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JRoberts
Reviews
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Ok, I get it--but it's still awful
I don't hate many movies, but this one comes close.
Only Gene Hackman rescues this from rating a 1. In short, you might like it if you haven't seen many good movies, or if you're not expecting something very interesting.
Simply put, a good cast is truly wasted in this dreadful and boring film, which is full of itself, full of sledgehammer social commentary, and full of all-too-cliched sentimental nastiness which passes for intellect and wit.
And yeah--I do "get it." "It"--the contrived quirkiness, supposedly humorous morbidity and lightweight darkness inherent in the dramatic situation, the irony poured on as delicately and thickly as corn syrup over premixed pancakes--"it" you can't miss if you stay awake during the movie and have been alive past 20!
Yikes! What a simply terrible follow-up to the precocious Rushmore (though can't we all agree now, after Lost in Translation, that even Rushmore owes more to Bill Murray's performance than to Wes Anderson's intermittent genius?).
With the exception of Hackman's scenes misbehaving with his grandchildren--which are absolutely great and all too brief--the whole thing is about as interesting as watching lint. Make that "pretentious lint" :)
In truth, Anderson may be a great director (he certainly hasn't created anything that would put him into my handful of choices yet) and Owen Wilson may be a great actor (ditto handful of great actors), despite his recent career trajectory. But neither of them are accomplished enough writers to pull this comedy of dysfunction off, and it shows all too obviously here.
So is it fair to blame Wilson and Anderson for not being, say, Charlie Kaufman here? Yeah, I think so--they just can't write their way out of this mess--they write into it instead, if you get my drift, without really exploring anything new or interesting.
So while all of the surface marks of literacy are shown again and again in the film(and played up all-too-ostentatiously), they all remain on the surface.
And even a surface comedy or satire would be OK if the film was all farce or signaled its own problems. In the end, though, it asks us to believe that its own meanness is somehow insightful--not parody at all. And that's the final slap across the face to an audience--look how stupid we all are, taking these ciphers seriously! Wink, wink... In fact, nothing resonates here except how embarrassing this will all look in 10 years :)
Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
A brilliant film
Bringing out the Dead, unfortunately, has fewer fans than it deserves. Why? Because this isn't simply a "New York" movie, or a movie about a paramedic, or about euthenasia, despite the ostensible setting and plot points.
Instead, Scorsese has created a cinematic myth about how haunted modern existence can be, and what it takes to be "saved" and find grace in a seemingly godless world. His vision of New York is all literate existential comedy, not a window into the rotten Big Apple. Mere satiric commentary on the tragedy of life in New York is for journeyman directors; Scorsese is doing something else entirely here.
In other words, this is that really rare beast--a literate film that is, first and foremost, still a great movie. In the plot and its implications, there's more here of Flannery O Conner or Virginia Woolf than there is here of, say, Tom Wolf. More pariticularly, Bringing out the Dead does with masterful filmmaking what Joyce's The Dead did in prose. This film is a truly eye-opening investigation into how the living exist in the shadow of the dead and dying.
The film accomplishes this incredibly difficult task on many levels--the cinematography alone should give you a clue that this is definitely not Taxi Driver or Goodfellas--there's something more sublime here (the beauty that American Beauty explains wonderfully is shown everywhere in this film, but Bringing out the Dead is less mundane, simple and "character" oriented). Every shot is right, and the numerous computer effects here--on display almost for their own sake in The Matrix--are here poetically put together by a master director.
So, just for it's approach to a subject that few movies or directors would even attempt, this film will be a classic. Oddly enough, one of the few movies it can be compared with is Hitchcock's Vertigo, which confronts the same issues in a different way. Scotty's (Jimmy Stewart) desire to "raise" the dead is as strong as Frank's, and audiences didn't much like Vertigo when it was released either.
The acting, the music, the incredible photography--they're all great, if you realize you are watching a literate, funny, well-plotted (as opposed to simply plotted) meditation on the ghosts that increasingly inhabit our technocratic dwellings.
Too good for a grade: see it on the biggest, best screen you can while you can. BTW--it's better the second time.