Norman Bates Would be Proud

American Psycho

Day 35

Film 27

Directed by: Mary Harron

Screenplay By: Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner

Starring: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon

American Psycho was a very hit and miss film for me. Harron tried to stuff the film with so many different ideas it loses a lot of its punch. It goes from a satiric look at the 80's power businessmen into a broad and unfocused critique of the 80's itself.

The film is best when it is analyzing Bateman (Bale) who is everything from a suave businessman to a monster who replaces his face every morning. Bale plays the character spectacularly, dancing on the line of millionaire playboy and homicidal maniac. The scenes where we get inside his head or watch him mutilate a business partner or prostitute are spectacular. They form a couple high points in the film that the rest of the scenes have a hard time reaching.

Harron tries to fill the time by mocking 80's film making. With a loud 80's pop soundtrack that is more annoying than amusing and a climactic fantasy that would fit better in Lethal Weapon it is hard to shake the feeling that these ploys would be better suited in the mid 90's and not at the beginning of the 00's and now just as the newest decade begins I wonder if this film is just a little too dated for its own good. I found this type of film making, be it lost in the 80's by design or by accident by Harron, really just annoyed me and fueled the ups and downs enough to leave a bitter taste in my mouth by the end.

American Psycho is a respectable film, with a few spectacular scenes that are worth watching even if they are caked in mediocrity.

The Fab Four's Fantastic Film

A Hard Day's Night

Day 33

Film 26

A Hard Day's Night is the first film made by The Beatles, and has been heralded as just a great movie. When I started the film I was a little quizzical if only because every other Beatles based movie has always been worse than its music and for the first 30 minutes of the film I felt just that. But as I got used to its very bare story, and cheeky fun I just started to love it. It was a perfect storm of fun, making it a very enjoyable 90 minutes of film.

A Hard Day's Night was not made to be challenging, its message is not one that changes your view of the world or leaves you questioning your very existence, and if I was to just look at A Hard Day's Night in this regard it would fall flat on its face. It would join the ranks of Pineapple Express in the 'damn good time' type of movie that you quickly forget. Interestingly, A Hard Day's Night is one of those movies that is so very important you cannot simply right it off.

For all of its lighthearted and forgettable fun A Hard Day's Night is a perfect example of the radical change that happened in the 60's. The fab four are constantly defying authority, be it their manager, the director or the police. They choose fun, they take risks, they flirt with women and they laugh at all the men who try to control them. It shows the beginning of a change in the world, for people generations beyond to enjoy.

That and some of the best music in film.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Day 26

Film 25

Before I get to work on Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance I first want to say this: Look! 25 films down! Sweet right? I am just 75 movies away from the goal. As much as I would like to say that it is a short way away the next 75 films seem to be quite daunting. Oh well, at this point there is only one thing to do really, and that is just keep on doing it.

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the first film of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy. A couple days ago I reviewed Oldboy (which is the second of the seemingly unrelated films) and I was absolutely blown away by it. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is no Oldboy, which is both sad and expected.

The beginning of the film is slow, and the main characters have a hard time getting you to care about them and the pace crawls. The main character Ryu (Ha-kyun) is a deaf mute who is a nice enough guy, working in a closing factory, and taking care of his dieing sister (Ji-eun.) Ryu bargains with some mafia types selling organs, but lacks the money to pay for the operation. This leads Ryu, after being provoked by his girlfriend Cha Yeong-mi (Doona) to kidnap his ex-boss Park Dong-jin's (Kang-ho) daughter.

Everything falls apart when the sister dies. Ryu is forced to bury his sister along side a river and Park's child accidentally drowns. The story degrades into a corpsefest as Park attempts to get revenge on Ryu and Cha while Ryu goes after the mobsters who made it impossible to save his sister.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a quiet film. There is no soundtrack, most of the film is acted quietly or signed out and the absence of sound makes the film drag. Chan-wook seems to be playing with sound, and even if it does not work it is interesting to look at how it changes the film.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance falls pretty far short of its sequel Oldboy. It is by no means a bad film, but the chances Chan-wook took with the film made it less than enjoyable to watch.

Chinatown's Teenage Lovechild

Brick

Day 26

Film 24

Brick is an exciting piece of cinema fusing together noir with a high school drama. It does not sound like it would work, and it does not 100% of the time but in the few times where the idea stumbles it catches itself by never letting the tension drop.

Brick begins with Brendan Frye (Gordon-Levitt) staring at his dead ex, Emily (Ravin,) at the bottom of a sewer drain. The movie flashes back to the days before her death and is propelled by this first scene as we try to piece together the mystery along side Brendan. What starts as a edgy teenage drama quickly turns into a noir film as Brendan smooth talks and fights his way through a cast of characters that are as much noir as high school.

The pace does not let up, we meet Emily right before she is killed. After that Brendan turns from a man searching for answers into a single minded beast ready to do anything to get the truth. This means walking into the basement of a drug lord, dodging murder accusations and fighting with the school administration while still asking questions. It leads up to a spectacular few scenes at the end.

The only hole I can find in Brick is the fact that it is a noir story set on a high school campus. There are a couple scenes where it just does not quite work. The interesting thing about these scenes is that when they do not work perfectly you are not jarred from the movie. These quirks become hilarious lines caught that break the tension of the frantic story. When the dialogue, which is almost Shakespearean in complexity, stumbles it shifts from barely able to follow to amazingly understandable. It is strange, but I think Johnson wanted it like that. It forms a give and take relationship between accessibility and perfection.

I loved Brick. It does a spectacular job dancing around with two orthogonal genres. It keeps you entertained in a way only noir can.

Being John Malkovich

Day 25

Film 23

Being John Malkovich is another one of those strange imperfect movies. It makes you think. It plays with the medium and the audience's expectations.

Being John Malkovich asks the question: 'What would happen if someone discovered the door to another person's mind?' It probes this at a very sophomoric level at first, letting us imagine what it would be like to be someone else while at the same time letting us get the feel for the ragtag group of leads.

The film is weakest in the beginning. Craig Schwartz (Cusack) is a loser artist who's more pitiful than love able. The setup feels a little long, as we are introduced to Craig's wife Lotte (Diaz) and the love interest Maxine Lund (Keener.) The time is stretched over half fulfilled gags and awkward scenes between Craig and Maxine that do not settle very well.

The discovery of the door into Malkovich's mind catapults the film from an awkward romantic comedy into a sobering view of humanity and identity. The contradictions laced into the film force you to think. The love affair between Lotte Schwartz and Maxine Lund becomes a twisted mess of ideas. Untangling this mess of homosexuality and transgender identity is as thrilling as it is daunting and makes for a compelling mind screw. Craig Schwartz degrades from a pitiful but like able guy into a sociopath who cannot get over a woman. His relationship with Lund feels like a stalker's sick fantasy, crossing the lines of rape through another man's body.

Being John Malkovich dares to do the unexpected. The questions it asks and the ways it asks them are new and exciting. Where it fails in the beginning it makes up for it at the end leaving a discomforting human aftertaste.

Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.

Oldboy

Day 24

Film 22

Before I get started I think I should say something about my particular viewing of Oldboy. I watched this film on netflix without the ability to get the undubbed version, so I will be avoiding some of the issues of pacing and acting for this little review.

Oldboy is my favorite kind of movie. It takes risks. It plays with the medium. It is far from a perfect film. Park Chan-wook' twists every thing that you take for granted with film and throws it out the window forming a narrative that is as twisted as it is remarkable.

Oldboy is a look at the revenge story. The protagonist, a likable businessman Oh Dae-su (Min-sik,) is imprisoned against his will by what we can only assume to be mobsters. Fifteen years pass. In this time Oh Dae-su is driven insane and emerges a changed man. Trained by fifteen years of television kung fu and driven by the death of his wife and wrongful imprisonment Oh Dae-su goes after the man responsible. As the story unfolds Chan-wook throws enough curve balls to keep you going and the conclusion leaves you amazed and appalled at the same time.

**From this point on there will be spoilers. You have been warned.**

What makes Oldboy so amazing is how Chan-wook plays with the revenge archetype. Oh Dae-su's imprisonment is an obvious parallel to the Count of Monte Cristo. It could almost be a complete retelling if Oh Dae-su's driving force was just revenge, instead there is a very Hamlet like drive in him that keeps him going until it leads to his tragic end. Oh Dae-su is given every chance to kill the man who has set out to ruin his life and fails to do so, leading up to the a final revelation that is too much like Oedipus Rex to just ignore.

Each of these pieces is taken and warped in Chan-wook's hand. Every familiar story is turned on its end and changed into something until now unseen. The Count of Monte Cristo suddenly is changed from the story of a man who lusts for revenge to the story of a man who cannot avoid another man's revenge. Hamlet gives up every opportunity to not kill Claudius and is forced to see the ruins his actions have caused, instead of conveniently dieing before it all comes into view. Oedipus chooses to forget everything that is told to him, and remain in happy ignorance till the end of his days. Each of these stories is warped just enough to give them a new angle and to leave the audience asking new questions about it.

Beyond these twists on classic stories Chan-wook plays with more subtle cliches. The most obvious of these is of the roll of Mi-do, who serves as Oh Dae-su's love interest and daughter. For the majority of the film Mi-do swoons over Oh Dae-su. It is almost pathetic as Oh Dae-su attempts to rape her, and leaves her again and again sometimes tied up and other times locked inside a cell. Mi-do would not leave this stranger, whom she did not know a week before, and it just does not fit until the final scenes. Everything is tied together with the use of hypnosis (which is a thin strand to hang the story on but it clings on just enough) and every scene where Mi-do was in it and I was asking 'why on earth is she still a character?' suddenly makes sense. Chan-wook shifts this story ruining, too flat character to what drives the final twist.

It is everything that makes you want to have faith in the medium, because for every Spiderman 3, which is the epitome of boring and poorly executed, there is a film like Oldboy that makes you take a new look at film.

My final verdict:

Oldboy changes how you watch film. It is not perfect but it makes you think. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to be challenged by a movie. To the rest of you: Just go back to re watching Avatar.

A Better Rabbit Hole

Coraline

Day 22

Film 21

Coraline was an imaginative romp through a world we have never seen. It is the type of movie that makes you have faith in animation again. The world has a very alien feel without going far enough away to disconnect from the audience. Coraline is amazing in this aspect, trumping Selick's other creations (most importantly Nightmare Before Christmas.) I could go on and on about how beautiful and imaginative the film is, but my ramblings would not equate.

The film starts Coraline, a little girl who is prone to fantasy and is just a little bit odd, just as her family moved into a reclusive house out in the wilderness. Her family does not seem to pay much attention to her, being journalists at the very end of a deadline and we are quick to dislike them. And when Coraline finds a new world through a small door beneath the wallpaper she is eager to escape. The world she finds is a perfect one, with marvelous and beautiful contraptions and loving parents. Every bit of it is as amazing as the real world is dull, but you cannot shake the feeling that something is just a little bit odd. Every character in the other world has buttons for eyes, and there are some sequences even before the final scenes that are just down right creepy.

Again, the visuals are more than enough to keep you watching the film and unlike its other visual driven counterparts (Avatar springs to mind) the story just as much sucks you in, and makes you wondering what all is going to happen.

My Final Verdict:

Coraline is a beautiful movie and should be seen for just that. Beyond that it has an engaging plot that is just as much fun as it is to watch. I would recommend it.