Well, it's taken me five months of turning it on, getting bored and turning it off, but I've finally done it. I've finally finished "La Dolce Vita." And if that achievement means anything, it means I'll never have to see it again.
Watching this movie was like an endurance test. I'll gladly sit through a six-hour miniseries like "The Best of Youth;" "The Decalogue," ten hours of the Ten Commandments, is at the top of my NetFlix queue, very closely followed by nine hours of Holocaust memories in "Shoah;" heck, I'd even like to see the 15-and-a-half-hour-long "Berlin Alexanderplatz" when they release it on DVD in November. But I could hardly stand a comparatively lean three hours of "La Dolce Vita."
In three hours of screentime, nothing much happens. A self-hating journalist covers various stories, hangs out with his friends, abuses various women, and parties all night long. Somehow, nothing really happens in three hours of screen time. On a discussion board I go to, a lot of people said that "The Great Gatsby" was "a bunch of rich fucks bitching and moaning about how much it sucks to be a rich fuck." I guess that's what "La Dolce Vita" felt like: A journalist covering celebrities bitches and moans about how empty his life is.
I can't tell if the movie had a point, but if it did, it probably has something to do with the cult of celebrity. Apparently, Federico Fellini could see the future of Hollywood and the tabloids, with photographers trying to take pictures of a woman as she learns her husband's gone crazy and killed their kids, or trying to take pictures of various stars. If that's the message of the film, then it's sure irrelevant now, since anybody with common sense knows what sick things papparazzi are. (And yes, I know that "papparazzi" comes from the character "Papparazzo" in this film, and no, I really don't care.) Maybe if the film had a spark of life to it, I could forgive that, but it doesn't. It's simply tedious.
I've tried 2.05 Federico Fellini films (this, "La Strada," and I gave up about five or ten minutes into "I Vitelloni"), and I've disliked them all. Call me a snob, but I don't want to sit through movies by somebody without something to say. (Unless, of course, the movie is entertaining, which I haven't found Fellini's films to be.) In both of the movies of his I've sat through, it felt like the movie wasn't trying to make a point, or if it was, it didn't know what the point was.
All the same, I can't help but think, "Maybe I should watch some more of his movies, just to be sure." Maybe I've been brainwashed by too many readings of Ebert's "The Great Movies" books, but for some reason, I can't just dismiss Fellini off of two movies. Maybe I should check out "Amarcord," or maybe try and finish "I Vitelloni," or maybe I could wait for "Juliet of the Spirits" to show on TCM, or...
No. No, no. Fellini's films are just too slow. Somehow, he managed to make movies where I get bored after watching maybe two or three minutes of it. It's like he went out of his way to avoid having plots in his films. I might try and subject myself to a few more of his films, and maybe I'll find a gem, like what happened when I kept watching Kurosawa films. On the other hand, maybe life is too short to sit and watch movies from people I find dull.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Babel
So I haven't written any reviews in about six months. Yeah, sorry. I just found what I'd written already pretty lame, and that I also saw very few movies that really needed reviewing all that desperately. (Look at my two reviews of "The Best of Youth," after all.) But I've been thinking about writing some more reviews, and even though I saw this one back in March, it's still fresh enough in my mind that I can write about it.
"Babel" was, as you probably know, a movie that was nominated for several Oscars. I've seen three of the movies nominated for Best Picture this last year, and I am just completely dumbfounded. "The Queen" was all right, but not the absolutely great film people seemed to think. (And for all the hype about Helen Mirren's performance, I didn't really notice it all that much. Now, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair? That was an amazing performance.) "The Departed" felt like a routine cops-and-gangsters film, nothing more. Argue all you want about how it has hidden themes, but usually, there needs to be something about those themes that people can notice.
"Babel," however, is the worst of the lot. I won't go so far as to call it terrible; if I know one thing from hanging out on a forum dedicated to terrible movies, it's that what I think is terrible is quite honestly much better than most direct-to-video monster films. But "Babel" is pretty much a big mess.
It's the story of, well, nothing that I can really tell. That's partly because of the multiple-storyline thing, a premise that really shouldn't be used unless you have a good reason for it. It seems to me like some kind of result of our ADD culture; we can't have just one good story anymore, so we'll take four or five mediocre stories. Hearing that the director of Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Innarito) has used this for his previous two films, "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," makes me wonder if he's a one-trick pony. I haven't seen either one, and to be perfectly honest, "Babel" makes me want to stay away from them.
But the mess can't really be blamed on the multiple storylines. It should be blamed on the lack of coherence. I'm not going to say that if you use multiple storylines, you should make a good point; "Intermission" didn't make any real point with its various storylines, but it managed to be a good time nonetheless. "Babel," on the other hand, has pretensions of being Art, and it just doesn't work.
Let's look through the stories themselves: An American couple is arguing, but is brought together by the wife being shot. Two brothers (the ones who shot the woman, not really intending to do it) end up feeling guilt over her "death." The couple's children are taken into Mexico illegally, get culture shock, and then end up in the desert. And finally, a Japanese girl feels horny.
The stories on their own might make for a good film, but again, they're supposed to make A Statement About Our World. And that statement is... totally lost on me. Okay, reading about the movie later, I know it's supposed to be about borders and language and all that jazz, but the film doesn't seem to make a point about it. It just says, "Hey, you know how borders and language are impeding us?" and then doesn't really give any solutions or insights.
Worse yet is that if it's talking about borders and language, it seems it wants to shoot itself in the foot. If language is an impediment of some sort, then why do the American kids speak Spanish? Why does the American couple have a translator? If it's supposed to be about borders, what kind of borders do those Middle Eastern kids have to deal with? And the Japanese schoolgirl subplot could've been tossed out for all it does for the film; by the end, I was wondering if maybe the director put it in because he has a fetish for Japanese schoolgirls.
The film also seems to want to be a Topic of Conversation, and thus tries several attempts at starting conversations in coffeeshops. (Warning: Spoilers herein.) There's the third-act revelation that the American kids' story and their parents' story don't happen at the same time. The revelation affects nothing about either one of them. There's a note written by the Japanese schoolgirl that we don't get to find out the contents of. It feels like an afterthought more than an organic extension of anything. The one link between the Japanese plot and everything else is that the schoolgirl's father sold a gun in Middle East-land, which fell into the hands of the kids who shot Cate Blanchett. Now, really, when you're watching the plot about kids shooting a woman, you don't need to know how the guy who sold their father the gun came into possession of it; you need to know what unfolds because of their shooting. So we're getting a bunch of scenes that could've been cut out. Are you taking notes?
The thing that really got me about the film was its Oscar nominations. Why? There weren't any better movies to highlight? (Then again, they nominated "Little Miss Sunshine," so maybe they weren't paying much attention.) I mean, I can't say I've seen a bunch of 2006 movies, but "Babel" is feeble compared to "Stranger than Fiction" or "The Fountain." If they nominated "Babel" because it was trying to say something, why not nominate "The Fountain," which also tried to say something, and managed to be more entertaining and thought-provoking?
In the end, "Babel" felt like it wanted to say something, but it wasn't speaking my language. Which is ironic, to the say the least.
"Babel" was, as you probably know, a movie that was nominated for several Oscars. I've seen three of the movies nominated for Best Picture this last year, and I am just completely dumbfounded. "The Queen" was all right, but not the absolutely great film people seemed to think. (And for all the hype about Helen Mirren's performance, I didn't really notice it all that much. Now, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair? That was an amazing performance.) "The Departed" felt like a routine cops-and-gangsters film, nothing more. Argue all you want about how it has hidden themes, but usually, there needs to be something about those themes that people can notice.
"Babel," however, is the worst of the lot. I won't go so far as to call it terrible; if I know one thing from hanging out on a forum dedicated to terrible movies, it's that what I think is terrible is quite honestly much better than most direct-to-video monster films. But "Babel" is pretty much a big mess.
It's the story of, well, nothing that I can really tell. That's partly because of the multiple-storyline thing, a premise that really shouldn't be used unless you have a good reason for it. It seems to me like some kind of result of our ADD culture; we can't have just one good story anymore, so we'll take four or five mediocre stories. Hearing that the director of Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Innarito) has used this for his previous two films, "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," makes me wonder if he's a one-trick pony. I haven't seen either one, and to be perfectly honest, "Babel" makes me want to stay away from them.
But the mess can't really be blamed on the multiple storylines. It should be blamed on the lack of coherence. I'm not going to say that if you use multiple storylines, you should make a good point; "Intermission" didn't make any real point with its various storylines, but it managed to be a good time nonetheless. "Babel," on the other hand, has pretensions of being Art, and it just doesn't work.
Let's look through the stories themselves: An American couple is arguing, but is brought together by the wife being shot. Two brothers (the ones who shot the woman, not really intending to do it) end up feeling guilt over her "death." The couple's children are taken into Mexico illegally, get culture shock, and then end up in the desert. And finally, a Japanese girl feels horny.
The stories on their own might make for a good film, but again, they're supposed to make A Statement About Our World. And that statement is... totally lost on me. Okay, reading about the movie later, I know it's supposed to be about borders and language and all that jazz, but the film doesn't seem to make a point about it. It just says, "Hey, you know how borders and language are impeding us?" and then doesn't really give any solutions or insights.
Worse yet is that if it's talking about borders and language, it seems it wants to shoot itself in the foot. If language is an impediment of some sort, then why do the American kids speak Spanish? Why does the American couple have a translator? If it's supposed to be about borders, what kind of borders do those Middle Eastern kids have to deal with? And the Japanese schoolgirl subplot could've been tossed out for all it does for the film; by the end, I was wondering if maybe the director put it in because he has a fetish for Japanese schoolgirls.
The film also seems to want to be a Topic of Conversation, and thus tries several attempts at starting conversations in coffeeshops. (Warning: Spoilers herein.) There's the third-act revelation that the American kids' story and their parents' story don't happen at the same time. The revelation affects nothing about either one of them. There's a note written by the Japanese schoolgirl that we don't get to find out the contents of. It feels like an afterthought more than an organic extension of anything. The one link between the Japanese plot and everything else is that the schoolgirl's father sold a gun in Middle East-land, which fell into the hands of the kids who shot Cate Blanchett. Now, really, when you're watching the plot about kids shooting a woman, you don't need to know how the guy who sold their father the gun came into possession of it; you need to know what unfolds because of their shooting. So we're getting a bunch of scenes that could've been cut out. Are you taking notes?
The thing that really got me about the film was its Oscar nominations. Why? There weren't any better movies to highlight? (Then again, they nominated "Little Miss Sunshine," so maybe they weren't paying much attention.) I mean, I can't say I've seen a bunch of 2006 movies, but "Babel" is feeble compared to "Stranger than Fiction" or "The Fountain." If they nominated "Babel" because it was trying to say something, why not nominate "The Fountain," which also tried to say something, and managed to be more entertaining and thought-provoking?
In the end, "Babel" felt like it wanted to say something, but it wasn't speaking my language. Which is ironic, to the say the least.
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