Atonement

 (2007)

I'll have to tread through this one gingerly, because it's a mine field. It's a film which is one of the best-reviewed of the year. It has been honored with many Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture, Drama. It is rated so high at IMDb that it will soon join the all-time immortals in the Olympus 250.

And I wasn't very impressed. I found it a good movie, but not a memorable classic.

Many reviewers cast their raves in the form of solemn praise for a faithful literary adaptation. Not having read Ian McEwan's novel, and having received no motivation to do so from this film, I have no way to determine how successfully the film transmuted McEwan's literary elements into cinema gold, but I could see some major problems right from the start.

In the film's first act there are events which are presented from two different points of view, the first time from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl, the second in close-up detail from an objective perspective. This sort of narrative technique makes a lot of sense in a novel, because a 13-year-old narrator controls every detail of what we see and hear. We only know what she knows, we only see what she tells us about in the manner she chooses to tell it, and our perspective is completely limited by hers. If we then re-experience the same events through the eyes of an omniscient narrator, or through the counter-perspective of an adult who was also there, we may be shocked and edified by the second telling. But a camera is not the written page. Although I may witness a filmed event from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl, I am still processing and interpreting what I see with my brain, not with hers, and I am filling in the missing details with my experience, not with her lack thereof. As I result, I can immediately see what really transpired and I can see that she misinterprets or misunderstands it. I don't need to have the events run through a second time. The director ignores this reality and plunges forward with the retelling anyway. And he uses the repetition device twice, with two separate events. In each case, the second perspective showed me nothing I had not already figured out the first time. It was just a superfluous device which slowed down a narrative which was already crawling at a snail's pace.

As a result of several misunderstandings, combined with some inchoate sexual jealousy on the part of the young girl, the brat ends up accusing her sister's working class lover of a serious crime which he did not commit.

His punishment for this crime is to be deported to another film.

It's a good film, but one completely unrelated to the one we have been watching.

The false accusation occurred in a stately English country estate in 1935. The new film takes place on the battlefields of WW2, in the events leading up to and including the historic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French port of Dunkirk. Off-camera, in the five intervening years, our working class hero was imprisoned, then offered a chance for parole if he decided to volunteer for combat. His sudden appearance in a WW2 combat film serves to slow down the main storyline still further. Will the lovers get a chance to re-unite? Will the little sister find a way to achieve atonement for her false accusation? Well, I'll tell you ... as soon as I insert this 40-minute documentary about the horrors of war on both sides of the Channel. There is the misery and squalor of the soldiers being tended to in the hospitals back home. There is the grotesque misery of the soldiers in combat and in Dunkirk, discovering the mass murder of civilians, shooting their horses to keep them from the Germans, singing sad songs of better days, stealing from the corpses, coping with disease and starvation. There are some impressive set pieces, but they serve no purpose other than to delay the awaited resumption of the story we began with.

Say, just what is happening with those three people anyway?

Finally, after nearly two hours of a pace which would lose a race to tectonic shifting, the film resolves everything with a voice-over narration told by the false accuser, who is now an elderly novelist. It's actually a brief response to a chat show question. Time expended: maybe a minute. Don't make the mistake of leaving the theater a minute early, because without that talk show answer, you lose ... oh, about 100% of the film's plot.

This film has an excellent chance to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. It may even win, because it has everything the Academy demands of a winner: impressive literary provenance, gravitas, British accents, and  unrelenting misery. It has some characters dying tragically young, and an old character dying of a horrible disease. It has an upright young man convicted of pedophilia and sent to prison. It has the actual pedophiliac escaping scot-free. It has horrible cousins with terrible family secrets. It has lovers frustrated and separated. It shows mass murders committed by Nazis. It pictures wounded men disfigured by combat. The screenwriter made only one miscalculation in his Oscar grab. At the end, when the 13-year-old girl has become an old woman dying of a disease which will soon cause dementia, the script should have arranged for the old woman to die of AIDS instead. That would have made perfect sense, because the character was born in 1922, and was played by 70-year-old Vanessa Redgrave, so a 1992 death of AIDS would have fit in ideally. Voila! Instant Oscar. Oh, sure, the film still has Nazi atrocities and false imprisonment - Mr. Schindler meet Mr. Shawshank -  but without the AIDS, it's only guaranteed a nomination, not a victory.

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Note: the top 1000 voters at IMDb score this film 7.3 which, in my opinion, is exactly where it belongs. It's a good movie, but not an all-time classic.

If you would like to see a truly great movie with a very similar theme, skip this film and rent Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement.

Here's the film clip of Keira Knightley, who looked very beautiful throughout the film.

 

 

Walk Hard

 (2007)

Walk Hard started out to be a spoof of the rock era musical biopics. It took about half of the story of Ray and half of I Walk The Line and combined them to form the faux-bio of Dewey Cox, who was sort of the Forrest Gump of contemporary music. He wasn't the brightest guy in the world, but he was right there with everyone, changing his style of music to suit the times and his surroundings. He was in India with The Beatles, and backstage with Elvis, the Bopper and Buddy Holly. He sings with rappers, MoTown artists, folk rockers, doo-woppers, hippies, old-time blues guitarists, psychedelic rockers, punk rockers, you name it. He sings like Bob Dylan, Pat Boone, and Johnny Cash. The film incorporates brief performances from Lyle Lovett, the Temptations, Jewel, Jackson Browne, and Ghostface Killah. You may think, "Wow, that's a lot to cover in one film!" and you'd be right. Not only does that agenda serve to pack the film too full, but it is further jammed by the fact that Dewey does not sing mere snippets of songs. Virtually every one of his performances consists of a full-length song, and he gives many performances.

That's a lot of music. 

If you go to this film thinking you will see a typical Judd Apatow comedy, well, there is some of that, but you need to prepare yourself for the fact that there's only about a half-hour of typical Apatow humor. The rest of it consists of lengthy parodies of different musical styles. It's a musical comedy, heavy on the music. The songs are consistently clever, but they are witty without being laugh-out-loud funny. They supply the kind of humor that makes one in appreciation of what they are doing and in recognition of their excellent mimicry. The writers and John C. Reilly manage to ape every musical style you can think of, but sometimes you get the feeling that they wanted to create a best-selling soundtrack album rather than a best-selling movie, because the songs are too good, too much like the real thing. John C. Reilly does a better job on singing than he does on clowning, not because he lacks the talent for the latter, but because that's the way the film is structured.

I think the film's pace would have been more appropriate to comedy if each musical parody had been a short visit to the era's comical highlights rather than a meticulously accurate but dragged-out set piece. The way it's handled here, the film is not really a spoof of a musical biopic. It IS a musical biopic, albeit about a guy who never existed who is singing songs you've never heard before. I think you'll enjoy the film if you enter the theater knowing what you are in for. If Spinal Tap was the mockumentary for heavy metal, Dewey Cox is the mockumentary for every other form of music which was popular in the second half of the twentieth century. If you are expecting a zany comedy, you will find a good one in there somewhere, but it's a very, very short one sandwiched in between long and elaborate musical numbers.

Some of the best comedy pieces involve:

• the ridiculous things Dewey Cox buys when he jumps from poverty to rock star wealth (a giraffe, for example, which eats dinner with the family). OK, maybe Steve Martin did this better in The Jerk, but it's still funny.
• the parody of the Beatles in their psychedelic Yellow Submarine era, complete with Peter Max-style animation, as performed by the unlikely foursome of Justin Long, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, and Jason Schwartzman. Long and Rudd are quite energetic and funny as Harrison and Lennon, complete with appropriately exaggerated Liverpudlian accents, but the funniest concept is that Jack Black makes no effort at all to look like Paul McCartney. He basically just plays Jack Black with an accent, but declares himself to be Paul McCartney! The Beatles segment ends in a fistfight between Lennon and McCartney, as shown below:

The film was nominated for two Golden Globes: best original song and best lead performance in a musical or comedy. The film is not really as good as I hoped, but there's absolutely no question that Reilly earned that nomination. He's funny, and her can sing.

There is plenty of nudity in this film, with male and female full-frontals, but it's all concentrated into one scene, and it is all provided by unidentified extras from Dewey's wild, dark, drug-abusing, groupie-groping era. More on that as home media becomes available. (I saw this one in a theater.)

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This is the 13th consecutive Christmas on which we have published!

On behalf of all of us who work the Christmas shift every year

Merry Christmas to All

and to all a good night

 

Dream Lover

Happy Holidays to Uncle Scoopy and all the gang.

For our gift today we unwrap Madchen Amick. I think this film is the crown jewel for Madchen as she gives up the T & A plus some delicious full frontal nudity.