J. C. Chandor’s (Margin Call) possibly allegorical tale is a model of visual storytelling. It begins with a man (Robert Redford) literally and figuratively at sea reading a desperate-sounding message in a voice-over that become the last bit of dialogue for a long while. Then it flashes back, but barely a week, and in that scene he is also at sea, on a boat that has had its hull damaged and is leaking. One thing after another is the story. It is Life of Pi without the magical realism or idyllic beginning. (The two films do both employ the gifted underwater photographer, Peter Zuccarini.) The breakdown of the man is the story also, and Redford must and does carry the entire film. We know virtually nothing about the man except that he is resourceful and seemingly stoic. Save for the scenes shot from above and below the waterline, the movie is entirely from his point of view. We are too caught up in his battle for survival to be depressed. It’s essentially a simple story whose powerful, concise telling is a strong argument for the power of the medium of film.
IMDb link
viewed 10/17/13 8:00 pm at Perelman Theater at Kimmel Center [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/14/13
Showing posts with label silent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silent. Show all posts
Friday, October 25, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
Blancanieves (***1/4)
Did seeing The Artist make you wish for another black-and-white homage to silent film? Look no further than this Spanish effort. Where The Artist tweaks silent-film conventions, this one plays it just about straight. Though still playful, if not quite comedic, at times, it’s mostly an old-fashioned melodrama, beginning with twin tragedies, continuing with a wicked stepmother, and winding up with (mostly) good-natured dwarves. As the title‘s translation suggests, it’s infused with fairy-tale elements…and bullfighting.
The key character, the long-suffering Carmen, is played by the appealing Sofía Oria as a girl and by Macarena García as a young woman. (Maribel Verdú, of Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth, has a prominent role. This kind of slightly unreal story, set in the 1920s, is the perfect kind of story for a silent film. It’s didn’t grab me as immediately as The Artist (though in time), but it was almost as lovely to look at, with scenes set in a lush mansion, enormous arenas, and the open landscape. The score by Alfonso de Vilallonga is tremendously varied and truly carries the film along, and the ending, while not to every taste, is slightly mysterious, mostly surprising, and entirely fitting.
IMDb link
viewed at Ritz 5 7:35 pm 5/8/13 and reviewed 5/8/13
The key character, the long-suffering Carmen, is played by the appealing Sofía Oria as a girl and by Macarena García as a young woman. (Maribel Verdú, of Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth, has a prominent role. This kind of slightly unreal story, set in the 1920s, is the perfect kind of story for a silent film. It’s didn’t grab me as immediately as The Artist (though in time), but it was almost as lovely to look at, with scenes set in a lush mansion, enormous arenas, and the open landscape. The score by Alfonso de Vilallonga is tremendously varied and truly carries the film along, and the ending, while not to every taste, is slightly mysterious, mostly surprising, and entirely fitting.
IMDb link
viewed at Ritz 5 7:35 pm 5/8/13 and reviewed 5/8/13
Friday, December 23, 2011
The Artist (***3/4)
As a child, one favorite of mine was Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976), a nearly silent movie about a latter-day effort to make a silent movie. In its opening, this irresistible effort from Michel Hazanavicius — who’s French — goes Brooks one better in the movie-within-a-movie department by being a silent movie set at the gala Hollywood premiere of a silent movie whose star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, star of Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 spy spoofs), is both onscreen and backstage. Hazanavicius has great fun confusing what’s happening with what’s on screen. Valentin’s accidental encounter with a young female fan, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), sparks her Star Is Born-style ascent as the sound era dawns. That revolution, which doomed many a real career, creates irony and pathos as Valentin (whose name recalls silent star Rudolph Valentino) resists adaptation and Miller embraces the change, the irony being that we, the audience, can’t hear her voice.
Far from being ponderous, Hazanavicius’s film playfully relies on our collective storehouse of Hollywood tropes to both celebrate and satirize movie history. The lack of audible dialogue creates humor that only works in that context, where imagination supplies what is missing. As does music. Even people who rarely notice a film’s soundtrack might notice its heightened importance here, and Ludovic Bource’s score gorgeously sets the mood, though it’s more representative of the early sound era, especially when it cops Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo theme for the climax. While never abandoning the comic overtones, Hazanavicius reminds us of how, even in its earliest days, cinema had the power to move us in ways different from earlier media.
IMDB link
viewed 10/27/11 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/22/11
Far from being ponderous, Hazanavicius’s film playfully relies on our collective storehouse of Hollywood tropes to both celebrate and satirize movie history. The lack of audible dialogue creates humor that only works in that context, where imagination supplies what is missing. As does music. Even people who rarely notice a film’s soundtrack might notice its heightened importance here, and Ludovic Bource’s score gorgeously sets the mood, though it’s more representative of the early sound era, especially when it cops Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo theme for the climax. While never abandoning the comic overtones, Hazanavicius reminds us of how, even in its earliest days, cinema had the power to move us in ways different from earlier media.
IMDB link
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