"Silver Linings Playbook" - Film Review

“I opened up to you. And you judged me” – Tiffany

Silver Lining Playbook is a film about many things. It’s about mental illness. It’s about family. It’s about identity. It’s about recovery. It’s about being broken in a broken world. And it’s exceptional about exploring all these things. 

Silver Linings Playbook rightfully received a lot of attention about its incredibly sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of mental illness, and this praise was completely well deserved. The film never falls into special of the week storytelling nor does it look down upon the characters, most of whom are coping with some sort of mental problem. It’s honest about the unresolved issues holding back Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) but it also wants us to understand where they’re coming from. A lot of credit has to be given writer-director David O. Russell’s script and direction which allow the story to slowly but surehandedly unfold. Russell places a great deal of faith in the audience; he doesn’t justify the outbursts from Pat or any of the characters right away. Instead, he lets us spend time with them letting us in on their worldview and over time understand and like them. These are screwed up people but they’re more importantly good people as well as relatable ones. 

Much of our sympathy draws upon the phenomenal performances of the film’s two leads. It’s hard to decide who gives the more compelling performance, but both Cooper and Lawrence make these characters so very beautifully lived-in and fleshed out. They inhabit these characters as if they’re portraying real people. Lawrence won an Oscar for her performance and now having seen the film, it’s hard to argue with the win. It’s hard to imagine many other young actresses embodying a character as Tiffany quite as well or handling so assuredly such tricky material. Lawrence is above all else vulnerable. Lawrence, even in big blockbusters such as X-Men: First Class and The Hunger Games, makes all the characters she plays human. The performance from Cooper though is revelatory. Known previously for roles in films such as The Wedding Crashers and The Hangover, initially it’s hard to imagine Cooper tackling the complicated role of Pat, a character suffering from bipolar disorder, but Cooper quickly dispels our suspicions completely holding his own. 

Pat leaves an eight month court-ordered stint at a mental institution after severely beating the man he found his wife cheating with. Pat is obsessed with getting back together with his wife but it’s clear from the start he’s in no shape to do this. He's off his meds. He has mood swings that constantly derail him and they start to take a toll on his mother (Jacki Weaver) and father (played by Robert De Niro refreshingly giving a crap for the first time in ages about a film and giving another great performance in a film filled with them). Pat has a plan; he’s going to get back in shape, read up on the books his wife, a teacher, has on her course syllabus, and somehow get back together with her. Pat has convinced himself that this is exactly the course of action he needs to take to get his life back in order (although to us we can see it’s going to take something more than all this to restore stability).   

Pat has a chance encounter with Tiffany, the sister of a friend’s wife. She’s at a dinner he's invited to after treatment. Pat doesn’t quite have social cues down. He says whatever is on his mind without a filter, leading to awkward situations, and he wears a football jersey to this formal dinner. Tiffany is a little more clued into social protocol but there’s still something off about her. She’s dodgy and quick to taking offense, and she leaves the dinner before the meal has even begun. Tiffany asks Pat to walk her home, and when they get to her home (a refurbished garage behind her parent’s house) the first thing she does is to ask Pat if he wants sleep with her. Pat is taken aback and quickly leaves, but he soon finds himself continually running (quite literally as it seems to happen only when he’s jogging) into Tiffany. Tiffany is persistent; maybe she sees something in Pat or maybe she’s just a bit lonely or perhaps she recognizes a kindred spirit. Whatever the case may be, Tiffany and Pat soon find themselves befriending eachother. 

We learn that Tiffany has her own baggage. She’s was married to a police officer who died in a car accident. The impact of the incident has left Tiffany emotionally crippled and she’s fallen into sexual addiction to cope. In this way, Pat and Tiffany are two fucked up peas in a pod. 

It’s here the semblance of a romantic plot can begin to be seen forming. However, the great thing about the film is how it situates this story as less important for the will-they-won’t-they tension but rather the two way transference between the two that allows both to overcome and accept their past and their problems. That might on its face sound clichéd but it works partly due to the performances and partly due to the film taking these problems seriously.

This isn’t the only place the film takes on mental illness. Pat’s father has OCD and rage issues. He’s been banned from the Eagle’s stadium for beating up other people during a game. He has a gambling addiction; he watches every Eagles game and has little rituals he obsessively adheres to (the remotes have to  be positioned just so, his handkerchief has to be in his hand, folded just right). He makes Pat part of this specific ritual towards the Eagle’s success, something more pressing as his bets grow. When Pat’s there, he argues, the Eagles win. Pat becomes increasingly involved with Tiffany and he’s torn between her and his father. This becomes particularly true when Tiffany forces Pat to do a dance competition with her in order to get a letter that his wife wrote. 

Pat at first does it to get the letter but the more time he spends dancing, the more disciplined and focused he becomes. His mental issues start to be put in check. They’re there still; ready to resurface at a moment’s notice. But with Tiffany’s help there might just be a silver lining to all of this. 

Much like the dancing routine at the film’s end, there’s a rhythm to the film and especially to the crooked repartee between Lawrence and Cooper. Much like the characters, the film is largely even keeled but it also has the quality where it could explode at any moment (and it does in big speeches and big fights). Characters are talking as if everything is normal, which it mainly is, but the dialogue is also at times strange but yet feels normal. This is because the script treats the surficial crazy as not crazy but normal. The romance is messy and self-destructive but in that way it feels like a more honest, more realistic, more normal depiction of love and life.   

Silver Linings Playbook is a sympathetic examination of mental illness and family, and a sweet, funny, endearing romance. It’s filled with exceptional performances, particularly from Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, and tenderly filtered through David O. Russell’s great script and direction.    

Grade: A

"Dredd" - Film Review

I’m pretty sure in the right hands there would be some good satire to mine from Dredd’s premise of a worldwide megapolis nation-state. It’s there just under the surface. But the surface above that suffocates the satire in favor of some incredibly dumb and loud action.

Yea, the action is entertaining at times, but any time the film tries to pretend it’s something more serious or lofty; the thin seams start to show. The action’s just not there often enough to cover up for the film’s many flaws. In fact, the film is often times bone dry and oddly slow moving. Any time there’s no action taking place it all becomes somewhat boring. 

This world is all too nondescript. It's bleak and blank without a real justification other than for some futuristic shoot em' up in close quarters. The excessive violence never transcends the violence and the action is hit or miss and not frequent enough.

Dredd (Keith Urban growling for an hour and a half) is such a hokey and unflinchingly macho character that there's little to be plumbed from his part in the movie (he never even takes off that Magneto helmet). Much of the film's weight falls on Olivia Thirlby's judge (cops if cops could be judge, jury and executioner) in training. While Thirlby does her sincere best with the part, the character is so one-dimensional that it's hard to care. 

It's all too humorless and tedious to really work. There's a decent satire in there somewhere as well as a decent action movie, but not in the hands of this creative talent.

Grade: C-

"Man With a Movie Camera" - Film Review

Man With a Movie Camera is less a film and more an experiment. Director Dziga Vertov and fellow contemporary Soviet filmmakers (including Sergei Eisenstein) throughout the 1920's experimented with the ways in which films can be shot and the ways they can convey meaning (Vertov invented and used a number of unusual, still frequently used film techniques including double exposure, Dutch angles, parallel shots, and tracking shots). Man With a Movie Camera style doesn't make for the most easy viewing experience; it's not really telling a story but testing out a bunch of theories and ideas about films within the constraints of Soviet Realism.

It's part portrait of a city, part slice of life, part thought project. Vertov takes time to juxtapose imagery in seemingly random and confusing ways to try to get us to think about the underlying meaning. He also shows us the filmmaker filming the film and gives glimpses of the very film we're watching get edited as well as watched by other people. It's makes for a somewhat surreal, somewhat meta film experience and commentary.

It's a documentary in that it's all footage of actual real life events but there's no seemingly overt message to takeaway like we might expect from a typical documentary. There's not a story (there are no inter-titles to lead us along) though there are little reoccurring scenes we keep coming back to. Of bustling city streets, of busy factories and mines, of mundane daily activities. 

It's avant-garde to a point of almost distraction, but it also remains thoroughly energetic. It's not the film you're going to pop in for entertainment any time soon but it's an important film that broke ground at a time when movies were still figuring out what they were. Man With a Movie Camera seemed to suggest there was something there that set films apart from all the other arts. And there's certainly much to set the film apart even from the movies of today.

Mad Men - "Favors" - Review

I know there’s a lot to discuss in this episode, but let’s set that aside for that one moment that’s lingering in our minds. It comes from the Sally Draper Will Need Therapy Someday department. 

I’ve been complaining about the lack of use of Sally, but here we finally get a Sally storyline and it’s fantastic. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere (it’s still entertaining – Sally reluctantly gossiping with a friend feels very much like the sort of thing you’d expect from kids this age) and then suddenly the story's true motives come out. And dear lord at that point I was upset beyond all belief. Sally through a series of coincidences finds herself witnessing her father cheat on Meghan (with Sylvia). I don’t think I’ve fully processed this.

Behind all that outward teen sass Sally's sporting is a quiet innocence. In many ways we could argue she’s the soul of the show. And if Don has lost the battle for her, then he may not stand a chance save his own dark black pit of a soul. I could definitely see the rest of the season being about the fallout from this moment and I would be thoroughly satisfied by it. The slow buildup of Kiernan Shipka’s part in the show almost feels now like it was all prologue to this moment. I can see a version of the show where Don’s attempts to regain his sense of self can only be fixed through Sally. Don and Sally have always had a strong relationship. Sally even states that she likes her father more than her mother right to Betty’s face early in the episode. (Of course, this is some nice foreshadowing). 

Don’s relationship with Sylvia looked like it was going to blow up in Don’s face at some point, but could we have ever imagined that this was the way it would blow up. The show dropped the affair earlier than we might have suspected and that now appears to have been misdirect. The affair gets off our mind just enough where we don’t see the moment coming where Sally walks in on her father. It hits us like it does because of not just the underlying emotion of it (which is powerful) but due to how surprising it is. 

Don has been so caught up in himself lately that he’s failing to see the things going on around him. He’s slacking off at work and he’s getting sloppy, in his affairs, his work, and his relationships. He looks like a man who’s all but given up. We see this in the storyline with Ted who has been increasingly pissed off (rightfully so) with Don. Ted is carrying the creative side of the company right now. Ted is getting distracted in his own right; his infatuation with Peggy (along with his work) is causing him to neglect his wife. But at the end of the day, Ted doesn’t shack up with Peggy. He gives her a ride home and then heads to his own home to watch tv with his kids. 

Sometimes we need these relationships to give a sense of order to our lives. Peggy without Abe is having trouble keeping house. She spends the episode trying to kill a rat scuttling around her apartment. It gets caught in a trap but still lives (is the rat symbolic of Don, or perhaps even of many of these characters at this point in their lives?). She calls up Stan asking for help (even offering to fuck him in exchange), but Stan refuses her offer. Sometimes though, the episode suggests, favors aren’t worth giving out or taking. 

The favor Don gives to Sylvia and Arnold, helping their son Mitchell get out of military service, is all a ploy to get back in Sylvia’s good graces (which it does, but to disastrous results). Don in turn gets a favor from Ted (who has the connections necessary to save Mitchell from service); the cost here is that Don gives Ted the upper hands with accounts, dropping a conflicting account. Ted appears to be the only one trying to make sure the company doesn’t fall into an all-out civil war. 

Pete accepted a favor from Bob Benson to hire a Spanish helper Manolo, but Pete fires the man when he learns that the man supposedly slept with his mother (a fact he learns from Peggy in a hilarious scene) and also when it turns out he might be gay. Pete is also turned off from what he takes to be a suggestion by Bob to repay the favor (some knee brushing that seems to imply some homoerotic subtext -- Also, anyone else miss Salvatore? I wonder if he’ll return).

This of course brings us full circle to the favor the doorman provides to Sally that causes her to witness her father’s affair. The doorman thinks nothing of Sally asking for the keys; she asks for that favor and it proves devastating. Sally was simply trying to avoid the embarrassment that came with her friend giving Mitchell a list she and her friend had written providing qualities they liked about him (including his ass). This is a bit of a contrivance but the episode does such a nice job of making it unclear the purpose of this story that when Sally goes into the Rosen’s apartment we’re not sure what to expect. Don’s phone call with Sylvia doesn’t entirely suggest they’d be sleeping together right away. Sylvia comes off as someone being thankful and also tying up the awkwardly ended place things left off in, but not necessarily rekindling things. But at the same time, it’s not a stretch that this is how she repays the favor to Don.  

And then there’s that final scene which is absolutely wonderful. Don returns to find his disillusioned daughter at dinner. Meghan’s there and Sally’s friend. It’s deeply uneasy (and rightfully so). And then Arnold shows up with Mitchell, and it becomes ten times more uneasy and also really intense. It’s somewhere between a feeling of I’m going to me sick and holy shit this is exciting. "What is going to happen next?!" we ask ourselves restlessly. Then Sally gets up from the table, tells her father she’s sick with him, and Don chases her to her locked bedroom door. Besides the reveal, this scene is the episode’s best scene. Don and Sally stand on opposite sides of the door. They’re so close and yet so distant from eachother in this moment. Don tries and fails to properly find the words to cover for himself and make his daughter forgive him. Don hasn’t been in the right state of mind for a long while to sales pitch his way out of this. 

Don’s done some damage in his life and especially this season, and he’s done some damage control. But here’s perhaps some damage he can never fix. This makes me think of what Joan said recently to Don (in "For Immediate Release"). She chastises Don after losing the Jaguar account. Don didn’t think of the concerns or feelings of others. He's so self-interested that he’s missing the big picture lately. However, it’s one thing when it’s employees of SC&P but it’s another when it’s his daughter. Hurting Joan is terrible but hurting Sally is irredeemable. 

Stray Thoughts:

*I love how the scene with Peggy and Pete’s mother recalls Peggy’s baby she had to give up. This episodes treatment of Peggy and Pete’s relationship is really excellent. Pete drunkenly telling Peggy she’s the only one who knows him is just so well-observed. And them laughing as Ted walks in is funny and awesome.

*Betty sends Sally to Don’s to avoid her being around a bunch of boys and so of course she runs into a pretty boy in the apartment lobby. Betty, once again, (although this time accidentally) uses Sally as a pawn in her war with Don. (Oh the irony of Sally attending a Diplomacy Club trip).

*Pete picks up on the feelings between Peggy and Ted. Peggy better keep that in check. It could come back to bite her. Just ask her mentor.

*Don killing the conversation with GM is just terribly uncomfortable. Don really has lost his touch.

*There was a nice montage at the end of the episode. Lots of lonely people fucking up. 

*I see Sally as the soul of the show in a similar way to how Meadow functioned in The Sopranos.

*I like all the uses of "Mrs. Draper" referring to Meghan. It really subtly foreshadows what's to come. Sally may not appear to have the strongest bond with Meghan but she still can't tolerate this kind of behavior from her father. 

*Nice piece of meta humor when Harry Francis asks why they only use this one room when they live in a mansion. 

*Some "At the Codfish Ball" resonance here in the Sally storyline in the way she witnesses her father sleeping with Sylvia. 

*Kiernan Shipka has rightfully been praised for her performance, and she's an exceptional young actress. But some of her finest work is in this episode. That scene between Don and Sally is chilling and Shipka totally holds her own. 

*Directed by Jennifer Getzinger who also directed "The Suitcase", another great (perhaps the series' best), emotional episode.

*Don Draper has never seen so loathsome. This season is really dragging down our ability to like him. And this may be the breaking point.

Grade: A

Game of Thrones - "Mhysa" - Review

The Red Wedding is a monumental moment in the book series of A Song of Fire and Ice. It’s such a big, devastating moment and such an unexpected, emotionally impactful twist that it’s come to hold a special psychological place in the hearts of readers of the books. It was a similarly powerful moment in last week’s penultimate episode “The Rains of Castamere”. The development abruptly disrupts one of the core, important foundations to its very basic makeup. It’s hard to imagine where the show goes from here without Robb and Catelynn (no matter your feelings towards them).

However, the Red Wedding is also a climactic and not a conclusive moment. It occurs about two thirds of the way through A Storm of Swords. It’s essentially a dividing point in the middle of the book that logically was chosen to close off this season which is adapting the first half of the book. But as a climactic moment it doesn’t speak of endings but possibilities. After the initial shock wears off our thoughts turn to wondering where the series will go from here. How can it possibly keep going after something like that? Obviously it does, but the show can’t quite get to some of those other tantalizing moments just yet because this is a finite season of television. And so the show is forced to figure out how to close out a story that’s not complete. Ned’s death logically marks the end of one chapter of this story, and Blackwater marks another end to yet another chapter. But the Red Wedding does not. 

“Mhysa” has some great moments in it but it doesn’t feel like a very good season finale, and it’s also jumpy (at times it’s at an “A”-level and others it’s barely scraping above the “C”-range) in that Game of Thrones way where the show can’t seem to pin down what the heck the show is supposed to be for this week’s hour in Westeros (and Essos). It’s not entirely like this. For a good while the episode takes stock of the Red Wedding and plays out the rippling effects with some great dramatic moments. But about half way through the episode becomes like a grab bag of ideas that the writers just seem to be tossing out there hoping they stick with us.  And some do and others don’t, but it comes off as if the writers don’t know how to end the season. In that way the episode feels like two very different episodes stitched together. Too much of the episode feels like a bridge; at times it’s like an episode that ought to have been in the middle of a season. And this just gives it, particularly the back-half of the episode, an awkward quality (it doesn't help that some of the less compelling moments occur in this part of the episode).

Game of Thrones has always had trouble with finales. Season two's "Valar Morghulis" pops in on everyone to tell us where they'll be for the following season and in the process it feels like an episode where the writers have too much story to neatly tell. It doesn't help that the finales have all followed episodes that are the best episodes of the season (and also some of the best episodes aired on television for that given tv season). The penultimate episodes focus in more and feature big, earthshattering moments that are typically visceral and deeply emotionally felt. Since this is an adaptation of a book series though (and a book series that is technically one giant story broken up at convenient dividing points) the finales have, to one extent or another, felt like the writers are just dicking around until they can get back the next season; it's a constraint of the medium this is being told in. It doesn't help that there's so much expectation about what a finale ought to be. We've come to expect certain things of a finale (and there's some of that in here - with different levels of success), but there's also just a lot of stories reaching logical conclusions that may make sense on a narrative level but don't necessarily come off as satisfying in this given medium. And then there are those stories that just don't reach logical conclusions but merely stop in on a character.   

For much of the episode, I was of the opinion that this was one of the best episodes of the season as well as one of the best finales the show had managed. It was tightly constructed; there were lots of nice transitions stringing it all together (including an excellent one where Bran talks of the evils of breaking hospitality before cutting to Walder Frey). And the scenes came off as the next logical place to head into: the Lannisters considering their new found power in the war, Arya escaping the Twins by the skins of her teeth, the Boltons being pleased with their new found (or continuing) power, Jon reaching Castle Black. 

And then about halfway through, the episode lost its tightness and started just tossing out things that didn't always land.

So let’s take a moment to consider what was good. The episode starts immediately after the deaths of Robb and Catelynn where we see that the Red Wedding still drags on to excruciate brutal effect (Director David Nutter really lets the dark chaos of this drag on for a while to allow this to sink in). It’s here we get a sense of just how thoroughly fucked the Stark bannermen are. The Hound barely escapes with Arya, but not before she has to witness the gruesome scene of Greywind’s head attached to the now decapitated body of her dead brother (this should be hokey but they don't linger on it for too long and Arya's reaction is all too powerful it to not be affecting). The Arya-Hound scenes are some of the episode’s best. A later scene where Arya repeatedly stabs to death a Frey soldier is disturbing for what it says about the mental state of everyone’s favorite tomboy and compellingly acted by Maisie Williams.   

Tyrion is called to a small council meeting* where he learns of the news from the Twins; the best part of this are the moments involving Tywin. Joffrey keeps excitedly talking about the Stark deaths which leads Tywin to amusingly school his grandson. And when Joffrey snipes back, everyone in the room looks around nervously aware that the little shithead has just talked down to the most powerful man in all the Seven Kingdoms. It’s followed by an equally excellent scene where Tyrion and Tywin have one of their world famous awful father-son relationship talks.  

*A scene so perfectly contrasted with a prior scene of Tyrion and Sansa warmly, sweetly chitchatting and plotting pranks on those people who make fun of Tyrion. It’s so great for how it draws the parallel between the similarities of these two newly reluctantly betrothed.  And it's likely the last we'll see Sansa like this *sigh*

Outside of the Twins and King’s Landing (which have some other yet mentioned great scenes) though, the episode is messy. The ending with Dany feels incredibly tacked on and somewhat false note to end the episode on. Freed Yunkai slaves start crying out “mother” (the titular “mhysa”) in a foreign language to show their appreciation of Dany’s efforts to save them. But it’s a scene that comes out of nowhere and feels as if the writers wanted to end the episode on an uplifting, triumphant moment. But there is so much going on elsewhere (frantically so) that the episode seems to sputter out to this point, shifting from one location to the next without a complete sense of direction. Jaimie and Brienne returns to King’s Landing, because loose ends. Yara (who we haven’t heard from since way back in season two) heads out to save her brother Theon, who we finally learn the fate of (but more on that later). A questionable, somewhat excessive amount of time is spent on Dragonstone where the show burns through enough plots for Davos, Stannis, and Melisandre to fill out a couple episodes worth of story.**

**Some of this story could have possibly been used at points in the season where these characters looked as if they had nothing to do. But on the whole I thought the show handled these character much better than last season. 

If I might get a little too intellectual here for a moment, the show is at its best when it's in conversation with itself (this is true of many shows). Yara heading out to save Theon or Bran getting past the Wall with the help of Sam is all setup for the future of the show. They don’t make the show feel like it’s saying “Hey, this is where we’ve been! This is where we’re headed”. This is what a finale ought to do more so than any other episode. Tyrion talking to Tywin, or Varys talking to Shae, or Roose Bolton talking to Walder Frey, all refer back to the show’s history and reflect it upon the present to suggest something about the future. Dany’s triumph doesn’t and thus it feels a bit empty and that makes the ending and a number of moments in this episode empty. They’re killing time in an episode that has no business doing that.

Game of Thrones finales rely too heavily on "It's going to be good ... Trust us!". But I would have liked more showing and less telling.

The show remains as messy as ever. But that's the fire the writers play with when adapting this source material. I still feel like this is the best adaptation the show could have hoped for and they have continued to nail the moments they need to nail (i.e. The Red Wedding). As long as they're pulling off those moments they need to land, I will give them a pass when the moments that aren't as important don't. And there's plenty of both of these types of moments in this episode.

Stray Thoughts:

-Lots and lots of great Hodor moments. I laughed so hard when Sam said, “And of course everyone knows Hodor!”

-The emotional sentiment of the Jon-Ygritte scene remains as potent and powerful as ever, but this scene still comes off as far too contrived. Where the hell are they?

-In case Roose describing his bastard son’s role in Winterfell’s demise didn’t make it clear enough who was torturing Theon (with a very effective and subtle cut away to the Dreadfort), Balon Greyjoy states the truth far more bluntly when he receives a particularly sensitive body part of his son from Ramsay Bolton.

-I love how Maester Aemon assumes Sam broke his oath sleeping with Gilly. I’m a sucker for humor drawn from this kind of mistaken assumption.

-I really liked the Davos-Gendry scene. The writers found a connection that you wouldn’t have really considered but brought out a lot from both of these chracters, and it was a nice moment for Liam Cunningham and Joe Dempsie to play.

-Even Roose Bolton, traitor that he may be, is sort of disgusted by Walder Frey.

-For a moment there I actually thought Ramsay might have been actually eating Theon’s dick; it would fit with what we know of his character. But it’s kind of a relief to find that this is not the case. We do come across his genitalia elsewhere though in one of the more interesting (and by which I mean I’m not sure it makes sense to have it in the episode) scenes with the lesser known Greyjoys.

-I like how Varys acknowledges that Tyrion would make a good ruler and one he’d back. It really adds to our sense of just what his political aims are.

-I like even more the scene that piece of information comes from which is a great scene between Conleth Hill and Sibel Kekilli that addresses one of the more pressing unaddressed issues of the season (yet, of course, doesn't resolve it).
-I'm always pleased when Tyrion and Cersei remember their siblings and hash things out. It doesn't say anything new here but the pairing of Lena Headley and Peter Dinklage just doesn't get old. They barb words at eachother delectably (and they even get to discuss Joffrey's god-awfulness and the never-ending war).
-The deaths of Robb and Catelynn do open up room for the remaining regulars. If there's an upside to be taken away from that. 
-Sam and Bran meeting up is a moment of unexpected connection in a series that so often chooses to break apart connections than to form them.

Grade: B
Season Grade: A

What did everyone else think?

I Try to Wrap My Head Around "Upstream Color"

Upstream Color just wrinkled my brain and so I have some brief thoughts on it:

Trippy might be the best word to sum up the film. If I interpreted correctly (which it's totally possible that I didn't because it's just that sort of movie), a man uses psychoactive drug laced parasitic slugs to take control of people and rob them. Then one of his victims, now with a fractured psyche, tries to reclaim her sense of self and discover the mystery behind what happened to her.  

It's a film of extremes; of extreme non-linearity, of extreme abstraction. It's extremely dreamlike in that way where things in dreams make sense while you're following along with the dream's twisted logic, but if you start to dig deeper, it becomes harder to tell what is really going on. But, boy, you've definitely gone through something singularly vibrant and potentially lyrical. At its best its mesmerizing and intoxicating. It's sad and mind-bending and totally unlike anything I've ever seen.

*From Shane Carruth, the writer/director of Primer, another film of surficial simplicity with hidden depths, and an incredibly complex narrative. Carruth also plays Jeff in the film.  

*I still don't have it all quite figured out. It's intentionally meant to be confusing, but at times I was just going wah? But that's the point of it. It's meant to melt your mind into goop with its pretensions of ambiguity and weirdness.

*Visually though it's a real treat; just really beautiful and stunning, which contrasts really nicely with the obliqueness elsewhere (kind of like how Terrence Mallick makes his movies).  

*There's a rather sweet romance plot in the midst of all the craziness. The film takes something that ought to be a meet cute and turns it into something pleasingly much more subversive. This a movie about broken people coming together to feel less broken. 

*The change of hair on Kris a third of the way through the film is a nice subtle change to signify shift in state of mind/identity. The film, I think, is a lot about identity.

*A great performance by Amy Seimetz as Kris.

Is it pretentious? A little bit. It's one of those films that's aware that's it's trying to be intellectual and make you think and junk. But it's also so unlike anything you're gonna see elsewhere that you have to give it the credit for not being conventional. Sure, some of it is probably just bullshit and purposely a little unnecessarily convoluted, impenetrable and weird but sometimes that's the admission price to something unique.

"Ikiru" - Film Review

What makes a well-lived life? That’s the question at the heart of Ikiru (which translates to “To Live”).

Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is a lifelong bureaucrat. He’s been paper pushing all his life in a boring government job. Life has passed him by; his work has become his life. 

Suddenly he discovers he has stomach cancer. He has at best six months to live. Unsurprisingly, he’s out of sorts. He starts taking a hard look at his life and realizing how unfulfilling it’s been. He’s haunted by the past; after his wife died, he dedicated all his attention towards his son, who has since become ungrateful. 

Watanabe can’t seem to tell his family about his illness. He tries but they’re so self-interested that they’re more worried about finances than hearing the man’s opinions. He falls into a depression; he can only muster up the nerve to tell a total stranger of his illness. They take him along for a night of drunken debauchery, but it can’t fill the hole inside himself. The night ends with him drunkenly singing a mournful, bittersweet tune ("Gondola no Uta") in a haunting bass. 

He stops showing up to work, something he’s never done. He befriends a young former female co-worker Toyo (Miki Odagiri) who has decided to quit due to boredom. Everyone mistakes his time spent with her as an affair, but he just wants to be around someone whose young and full of life. However, eventually after spending so much time together, she starts to get the wrong impression and find him creepy. He finally admits to her about his illness and she’s baffled by why he would have wanted anything to do with her. 

But she provides him with the inspiration of how to spend his last few months. He goes ahead with spearheading a parks project that the bureaucratic nightmare (played for laughs throughout the film) had shutdown. 

The film jumps ahead to after the park’s completion and his death. We see his family, co-workers, and other bureaucrats at his wake. They argue over how important to the park’s success he was. As the night progresses and the alcohol consumption increases, it dawns on them just how hard he worked to get the park made. Each one begins recounting a memory and it starts to flesh out our sense of how hard he fought for the park and how crucial he was to its construction. He had never made anyone aware that he knew about the cancer but they soon realize this as well. 

They promise that they’re not going to let the bureaucracy kill proposals like the park anymore. They’re going to live like Watanabe died! Of course, they don’t. The words spoken that night are left where they lay. And all that lives on of the legacy of Watanabe is the park. 

The shift in perspective away from Watanabe is important. His co-workers understand and respect what he did, but they don’t really get it. People don’t change the way they live unless life forces them to change, and even then that’s not a guarantee. But that’s how people live their lives; they should be off pushing proposals for parks through a maligned government bureaucracy, but instead they’re trying to advance themselves at a job they don’t even care about in the first place. 

It also brings across the point of how little we actually know people. Everyone thought they had figured out Watanabe, but they didn’t. The bureaucrats want to chalk up the park’s success to coincidence or a convergence of factors but that’s not the reality. The stranger wants to believe Watanabe is living up the last few months of his life but he’s really wallowing in regret. Toyo wants to believe that he’s a weird old man, but he’s just a sad sack on his last leg. His son wants to believe that Watanabe was a burden who never considered what his son wanted. We rarely ever know a person and even in death we fall back on assumptions we’ve accrued.       

Though Ikiru provides a nuanced exploration of confronting death, what’s really wonderful about it is how life-filled it is. It’s not about how people deal with impending death, but how people live their lives. Throughout the movie we see people living their lives, many of them in petty or selfish ways. But the greatness of Ikiru is how director Akira Kurasawa makes us completely understand the motivations behind the actions taken by people throughout the film. He never suggests these people are bad, but demonstrates how people get so caught up living their lives that they both cease to really live and harm others in the process. In essence, we can see ourselves in so many of these characters, particularly Watanabe.  

The film, however, never falls into excessive sentimentality. It looks head on at these existential questions exploring them seriously, intimately, thoughtfully, and with deeply felt emotion.

Akira Kurasawa’s direction and a number of great performances, particularly from Takashi Shimura, make Ikiru a powerful, poignant treatise on dying … and living as well.  

Grade: A