| 500 Movies 365 Days | ‘Cause this is thriller, thriller night

Posted on August 1, 2010 by

No, Michael did not rise from the dead. Or did he? But our genre tonight is thriller. Plus, I know you all miss Michael. He's no Bill Compton (or Edward Cullen?). Courtesy of CBS records

Let me open with this: It’s pouring. It’s so beautiful that James Cameron named his production company after the spectacle of the black sky ripping open and letting out a scream: Lightstorm. That is one evocative name. People get trapped in this beauty, the sky dumping atmosphere and drama to their hair. Soon, they will all be under the same roof and . . . interesting things will happen.

That’s all I’m gonna tell you. This is one of the movies I wish I had written. It’s so beautifully crafted I can’t even begin to imagine what went on inside the head of the person who wrote it. But if you can guess what movie this is and comment on this post, you win reader of the month, which basically means nothing. It just means you’re just as geeky as I am.

Anyway, if you want to read my thoughts on this movie, you’ll have to wait until very late tonight or tomorrow morning. I’m off to see Salt or The Girl Who Played with Fire because it seems that what’s getting you guys to read my blog is if I compared an old movie with a recently released one. Also, if you’re worried that I won’t be able to watch 500 movies in 365 days in this pace, you’re probably right. But, I’ve never been more productive so this project isn’t a complete failure. And you’ll still get a lot of movie reviews from me.

Follow me on Twitter for updates! My Twitter account is OfeliaL, not Ofelia.

Go out (or stay in) and watch a movie,
Ofelia

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|500 Movies, 365 Days| Movie 4: Wonder Boys — An Odyssean homecoming of intelligent wanderers

Posted on July 29, 2010 by

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

When I came across Wonder Boys at a public library a few years ago, it was like it found me.

The cover didn’t look like a promising apocalyptic scene out of some dream world in the recesses of Christopher Nolan’s mind. In fact, it was packaged so humbly, you’d think the marketing team of Paramount Pictures, for some ironic reason, wanted their own movie to do badly.

The film’s premise sounds as unapologetically unmarketable as the cover, but there’s nothing more attractive to me than a movie that doesn’t care what Hollywood’s cult followers want.

Sometimes, there are movies that just resonate so well with your situation that it seems like it was made for you and you alone. This was one such movie.

Wonder Boys is a cathartic experience that won’t let you wallow in self-pity but, instead, encourages you to laugh at your shame. It reaches your fear, not through some artificially simulated emotions and some saccharine treatment to the subject of failure but through a nuanced script.

Enter Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas): Desperation incarnate. He penned a critically acclaimed novel, Arsonist’s Daughter, seven years ago and had been poised for that many years to churn out another. His colleagues, students and editor are anticipating for his big comeback. Grady, on the other hand, is anticipating his failure and has long braced himself for career suicide. For a chronically undecided person, Grady is uncharacteristically sure of his life story’s anticlimax.

His typewriter is his anthropomorphic therapist, receiving the brunt of his frustrations at the world and its dreams for him. In it, he writes a never-ending opus, a catalogue of beauty that, in its 2,000-plus pages, couldn’t, not unsurprisingly, gel together.

I get him. He skirts around the issue. He displays hesitations and indecisiveness like a tick. He plays the part of someone unperturbed by the underlying pity everyone feels for him as they facetiously praise his seven-year-old success, a success that’s clearly past its expiration date.

This movie tackles defeat in such a sprawling way, and this works in the film’s favour. Through Grady’s personal journey, we are taken through self-revelatory encounters with characters wandering through life themselves. As it happens, I was a wanderer in college when I found it.

The creative writing class Grady runs is a gem. It’s peopled with merciless critics who deal with their own insecurities about their talents by tearing their fellow students’ work to pieces. One of their favourite targets is James Leer (Toby Maguire), that weird kid who drowns his misery with even more poetic misery in the form of fiction. But James Leer is the most talented kid in Grady’s class, a fact that Grady doesn’t want to admit in the midst of his long-impending failure as a career novelist.

James is such an electrifying mystery. Eventually, Grady will find out that most of James’s life revealed to him that are as colorful as the stuff of fiction, is also as much a fabrication as the things he concocts as a writer.

Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), Grady’s mistress, is very much the opposite of self-assuredness that her romantic desperation is as final and musical as an Anne Sexton poem.

The atmosphere in this film is an emotionally sensitive one. The snowfall, reminiscent of Christmas, at the same time assaults our hero in a slush-splashing scene. In one rainy episode where Grady and Sara were forced to talk above a whisper to compete with the rain, Grady is wonderfully expressive. He looks cold, rained on but, for the first time, there’s a form of sunshine peeking in his weather-beaten eyes. The ironically incessant chatter of Word Fest’s erudite crowd also surrounds our hero, drowning him in exactly the kind of talk he wants to avoid; it’s a cacophony that turns into a symphony when Grady, with his newfound maturity, finally emerges from the bottom and swims against the current of chatter.

These themes, like Grady’s book, do not, at first, make a solid plot. In fact, the plot here is a shapeless one, and one directed by emotions. I find myself led seemingly aimlessly from one tragicomic scene to another in a car where the trunk “fits a big bag, a tuba, a dead dog and a garment bag almost perfectly.” That infamous trunk is more than just a punch line; it’s a microcosm of the film itself — the chaos of disparate elements and characters amusingly coming together and fitting in “almost perfectly” in the bigger picture.

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|500 Movies, 365 Days| Movie 3: Garden State — planting idiosyncrasies

Posted on July 27, 2010 by

You won’t find a garden-variety cast of characters in Garden State. Peopled with oddballs in their 20s, this film satisfies my appetite for character-driven belated coming-of-age stories. It doesn’t shine as a whole, but many moments call attention to themselves in a good way. The gem in Garden State are the images that are deliberately poetic, bemusing and amusing. It is a comedy that relies on eccentricities that stick out like a sore thumb or, in our protagonist’s case, blend in with the bathroom wallpaper.

As a recent creative writing undergraduate, I often penned stories where everybody was different, maladjusted and fucked up. I can relate to writer-director-actor Zach Braff whose auteur ambitions culminated in a well-orchestrated comedy, not in the form of ha-ha jokes, but in the humour we find in one-of-a-kind, off-the-wall moments and situations.

Garden State starts off with an imagistic portrait of a life benumbed, echoed in the opening nightmare of a plane going down, while Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff), the film’s protagonist, looks shell-shocked and in stark contrast to the panic around him. What follows is the poetry of Largeman’s loneliness: Him lying in a bare, blindingly white room while the answering machine informs him that his mother just died. His bathroom cabinet is an improvised pharmacy reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. He sets off motion-sensor bathroom faucets, finds a gas nozzle hanging from his car’s tank and wears eye makeup to look the part in the trendy Vietnamese restaurant he works for.

While I’ll admit that these are a series of images that are too ordered and strained, and the eccentricities are unrealistically crowded in one average person’s life, I still appreciated the poetry in these crafted details. It seems just fitting for an overmedicated person’s life to be dramatized and distilled down into its interesting parts. Although these quirky elements come off as contrite, like the geometric garden in Versailles, they still manage to be strangely beguiling. This choice is both artistic and utilitarian – using the observational comedy in a lifeless and ordered environment to underline the irony of the character’s disordered, troubled mind.

But what I find most beguiling of all is the life Largeman left behind in his home town in New Jersey where everything seems stagnant. Even if one succeeds in this town, like Largeman’s old friend who invents something that sounds like a product you’d see in an infomercial – a silent Velcro, one still grows roots in the place.

The young silent-Velcro millionaire, with his newfound financial stability, proceeds to live in an unfurnished mansion, host stoner parties, shoot flaming arrows into the air for sport and nothing more.

A couple of Largeman’s friends from high school now work as grave diggers and, unofficially and more profitably, as grave robbers. This fact has given this movie great one-liners: “I don’t know [how she killed herself], I didn’t bury her,” and “We’re probably going over [at the mansion] as soon as we bury your mom.”

An unidentified knight wakes up Largeman to the sound of his creaking armor. This knight turns out to be his friend’s mom’s younger boyfriend who works at Medieval Times and knows a bit of Klingon to boot.

The scenes where Largeman reconnects with his old buddies are the most entertaining of all because the characters here don’t even try for comedy. Their characters are rife with humour inspite of their uninspired life choices. However, Braff doesn’t portray them as one-dimensional idiots. They are amazing to watch in their intelligent, if underachieving, glory and, thanks to Peter Saarsgard, Armando Riesco and Jim Parsons, their characters are bestowed with a heart that is tucked underneath their flaws. The result is a thoroughly watchable and likable characters who have layers to them.

As for the romantic slant of the movie, it’s more uneven. Largeman and Sam’s (Natalie Portman) meeting is definitely the textbook definition of a “cute meet” but it has a tendency to be annoying and predictable as it progresses.

This movie’s sustained quirkiness eventually succumbs, in its last minutes, to melodrama, conventionality and, worse, an epiphany of the worst kind – the kind that is incongruous to the buildup. This epiphany, the overstated abyss metaphor, Largeman’s oh-so-dramatic looking up into the raining sky with hope and the dialogue that should never have passed his lips at the end – all this overflowing of hope drains all my hope that the love Braff and I had going can be redeemed after he turns his amusing, quirky characters into one of those dreaded, familiar cardboards.

Posted in auteur, comedy, Film, Garden State, Natalie Portman, Uncategorized, Zach Braff | Leave a comment

Show Charlie Kaufman some love!

Posted on July 25, 2010 by

As soon as I stumbled out of the Carlton Cinema in 2004, fresh from seeing Jim Carrey do a drama, I immediately suffered Kaufman withdrawal. The internet became my friend:  www.beingcharliekaufman.com. I thought this website was a little kooky and ambitious. I mean, Kaufman isn’t really the most prolific of writers, so how can you possibly worship him in the form of a regular update? But lo and behold, it’s still alive. This thing even has earlier drafts of Kaufman’s scripts!

People who haven’t discovered this little portal into Kaufman’s cerebrum just yet, you are very welcome.

Oh, and Mick, the website’s founder, is a gracious man:
Contrasting Eternal Sunshine with Inception
Adaptation — Howard Roark, but funnier

Next up on my own kooky project: Matchstick Men and Wonder Boys. I intended on working alphabetically through The Best DVDs book, but, for convenience, I’m first watching the DVDs on the list that I already own.

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| 500 Movie, 365 Days / Now Playing | Movie 2: Shedding some Eternal Sunshine on concept-driven Inception

Posted on July 23, 2010 by

Christopher Nolan’s Inception begins mysteriously at a shore, as does Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both tackle memories at their core, construct for the audience the subconscious mind’s dream state and erode it through some compelling cinematography. The comparison stops there.

Watching these two films, you’ll learn that simplicity is the vehicle to the only complexity that matters: the humanity in films – not the idea, however novel and cerebral it is, but the humanity itself.

Nolan’s idea in Inception would be no stranger to followers of Freud who stated that a dream is a form of psychosis. When we dream, we descend into temporary insanity as we believe and interact with a world that exists only in our minds. He then uses this concept in a storyline where characters use people’s dream to extract information or, more intriguingly, manipulate their subconscious by planting ideas in a dreaming mind.

If Nolan’s concept is to extract or manipulate information in people’s head, Kaufman’s is to selectively erase painful memories. Both ideas are fertile with potential, but if you think the hard part is over, you would have a movie like Inception.

If a movie revolves around a concept, you have a story that talks about it. Dialogue is a great and powerful tool, but it is most effective if employed to get to know characters, not the plot.

Inception, in its use of dialogue, develops an audio book complex that uses words, not images, as exposition. The shot of the street rising and the earth inverting itself into a box is reminiscent of a pop-up book with the explanatory words washing over you. Suddenly, the film becomes self-aware of its cleverness and high budget the way the artificially constructed extras in an inception dream become aware of their artificiality and gaze suspiciously at the dreamer. But no matter how dramatically inanimate objects rise and bend in this film, it still falls emotionally flat.

Simplicity is thoroughly effective in complexity-building, be it in the stratification of dreams Nolan induces in his inception technique or in the layers his cast of character should’ve had so that their pretty but hollow gravity-defying dream sequences don’t invoke an unintended metaphor for paper-thin characters floating away.

Kaufman’s characters fight, not in million-dollar action sequences, but inside intimate homes. The only place more intimate and alive than the reality of Clementine and Joel’s lives is when they go back deep in Joel’s repressed memories, through some low-tech brain damage procedure that takes place in a small clinic and in the depressive patient’s own dingy home.

Nolan’s, on the other hand, is a construct that detaches itself from poignant and well-developed emotions the way its inception scenes have the Earth detach from its core. These scenes invoke awe but they seem to serve no purpose other than to showcase the capabilities of a “dream architect” whose mind maze creation is actually more decorative than plot-driven.

With Eternal Sunshine, the effects are what they’re supposed to be – the means to achieve the drama, the medium that would take us through the painful memories of a failed relationship that would’ve otherwise been too cliché. The protagonist, Joel Barish, who changes his mind too late about erasing his ex-girlfriend Clementine from his memories, runs around in his own head of disintegrating stored moments to hide Clementine in his poignant childhood reminiscence. Here, technology facilitates our desire to self-medicate our bruised psyche and wipe the slate clean of our emotional baggage. Here, philosophy is not just a stagnant idea used as a plot point, but is allowed to play out organically. Here, technology and philosophy meet to show us our humanity and how science is futile against it.

This is not to say that Inception lacks the heart that Eternal Sunshine has; in fact, it is actually easy to spot, and you wont’ find it in the deceptive beating musical score moments. It lies in the desperation of the dead wife, Mal, whose apparition keeps appearing in her husband’s inception operations. Not only that, Dom Cobb, Mal’s widower, is also haunted by visions of his children whose faces we never see.  Suspected to have murdered Mal, Cobb fled the country and abandoned his children to their grandparents. Cobb and Mal, before Mal’s death, had been experimenting in their dreams, and here is where the cue music should swell. Theirs is a backstory that is emotionally bigger in scope and a much more engaging puzzle than the sanitized story at the forefront.

Sometimes, there are  puzzles that just make you want to give up, and Inception‘s elaborate dream architecture and corporate interest plot is one such puzzle we are inclined to put down.

Posted in Christopher Nolan, Ellen Page, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inception, Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Leonardo Di Caprio, Michel Gondry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 32 Comments

Published articles update

Posted on July 22, 2010 by

Click here for some of the articles I’ve written for the Excalibur — the place that nurtured me as a journalist, more so than my professional writing undergraduate studies.

I’ve written about Facebook, BMX, Toronto’s annual Vegetarian Food Fair, relationships, the diamond culture and many others. Keep checking back as I’m currently updating this list.

Posted in BMX, diamonds, Facebook, relationships, romance, vegetarian | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

| 500 Movies, 365 Days | Adaptation — It’s Howard Roark, but funnier

Posted on July 21, 2010 by

Charlie Kaufman's artistic life is the stuff of metafiction

Director: Spike Jonze Writer: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Cara Seymour, Tilda Swinton

Do I have an original thought in my head? My might-as-well-be-bald head? It’s been a Charlie Kaufman-esque kind of mornings for me ever since this Rapunzel pulled a G.I. Jane in a recent trip to the Philippines, where one has to peel off clothing from from one’s skin.  (Speaking of Rapunzel: Tangled)

How do I even begin to praise Charlie Kaufman’s mind and balls for bringing his writing process – warts and all – to the big screen in 2002? Or should I force a contrarian out of me, vilify critically acclaimed films Armond White-style. I should. I should craft a car-crash-spectacle kind of review to send traffic congestion to my blog and attract torch- and pitchfork-bearing readers who, if they’re creative, should kidnap me, tie me down to a chair and torture me with bad-movie marathons ().

To do something different with this review . . . Would a meta-review be too gimmicky? I don’t want to be gushy, or pretentious, or be the reason why a teary-eyed screenwriter and a life coach are in the same room. Maybe a coffee and a muffin top would clear my head. Maybe a Panera Bread banana-nut “muffie,” which is what happens when you play God and crossbreed a muffin and a cookie, or watch too much Seinfeld.

But mutation, in the words of John Laroche (Chris Cooper), who was supposed to be the prime mover of Kaufman’s film, “is great. It’s the way evolution moves ahead.”

Charlie Kaufman‘s film adaptation is a strata of adaptations. Laroche curiously adapts to the fleeting life of his passions with ease and with such discipline. New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, who devours Laroche’s story as fodder for an article and, subsequently, a book, is in the cusp of change herself. There is something about Orlean waiting to happen. Meryl Streep saturates her character with such poetic desires that adaptation indeed seems like a very good thing.

Then we have Kaufman who exhibits a very Roarkian artistic principle and inadvertently steals the spotlight from his source material. Will he adapt and succumb to a more commercial adaptation of Orlean’s book or will he challenge the nature of moviegoers and defy the formulaic way that Hollywood attracts audiences?

So, I need to establish Charlie Kaufman’s strengths . . .

Kaufman’s interior angst is so naked it’s sexy, is so stripped to its soul it’s Mel Gibsonesque, is such a Titanic-slipping-perpendicular-in-the-Atlantic kind of wreck that it’s magnetic.

Kaufman, the thought trailblazer behind the inventive and uninhibited Being John Malkovich, and who pleads press shyness continues to be ironic in this metafictional film. He takes his neuroticism and perceived incompetence that he keeps from the media, and projects it unabashedly onto the silver screen.

Having a reputation for originality to uphold, he struggles to produce an unembellished but entertaining film based on Orlean’s book about Laroche, The Orchid Thief.

Did you see this one coming? A movie about flowers starred by A-list actors like Nicolas Cage, and Meryl Streep. Not in this world.

He employs an identical twin alter ego, Donald, who is his antithesis creatively: an easy-go-lucky guy who pens a derivative thriller script – the kind that fulfills audience expectations and thrives in Hollywood. Interspersed throughout the story of Kaufman’s artistic paralysis is one of Orleans’s creative prolificacy and insistent inspiration rushing and overflowing like a river during a storm.

If Charlie and Donald are identical twins who are complete opposites, Laroche is two personalities married in one body. A personality like Laroche’s is God’s gift to writers like Orleans. He is a “crazy white man” who can also be introspective and philosophical, making a New Yorker writer like Orleans, who has, by profession, no doubt come across a lot of personalities, pause with wonder.

The artistically sacred screenplay, the one to be as pure as a pristine ghost orchid, eventually deflowers itself with Hollywood conventions. Adaptation essentially condemns the Hollywood template but you don’t see a solution being offered at the end. At the same time, it accomplishes its goal of being original, while employing the very template it condemns. It lacks a real ending, yet there is a redeeming quality about this absence that makes the audience “feel” the ending, if not see it.

Watching this thing end, I find my butt inching itself forward until I’m just hanging by my  tailbone, in complete shock at what I’m seeing: A mystery, a thriller about . . . the writing process. Will he finish the screenplay? Will he make his deadline? Will he sell out?

The fact that Kaufman has managed to turn un-cinematic material about flowers into a portal into his own brain and charge us more than ten bucks for it (not unlike his characters in Being John Malkovich paying to temporarily possess the titular character’s body and experiences) this is a writing nerd’s wet dream you’d want to revisit again and again.

Posted in auteur, Charlie Kaufman, comedy, Film, indie films, Meryl Streep, metafiction, Nicholas Cage, Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, Uncategorized | Leave a comment