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the minutes in between screenings and other festival poo (fodder):
[coming soon]
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25. february 26th - revolver, uk, 11:00am **
take everything that you love about lock, stock, and two smoking barrels, and everything you love about snatch (saying that you like these movies), and place them in a home-made hand-made paper-making churn.
now sludge that all around and add fibers of confusion and abstract texture. mix it all around with a large churning stick of ambiguous storytelling and fractured editing/internal monologue structure, then take a crap in the churn.
when you're ready to use the paper, long after you have spread the mixture on the rack and laid it out in the sun for a proper amount of drying time, remember to please note how at the beginning, it had so many good things going in its favor.
it could have been a beautiful explorative sheet of pristinely cinematic paper, used even for official and beautifully drafted certificates. and then try to use the paper and realize that all it is good for is second-rate toilet paper that you can roll dead fish in after its been beer-battered and slathered in brown sauce scottish-style because its the only way you can make use of it.
that's how i felt about this fight club/vanilla sky/kill bill/sin city po-mo pseudo pastiche movie that makes use of mozart's requiem mass so oddly that you might want to watch amadeus over and over just to rectify in your brain what your eyes have just witnessed.
now that i've alienated myself from anyone who wanted a normal review, here's my go at explaining myself better.
this is a story that is so loosely handled that not even the presence of andre 3000 could save the scenes he was in. okay, he's more of a presence than an acting talent, but then again, the whole film feels like this; a sort of dabbling from certain actors into surprisingly great bit parts, but those are just the problem.
it's a film of bits that meet at awkward editing choices and really alienate the viewer to the point where you look over to your neighbor and try to see if they too are feeling the disconnect you are.
the tone is a little darker with less of the humor that worked so very well in lock, stock...which makes it seem as if the same level of complexity could be shifted from the heist template and secured in a dramatic psychological mindspace, but no.
i'm glad that someone gave ray liotta some work, but damnit, it was sort of wasted in a really strange way. and i don't know if seeing him naked saved anything for his character. there's a scene where his character is at a point of such vulnerability that he is moves to tears.
it's a very affecting image and he sustains it like a professional. and yet i felt nothing because i wasn't led to care at all about him or his personal plight or anything remotely near an emotion. this is the sort of problem that saturated almost every scene in the latter half of the film.
and also, two characters with psychological problems? why treat them as the same character if you're feeding the fact that they are similar? we're not dumb.
and then to use quotations in the opening titles, then repeat them again and again through dialogue and title-cards and other characters and beat it over and over that it's the the greatest mysteriously multi-faceted quote ever to have the magical properties to reveal and hide the true nature of man's drives through the infinite cosmos...it quickly becomes old hat and frustratingly so.
it's dramatic, but more dramatically confusing to the point where it causes the audience disinterest. and while this could be a point that someone could turn around and say "i just didn't get it," i will further state that if you are to present a mysterious atmosphere where things are not as they seem, i believe that one of the roles of confusing the audience is to lead them consciously astray then lead them back, and powerfully. not make the story so erratically confusing to the point where when you finally come to the "reveal," it is so too late in the story for it to make sense and you are just left annoyed and duped.
ritchie is riding off of snatch i think, and i can see that he is trying out a new hand at storytelling which is refreshing in a filmmaker sort of way. but i think that if someone doesn't help him produce the things in his head, his films will get introverted in the same way that this film gets introverted. you end up feeling cheated and like you got kicked in the kidneys; not beaten down, but struck at just the wrong angle as to induce momentary disgust.
but like i've said before, these are the moments where the low price of the ticket comes in. so what could've been a very interesting film ends up a greater example of how a sure-to-be-great films can crumble right through your fingers and leave you empty-handed.
26. february 26th - mrs. henderson presents, uk, 1:30pm ****
[coming soon]
27. february 26th - the world's fastest indian, new zealand, 4:00pm *****
[coming soon]
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