Movie Reviews

I'm doing well this year on the movies. So far 40 features in 40 days and I'm doing ok on Oscar nominations. Though this last week, I've been all over Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar. So, some reviews:

Biutiful - Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, a good man living a tough life in Barcelona. He works as a go-between in illegal immigrant labor. He's a criminal but he cares about the people. He's a father of two cute kids but his wife is bipolar and a drug addict and prostitute sometimes with Uxbal's brother. So now we have a complicated life, lets make it moreso by making Uxbal dying of cancer. Oh and he can sometimes commune with the souls of the recently dead. There's too much story and yet not enough as I found it hard to find a non-obvious point. Still Bardem's performance is fantastic. Gravity and sadness and hope and compassion are in his every look. The camera work is mostly handheld and naturalistic putting you in the middle of seedy. Still it's long and a bit slow and needs some more to it. Bardem's acting nomination is well deserved, the Best Foreign language nomination less so.

Madame Curie - A biography from 1943 starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. It's a great story and I didn't know much of it. It also did a nice job of explaining the science. A problem was that a lot of the dialog was really stiff. It could have come from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Still I think someone should do a remake, keep the science, maybe add a little more of her life (she did win two Nobels) and make the characters a little more human.

William S. Burroughs - A Man Within - A documentary on the author of Naked Lunch. Apparently a lot of people, particularly musicians, were influenced by him, but the film doesn't say how. Steely Dan was named from his book, but um, yeah, that's great. I don't know of a lot of other stuff done in the cut-up style. He also did a lot of drugs, maybe that explains all the shots of bands with him (he lived into the 1990s). He was gay and was out and writing about it and that wasn't at all done at the time. Still he resisted joining any movement but others were inspired by his openness. Oh and he shot and killed his wife playing William Tell. Literally. I'm still not sure how that squared with being gay. Potentially interesting subject matter, weak film.

Lust for Life - A 1956 biography of Vincent Van Gogh as played by Kirk Douglas. He got nominated for Best Actor and
Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin won Best Supporting Actor. Van Gogh certainly had enough trauma in his life to fill a compelling biography. He also painted a lot of pictures. The film shows a lot of them, and his development as an artist. A lot of it is filmed on location and in a vibrant color process. Apparently they even painted some wheat fields the color Van Gogh used in his painting. It not only tells the story of his life, it really lets you appreciate his all of his work.

Dogtooth - This is nominated as Best Foreign Language Film from Greece. It's more a psychological experiment than a film. Two parents have raised their three late teen children in complete isolation. They've never left the house and the walled in grounds. They're misinformed on the meanings of words, e.g., Zombie is a yellow flower and think house cats are man=killers. They innocent and naive. It gets very weird very quickly. The father leaves each day in his car to work in factory and bring in supplies. He hires one of the factory guards, a woman, to sleep with his son occasionally. He had needs but the daughters apparently don't. She also accidentally lets some external contamination in. Anyway, it's bizarre with not much of a plot and no explanation whatsoever. I really hated this and am shocked it's nominated for an Oscar.