Leftover Movie Reviews
Over the last couple of months I've started writing down thoughts about some of the movies I'd seen, but never finished them. I never will, so here they are unedited, incomplete, and completely incoherent.
The Incredibles
Every super hero story needs some homoerotic subtext and in The Incredibles this was sorely lacking. In most other respects, however, it was a wonderful movie.
The Day After Tomorrow
I saw The Day After Tomorrow last night with ben. Hmmm. Not the world's worst movie — but not very good either.
I kept on looking around my feet for my jacket throughout the whole thing — it made me irrationally cold.
I have to say though, as a plot device, having Jake Gyllenhaal being chased down a hallway by the "the cold" just seconds after he had been chased around a boat by rabid wolves probably wasn't the best idea.
Whaddaya wanna bet at least one draft of the movie had him being chased by wolves and "the cold" down a hallway — but the cold caught up to the wolves and they get frozen mid-step.
I'm just saying, is all, that in a hokey movie it doesn't work to have a the hero escape in a real chase scene, rabid wolves and all, directly followed by a scene were the hero is nearly caught by the weather. It just makes the weather look even more stupid, by comparison.
The Motorcycle Diaries
The other day I saw The Motorcycle Diaries with Collin, Ben, and Morgan.
I didn't like the movie very much, although I can't quite place my finger on the reason why.
A couple of stylistic things bothered me. In the beginning the shooting style was very choppy. The camera stayed close up to the characters' faces, and it intercut so much that I felt like I didn't get a good look at the characters for quite some time. And then there was the electric guitar in the soundtrack, which felt quite out of place.
As to the content, well, I've always like Gael Garcia Bernal (and who among us does not like Gael Garcia Bernal?), but I wonder if he was right for this role. He seems too pretty to pay Che.
--The entire thing, frankly, seem a little banal. One would expect (at least in the movie world) that it would be extraordinary experiences that drove Che to his radicalism, rather than a road trip. The movie seemed to want to tell us that the injustice Che sees on the trip inspired his , but the what we see is so tepid, so normal, that it is hard to imagine they would cause someone to volunteer their time on weekends let alone attempt to foment continent-wide revolution. On the other hand, maybe that is the point: that seemingly trivial experiences can drive people to extremes. Witness most of the 9/11 hijackers, Timothy McVeigh, the SLA, etc. These people were not driven to terrorism by because their families were killed, or because their homes were destroyed, or because they lived in grinding poverty. They were middle-class, well-educated, generally boring people.
Which is why this movie, I think, was ultimately so boring. It could have showcased the natural beauty of South America or its interesting people (boy, were the leper colony scenes wonderfully textured, though) but instead the filmmakers chose a lukewarm exploration of the injustice of poverty and social inequality interspersed with
Part of the problem, I think, is that the movie couldn't figure out whether it was history, hagiography, or highbrow entertainment. A true history would probably have been quite tedious, but might have been saved by rampant scenery-chewing, oversaturated color, and perhaps a little bit of nudity. Hagiography might also have been less than interesting (although it would have been fascinating to see a party-line view of the Comandante Che) and probably wouldn't gone over well with the mainstream critics. That leaves entertainment. It was a pretty long movie, but I didn't check my watch until very near the end — so it must have been doing something right. Still, though, I left unsatisfied. As road trip/buddy movie it worked pretty well. It is, however, more than a little ironic, I think, that by the end of a movie about the awakening of Che's social consciousness we've gotten a much better view of Che's friend and travel companion, Alberto Granado, than of the future revolutionary himself.