Cinematic Affective Disorder
Nov. 10th, 2007 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77As a rule, I kind of like depressing movies. But even I have my limits.
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marginalia has been my partner in crime through a week-and-a-half-long marathon of some of this fall's darkest (and, in at least a couple of instances, most promising) films.
First, she scored free tickets to an advanced showing of the the Coen Brothers' eagerly-anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. The movie seemed remarkably faithful to the book (at least, as I remember it), reflecting McCarthy's somber, unsentimental vision, with precious little of the Coens' characteristic irony. (A fact which seems all the more impressive after I learned that McCarthy had had nothing to do with the script, and hadn't even spoken to the Coens until he visited the set, well into filming.) The movie utilizes some gallows humor, has some fun with the folksy West Texas dialogue, but my impression was that this too followed the novel quite closely. The whole project struck me as more serious than anything the Coens have done before--akin to Blood Simple or Fargo, but without the glib tone of those earlier projects.
And Javier Bardem's Anton Chugurh is surely the scariest big-screen heavy since Hannibal Lecter--in fact moreso, in that he's driven not by a warped gentility, but by a self-conscious commitment to random cruelty.
Josh Brolin, who played hard-luck protagonist Llewelyn Moss, attended the premiere and afterward regaled the audience with tantalizing behind-the-scenes details: Cormac McCarthy, it turns out, is "a hell of a nice guy for somebody who writes about the end of the world." McCarthy apparently considers Miller's Crossing one of his favorite movies. Javier Bardem whined that the haircut that came with his Chugurh persona meant that he wouldn't get laid for months. The Coens apparently aren't really big on giving their actors feedback (read: ego-stroking).
Next, we went to see Michael Clayton, which I think could best be summed up as Serpico for highly-compensated corporate lawyers. (It also includes fantastic work by Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton.)
American Gangster's seventies New York setting was also really reminiscent of Sidney Lumet movies from that period, (perhaps somewhat incongruously) blended with elements recalling Scarface and The Godfather.
Anyway, speaking of Sidney Lumet, the old man himself provided our next feature, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a movie in which everyone makes the all wrong choices for all of the worst reasons, and just when you think things can't possibly get any more fucked up, they do.
I'd been OK with the previous three films, but the last one's uncompromising bleakness left me running for comfort cinema:
So I sought refuge in re-watching Trevor Knight's version of Twelfth Night. As I'd hoped, Ben Kingsley's Feste singing "The rain it raineth every day" and Helena Bonham Carter's Olivia mooning over Imogen Stubbs' Viola restored my spirits.
marginalia has been my partner in crime through a week-and-a-half-long marathon of some of this fall's darkest (and, in at least a couple of instances, most promising) films.First, she scored free tickets to an advanced showing of the the Coen Brothers' eagerly-anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. The movie seemed remarkably faithful to the book (at least, as I remember it), reflecting McCarthy's somber, unsentimental vision, with precious little of the Coens' characteristic irony. (A fact which seems all the more impressive after I learned that McCarthy had had nothing to do with the script, and hadn't even spoken to the Coens until he visited the set, well into filming.) The movie utilizes some gallows humor, has some fun with the folksy West Texas dialogue, but my impression was that this too followed the novel quite closely. The whole project struck me as more serious than anything the Coens have done before--akin to Blood Simple or Fargo, but without the glib tone of those earlier projects.
And Javier Bardem's Anton Chugurh is surely the scariest big-screen heavy since Hannibal Lecter--in fact moreso, in that he's driven not by a warped gentility, but by a self-conscious commitment to random cruelty.
Josh Brolin, who played hard-luck protagonist Llewelyn Moss, attended the premiere and afterward regaled the audience with tantalizing behind-the-scenes details: Cormac McCarthy, it turns out, is "a hell of a nice guy for somebody who writes about the end of the world." McCarthy apparently considers Miller's Crossing one of his favorite movies. Javier Bardem whined that the haircut that came with his Chugurh persona meant that he wouldn't get laid for months. The Coens apparently aren't really big on giving their actors feedback (read: ego-stroking).
Next, we went to see Michael Clayton, which I think could best be summed up as Serpico for highly-compensated corporate lawyers. (It also includes fantastic work by Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton.)
American Gangster's seventies New York setting was also really reminiscent of Sidney Lumet movies from that period, (perhaps somewhat incongruously) blended with elements recalling Scarface and The Godfather.
Anyway, speaking of Sidney Lumet, the old man himself provided our next feature, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a movie in which everyone makes the all wrong choices for all of the worst reasons, and just when you think things can't possibly get any more fucked up, they do.
I'd been OK with the previous three films, but the last one's uncompromising bleakness left me running for comfort cinema:
So I sought refuge in re-watching Trevor Knight's version of Twelfth Night. As I'd hoped, Ben Kingsley's Feste singing "The rain it raineth every day" and Helena Bonham Carter's Olivia mooning over Imogen Stubbs' Viola restored my spirits.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-11 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-12 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-13 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-13 05:06 pm (UTC)What brings this to mind?
CWT
Date: 2007-11-13 08:23 pm (UTC)Re: CWT
Date: 2007-11-13 09:39 pm (UTC)(TotG quotes other films all over the place, doesn't it? Everything from Chaplin to Fellini to Coppola to ... whoever directed CWT ...)