Change Your Image
nwreid-82383
Reviews
Closer (2004)
Terrible
I found this unwatchable and almost switched off halfway. The problem is that it is based on a dreadful play. Patrick Marber seems to have a very limited understanding of real human behaviour and the play feels like the rantings of a highly-sexed adolescent who has just discovered some new sexual practices and learned a few new naughty words. The main protagonists come across as deeply unpleasant (especially the men) and very shallow. There is no-one I felt any sympathy with. The performances are excellent, particularly Natalie Portman, who portrays quite convincingly someone with borderline personality disorder, though I felt Clive Owen rather overdid the "caveman" side of his character (but he does the macho posturing and shouting very well). But the film seems to me to be let down by the screenplay which is banal, cliched and at the end of the day wholly unbelievable.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
Grim
I think the so-called "haters" have this spot on so far. The visuals are very well done, but the plot is a mess, the acting merely adequate, the dialogue banal, the characters just stereotypes and the music average. The plot seemingly lurches from one set piece to another with no connecting threads. Maybe it will all come together in the end, but this far, I am not holding out much hope. It is far removed from the nuanced, beautiful world Tolkien created. Peter Jackson understood what was needed but sadly the writers and the directors do not. The Wheel of Time was a masterpiece compared to this.
Kaos (1984)
An extraordinary film
This is an extraordinary film which needs at least 2 viewings to make you really appreciate its subtleties. Although headlined as four Pirandello stories with an epilogue, the prologue about the crow and the bell is also taken from a Pirandello tale. Each story has its own emotional intensity and although each is a separate, self contained entity, they are all linked by various visual devices a bit like leitmotifs in an opera. Look out for the images of drinking milk from a bowl, images of a woman dancing, images of a horse moving across a landscape or townscape, images of children rolling down a dusty slope, images of cooling oneself with water. They all come together powerfully in the epilogue, in which the penultimate scene set on the pumice island is without doubt one of the most visually beautiful in all cinema.
Other linking factors include the use of the same actors in the different stories and the music. The soundtrack is a masterpiece in its own right.
Some will find the length of the film offputting and I can see why it has been suggested that you make a break between the stories. But to watch the whole in one sitting allows you to appreciate the linking leitmotifs and gives accumulated power to the ending.
I just love this film.