Monday, October 4, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
New York Film Festival debrief
Hi Fall, How goes it? Wired from too many free espressos at the Illy stand at Lincoln Center, I am hastily reporting on the battery of films I've seen over the past week. Starting with...
THE SOCIAL NETWORK -- GAH! I saw this TWICE. Yes. Why? I'll give you my top five on why this film managed to live up to the extreme hype (outrage by Zuckerberg, critical praise across the board):
1- Cast - Each actor is perfectly suited to his/her role, is directed appropriately, and develops a compelling character who could lead his/her own film (most notably Jesse Eisenberg who makes Mark Zuckerberg a completely recognizable socially inept nerd who emerges as a tragic anti-hero/hero, and Justin Timberlake as Napster bad boy Sean Parker -- actually an Oscar performance...Arnie Hammer, Andrew Garfield...Rashida Jones...the Larry Summers look-alike...just great...and Erica Albright)
2- Script -- tight, expertly crafted, with complexity, truth (?), ethical dilemmas, timeliness, motifs and subthemes, motives, near perfect pacing...the ultimate issue is very meta -- the end of personal privacy leads to the filming of this tell-all expose
3- Music -- Trent Rezner of NIN creates a dense layer of sound which adds and elevates scenes, the tension, amplifies the speed of the proceedings
4- Direction -- characters are connecting/disconnecting in the best way possible, the editing, the computerized nature of the cinematography...it was perfect
5- My own bias -- the first frame of this film "Fall 2003" was my freshman year at college, revisiting that dorm, that life, those people, and those iterations of The Facebook mastheads made this film come alive to me in a really personal way. This is the first movie I've seen that legitimately tells my generational story verbatim. So many moments I recall, from the invention of the WALL, to the beginning of ads, etc.
Moving on to less than stellar flicks
The Tempest -- god, Julie Taymor. We are in a fight. This film shouldn't have been made. Really the Public should have wrangled Alfred Molina and Helen Mirren to perform this script next summer in the park and that would have been it. But JT being who she is these days (Spidey Broadway on the way) brought this into the world, based on her obsession with this story. There were aspects that reminded me of a trippy Eureka's Castle episode from the early 90s, and others that reminded me of the lamest parts of Across the Universe, an extended emo music video with lots of pastiche fabrics and worlds. Mostly I felt bad for Dijamon (why did he agree to be a part of this). Then I felt equally bad for Chris Cooper and David Straitharn. But then I felt bad for myself, because I had to sit through the entire thing and they were only in moments of this endless storm.
Aurora -- an absolute waste of 3 hours of my life. Painful. Romanian thriller my foot. The pacing was excruciating. Literally nothing happened for two hours and then the main character goes on a killing rampage, blaming the demise of his marriage. I really disliked him. Especially his interaction with his daughter. I wanted something terrible to happen to him. Instead, he surrenders himself to the inept police and that's where we are left. Really? Bleck. Also, the pretentious conversations I had with NYFF patrons after the film confirmed that no one got the director or author's intention here. We were bored and frustrated.
Freakonomics -- this is another film that probably shouldn't have gotten made. It's not a documentary. Yet, it sort of needs to be. But the media of film isn't offering any new insight into the issues tackled in the famed mass economics text. It's instead creating little School house rock segments that sometimes succeed, other times, bore to tears, and mostly don't cohere because of the varied voices/narration. I say it rarely, but you would be better off reading the book. More chance you won't have to be subjected to cheeky cartoons and subject stand-ins.
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