did when the Cohens tried to mix black comedy with slapstick. It just doesn't work, no matter who's acting/directing/writing/etc.
An' I'm through.
(Yay to Sean Penn and Tim Robbins for their Oscars, though.)
Hmmm... Ok, I'll give you the black cop named whitey (in the book, he was white) and the overt use of music to propel the story along its arc. But... I think that rest of the movie was satisfying. Not in a "who did it" sort of way since, well, I already knew who did it. I was impressed with the acting AND the storyline. While it is true that hollywood loves stories of children in peril (my favorite film of all-time is an early noir classic, Night of the Hunter), it isn't true that films about (or relating to) the holocaust are critically accepted (lest we forget Mel Brooks' To Be or Not to Be). Okay, that's a stretch.
Perhaps you might enjoy the film more on DVD? I know I hated, absolutely HATED Titanic when it came out in the theaters. I couldn't for the life of me understand how and why anyone could enjoy that film. Then I watched the DVD. And... okay, well I still hated it. Worst movie to ever be nominated for anything worthwhile in my opinion... but then again, that's what we're talking about here. Personal opinion :)
That brunette boy in the Welch's juice commercial was great!
Oh, I really want to see Eternal Sunshine. I've been meaning to every night this week, but something's always come up. Maybe tonight!
Too much talk about Mystic and not enough about Eternal!!!! ;)
I'm seeing it for the THIRD time with a friend's film class this Sunday. I'm completely obsessed. But I love a movie that wraps me up in it this much!