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ezequiel2517
Reviews
Swimming Pool (2003)
an old joke well shot
I think there are two sides in Ozon's filmography; one is more related with theater and a sort of theatrical fantasy, in huis clos fictions, it is the side of "Huit Femmes" and "Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres brûlantes", and the other side is more realistic and intimate, like in "Sous le sable". The first one is embodied by Ludivine Saignier whereas the other is embodied by Charlotte Rampling. And I believe that here, in "Swimming Pool", he tries to combine these two sides of his career, joining these two actresses and creating a fiction between realism and dreams, in a sort of fantastic huis clos around a country house with a swimming pool.
But I think it is a failure. The dialogues are artificial and often sound false, maybe because they are in English written by a Frenchman, and some second characters' acting is really bad. The story is not original at all and plays with a joke that is becoming a cliché: the invented movie, just like "Adaptation", for instance. This joke may justify the bad dialogues and acting because you can say that the writer is inventing a bad fiction, but anyway I don't find this satisfactory. Besides, Ozon lacks completely of subtlety and destroys very heavily any kind of ambiguity regarding interpretation, with a cheap remembering flashback in the end, he explains the whole movie which was pretty clear after you think of it for a while. He makes all the work that should be done by the viewer, destroys his active work of interpreting the movie and does it in a way that lacks of elegance. In short, he builds a movie around a cliché that he doesn't even transform, and destroys what is interesting about it, the interpretation on the viewer side and the ambiguity. If the movie worths to be seen, it is because it has some beautiful shots, not to many, but it creates some great moving images. To conclude, it is really a mediocre movie with a quite bad story but technically very well done. "Swimming pool" is just technique without poetry.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
a movie worthy of a boycott
The first Matrix is a good movie, with great choreographies, beautiful action sequences which, I must add, already existed in Hog Kong cinema, an almost flawless photography, a quite good idea destroyed by one of the more stupid scenarios ever. But it is a quite good movie, a pleasure to see. Thus, I expected something of the sequel, I thought that, at least, it would be beautifully shot, that the action sequences would be as great as in the first one. So I tried to get in three times and the cinema was always full. Of course, this fact increased my expectations and I even hoped to see a really good movie. At last, I managed to see it yesterday night, and when the lights were on again, I was furious. What is wrong with you people? How can you like this million dollars trash? First, the choreographies are really not very special and the way they are shot is worse than lousy. It is always the same thing, a kick, or a long jump, the camera freezes for two or three seconds, turns 30 degrees and the action continues. This scheme is repeated every time. Besides the special effects use too much the computer and the characters are often replaced by computer images lacking of realism where men look more like Play station figures than to real flesh and blood human beings. In an other side, the film lacks completely of rhythm, it is boring, the action sequences are too long and there is never a climax of the plot, you never fell the great moment of the picture, maybe because there is no end. As the first one, The Matrix Reloaded has dialogues really, but I mean, really ridiculous, false, cheaply melodramatic but without poetry, big sentences trying to sound philosophical without even being intelligent, sometimes even without meaning anything. And this great pieces of intelligence come in completely unjustified moments. If Morpheus could be more stupid, we would not be able to speak. They try to make feel that this movie has a philosophic content with a debate between Sartre's determinism and free will, a debate so shallow and stupid that it would be better to erase it. The film, thanks to this story and to these awful dialogues, becomes a sort of parody of the first one. The plot is too complicated and seems to take time from the characters who are not explored, often just presented. With characters, the Matrix Reloaded seems to treat them like trilogies, like Star Wars, but the problem is that the first Matrix was not thought as the first chapter, not like this second episode. And could someone explain me what is this thing with the Bible? Why is Neo dressed like a monk and why does Morpheus preach to Zion (the Bible again) from a mountain, like Moises from the Mount Sinai? This is an analogy typical in epic trilogies, but completely useless and senseless, put there to make us think that this movie is not as shallow as it seems. Is this a profound metaphor, where Neo is Jesus, the Architect is The Father, Trinity Marie Magdalene and Morpheus who knows who? Ridiculous. Even using an allegoric interpretation in this movie, dramatically, there is too many loose ends, and these resemblances with the Bible are as stupid and shallow as the rest of this lousy picture. Don't tell me everything is going to get clear in the third one, because every movie has to have a story and be worthy to see alone, even if it is part of a bigger story. To conclude, let's just say that this is one of the biggest cinema scams ever, an awful picture with lousy (comparing them to the first Matrix, of course) and long action scenes, obvious computer special effects, bad story and dramatic content without even a Hollywood structure, really cheap philosophy, and dialogues overwhelmingly bad, shallow and stupid. I should not be wasting my time writing about this movie but I am going to all the bad publicity I will be able to do, and I will never see the third part.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
a classic wannabe, an intellectual flop
I went to see this movie after hearing all the noise it did, after hearing some of my friends say it was the best picture ever... and I was truly disapointed.
First of all, its photography. Of course, it is great in technical point of view, the shot of the eye dilating is cool, all the visual effects are cool, and technically astonishing. But, it is just that, it is just cool. They do not mean anything, they are put there just to decorate the story, they are useless. And there is too many of them. I went to see a movie, not a parade of technical skills. A movie, not a video clip. What could have been an interesting aspect of the movie becomes boring and excessive.
It is the same thing with the story, which I find extremely moralistic. Of course, drugs are bad, of course they can kill you, I don't need to pay ten dollars and suffer during two hours to understand it. My parents told me that many times before. Besides, the way Aronofsky uses to affect his audience is easy, sadly easy. He wants to shock you, and in the hardest way. And he goes for the easy way. It is easy to make you cry and to make you hate a character showing him kick a dog to death. In the same way, he shows you a rotting arm, gore sex and all the disgraces that can happen to a poor junkie or to his mother addicted to pills and TV. He never tries to say things in a subtle way, he things people who see his movie are idiots who can not understand anything unless he shows it, completely. He made a movie for idiots, I must repeat it.
He does too much and is redundant in his message and in the way he tells it. I could elaborate, give more arguments and examples, but this movie really do not deserve more of my time. I have wasted enough seeing it. If "Requiem for a Dream" is worth something, it is just because of the images effects, because its subject, drugs, is the same a teenager would choose and what he says about it is not much more mature. Drugs are not so interesting and this movie does not tell me anything I did not know before about them. And what irritates me the most is to see that there still are people who have the courage to say this is a classic! Well, I just hope that, with the years, it will be forgotten...
Easy Rider (1969)
Why did they have to die...
Why do Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper get killed? It is obvious they had to die, what would they have done with all that money in Florida? The whole movie's idea would loose its strength if these two wanderers ended living a normal kind of life amongst wealthy people. They would have been corrupted. It would have been like seeing Dean Moriarty sane, sober, with a pretty family and working in an office, living in a tiny house in suburbia. Awful.
The easy answer is that they were going against society's laws and values, this biggest and more powerful monster had to eliminate them. But, no, that is not the answer. That simplistic answer limits the movie to a polarized vision of the world where liberty fights against repression, good against evil. What could be more typical?
No. This movie goes beyond this eternal dialectic. No. What happens is that these two wanderers do not embody only liberty, they are not just rebels, they are not only the good guys. In fact, they won their money from drug dealing, what is somewhat reprehensible, morally speaking. But that is just another reason for their death.
What happened is that they "screwed up", as Fonda said during their last night. They did not understand the hippies, the people they looked like, physically, at least, and they felt relieved when they left this community of peace and love. They didn't even share with the hippies the acid as the guy who offered it to them made it understand, in a subtle way.
But their main sin was to pervert Nicholson, to have initiated him into the world of drugs and of the road in order for him to only find death in the kicks of the repressive men of the South.
They went to Mardi Gras to get in a whore house. After a while, they got out and the entered the graveyard where the ate the acid which made them cry as the prostitute yelled "I'm dying, I'm dying". Maybe another death they caused, symbolically.
They where just two guys, absolutely unable to adapt themselves into anything, who left behind them nothing but death. It seems as they did not mean to, but that is even worse. That is why society killed them. Well, yes, there may be a little of the liberty repression thing but I prefer my way to interpret it.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
the cinema achieves its final goal
Hegel once said, of course I'm simplifying, that the final goal of art was to be able to express itself using only the means that define it. Therefore, painting had to express itself with colors and shapes, dancing with the movement of the body, music with sounds, etc. Nevertheless, painting was in Hegel's time far away from its final goal because what it did was just to tell a story in a paintings, it was just a variation of literature. Nowadays, it is the same thing with cinema which in Hegel's point of view, has to express itself with movement (because cinema is the art of the moving image, of course), and it is far, far, far away. But from time to time, it comes close from this final pourpose, and it is what happens in this superbe movie in the moments where the story stops and we just see images of a stunning beauty and poetry, particularly when we see the lunar base from the outside or when the astronaut is travelling through time and space and the images become really a symphony of movement and colours that speak for itself without coming near to telling you a story. What I am trying to say in my lousy English is that 2001 reaches a point never achieved before nor afterwards, to my knowledge. It becomes cinema in his more complete, pure and absolute way. Not a variation of literature, but the art of the moving image. Kubrick makes cinema come near to what it is supposed to be in its more evolved way, he becomes a sort of Kandinsky or Mondrian of the filmaking.