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rampantpolanski
Reviews
I Am Here (2014)
a dark, tense and creepy place to go but I'm glad I did
This is one seriously messed up movie: If you like films like 'Repulsion', 'La Pianiste' or even 'Black Swan' (which I didn't think all that much of) or just beautiful unhinged women going further off the rails generally, I recommend you give it a look.
It's a European production from Danish director Morgenthaler, and feels miles away from anything made by Hollywood, yet it stars the bewilderingly youthful-looking Kim Basinger, who here is a revelation at her very best, with flawless support from Jordan Prentice and the always reliable Peter Stormare.
'I Am Here' is a dark, still, tense and creepy place to go, but I'm glad I did.
Before I Go to Sleep (2014)
Doesn't Convince, Doesn't Make Sense, and Doesn't Work
Unlike Christopher Nolan's magnificent 'Memento', and even '50 First Dates' - both of which this film is clearly heavily indebted to - this particular take on the dramatic possibilities of head trauma and memory loss never convinces, never makes sense, and ultimately fails because it refuses to adhere to the rules the premise itself demands.
Kidman's character has character progressions that are way beyond the bounds of believability right from the start, and by the time we're halfway in, she might as well have nothing wrong with her at all, for all she is retaining from earlier in the film and the way she is behaving.
It's a nicely made film but basically one you've seen a hundred times before, in a hundred other 'woman in peril' potboilers, just with the memory gimmick thrown in for colour, and it's the gimmick itself that sinks it in the end.
Foxcatcher (2014)
Foxcatcher
I couldn't for the life of me see how anyone was going to turn a book about wrestling into a brooding thriller, and the trailer for it frankly looked about as gay as a c*ck in a frock and his socks on a rock in Bangkok.
But 'Foxcatcher' turns out to be a relentlessly dark, hypnotically tense, creepy film that's almost anti-Hollywood in all its silence and subtlety, with so many of the most powerful moments being communicated through pauses, glances, flickers of recognition and realization, with no dumbing down or over-explaining to the cattle-stalls. Amazing they got such big names in to make it, even if you can't recognize the most famous one in it at all.
Really, it's only a film 'about' wrestling in so far as Million Dollar Baby is a film 'about' boxing. And nowhere near as depressing, either, so that helps.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
The Best Thing About This Film Is That It's Over
The Hobbit thing has been quite a mystery to me - they all have a very high user rating on IMDb, just as the original Lord Of The Rings films, but if you go look at the first few pages of reviews of each of them here, you will see page after page of only negative reviews, whereas the LOTR films contain only glowing recommendations - almost a mirror image. Why is this? It seems to make no sense. Is the film studio mass-planting votes here? There seems to be no other sensible explanation, because all the Hobbit films are inexcusably awful - everything that was good about the Lord Of The Rings films is what is bad here: the writing, the fight scenes, the CGI, the bits added and cut... Everything that could go wrong with the workings of a film here goes wrong. You would have to go rewatch Sin City to see more obvious use of green-screen. The dwarfs are characterless and annoying. In fact EVERYONE here is characterless and annoying, even the characters you loved in the earlier films, even fair Galadriel. Even Gandalf! You don't and CAN'T care for any of them the whole 9 hours, because there simply IS nothing there to care for. None of their actions seem driven by anything that makes any sense, they are just invisibly dragged from one scene to the next.
On top of that, the new, higher frame-rate literally hurt my eyes - something I've never had happen in a cinema before. What is the use of pointless innovation if all it does is worsen the experience? Empty, meaningless and a terrible tarnishing of the memory of the original trilogy, the very best thing about this film is that it's over.
Tusk (2014)
Of Course, In Alabama The Tusks Are Looser
If Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers decided to remake Psycho, The Human Centipede, and all the Inspector Cleauseau films in one movie, it would probably end up looking, well, almost exactly like Kevin Smith's "Tusk".
It's a queasy, creepy, but ever-so funny shaggy dog story unlike pretty much anything else ever made, and a bona-fide midnight-movie cult classic even before it hit the cinemas.
I can't say it will be for everyone, or even hardly anyone, but it really is one of the most one-off moving pictures you'll ever get to see, and also happens to have the single most unrecognizable super-famous guest-star in it of all time.
Mr. Turner (2014)
Dull, wearisome, meaningless, and award-winning.
I've really had enough of biopics that could have been knocked together entirely from the subject's Wikipedia entry. I cannot for the life of me see why the film 'Turner' had to be made at all: it tells me nothing about the inner life or deeper lived experience of an artist I really wanted to know more about. It just meanders along to no purpose whatsoever for 2 and a half hours then, as another reviewer here put it, "flops over the finish line" exactly the way you knew it would.
About the only nice thing I can find to say about it is there is some pretty scenery here and there, but Spall is almost embarrassingly bad, and the whole god damned thing's so awfully dull. Dull, wearisome, meaningless, and award-winning.