Movie Critic's e-mail club...
Over at Slate they are in the final day of their week long Movie Club, which uses an informal email-like format between a few critics to write about last years films.
The critics taking part this year are David Edelstein (Slate), J Hoberman (Village Voice), Manohla Dargis (LA Times), AO Scott (NY Times) and Sarah Kerr (Vogue).
There is some good stuff.
[The link I provided it today's posts only. When you get there I would recommend hitting the 'print' option toward the top of the page so that you can read all of the posts in order. There is about 20 pages worth.]
Here are a few choice excerpts.
J Hoberman:
- I'm told that Ian McKellan [in
The Lord of the Rings], a most uncloseted performer, was calling himself Gandalf the Gay on the set and trying to get the hobbits, Pippin and Mary—sorry, I mean Merry—to kiss goodbye. The queer stuff is actually more resonant in
X2 (an underrated if overlong movie) in which McKellan is far campier.
- The highest-ranking commercial movie is probably
The Fog of War which, to my mind, is a more historical version of
the Lord of the Rings starring Robert McNamara as Gollum.
- [
Lost in Translation] For me, the most poignantly self-reflexive, emotionally complicated moment in any Hollywood movie this year was Bill Murray's (or rather, "Bill Murray's") decade-collapsing, sincerely off-key karaoke version of "More Than This."
Sarah Kerr:
- ...[W]hat is with the shocking number of films this year in which the plot or the character's sole motivation—indeed, the reason said character is even a person of interest—involved either fearing or grieving the loss of a child, or (more rare) a parent?
- Sean Penn [in
Mystic River] is near-great, fierce and mesmerizing—as he sucks the air out of the room. He compels our attention with a diva's self-consciousness that is impossible not to be impressed by—but as with a diva, this drags you out of the story into awe for the performer. Watching him, I got distracted and started thinking about the history of various schools of acting, and what's it like for the naturalistic guys in this scene with him, and how did he prepare?
David Edelstein
- As for
Whale Rider: Yes, I cried, the filmmaking was elegant, and the girl extraordinary. But I'm increasingly impatient with a certain kind of cheap movie mysticism—the kind that goes into overdrive whenever Maori show up.
- I know there are those who think Jackson has tried and failed to measure up to Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Welles, Olivier, and, for that matter, Spielberg (whom he clearly reveres). And they'd get no argument from me: With a couple of exceptions the violence in
Return of the King doesn't have the moral weight of the battles in Intolerance or
Chimes at Midnight or
Kagemusha or
Ran. But, my God, what a curve we're grading on. As for it being too long, well: I saw it after the extended cuts of the first two parts and thought it was too short.
Fellowship and especially
Two Towers feel shorter to me in their longer versions because they breathe a little more and give the characters a little more complexity (which, yes, they need).
Manohla Dargis
- Believe it or not, a reader accused me of being politically correct because I mentioned that in Charles Frazier's
Cold Mountain Ada (the character played by Nicole Kidman) exploits slave labor. The idea that mentioning slavery—in regard to a Civil War movie, no less—makes me politically correct (and therefore a liberal scold) is, I think, pitiful.
- I don't usually like the way children, dead or alive, are treated in movies, and even good directors are susceptible to exploiting death. I didn't like how Kieslowski used the death of a child (and a husband) in
Blue for that very reason, and I loathed how John Woo exploited the murder of a child in Face/Off. I wonder if the recent rage for dead children (sorry, I realize how awful that sounds) doesn't have some sort of metaphoric resonance, wherein the dead children, the ultimate innocents, stand in for the grown-ups both making and watching these movies? It is, after all, a comforting illusion that in the great drama of life we (Americans) are innocent.
AO Scott
- [
Cold Mountain] One of the interesting things about the story is that it's set in North Carolina, the last state to join the Confederacy and one—especially in the western mountains—where there was great ambivalence about the Confederate cause (and even substantial support for the Union). (You hear this expressed from time to time in the movie when people complain about fighting for "the rich men's niggers.") These mountain folk are, in some ways, the mirror image of the Irish immigrants in
Gangs of New York, whose alienation from rich Northerners found expression in a torrent of racist violence during the draft riots. What's curious about these two movies, taken together, is that they suggest that the Civil War, which we are used to seeing as a matter of race and section, was also about class. Remove some letters from "Miramax," rearrange a couple more, and what do you get? "Marx." Interesting, no?
