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Pedro Gonçalves

Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia' - Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Melancholia,” an excursion from the sad to the sublime by way of the preposterous
  • an emotional disorder described by Freud as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”
  • The expectation of punishment is, of course, one reason people go to a Lars von Trier movie in the first place.
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  • Suffering — predominantly, though not exclusively, the suffering of women — is both his favorite subject and his preferred method. He is a crafty sadist, but also, for all his tricks and provocations, a sincere one.
  • Total obliteration happens on an intimate scale, and the all-encompassing, metaphysical nature of the drama leaves room for gentleness as well as operatic cruelty
  • The machinery of mass panic and media frenzy that juices up most films on this subject is notably absent. Instead, difficult emotions are registered in close-ups of individual human faces, and a perverse, persuasive idea rises to the surface. The end of the world as we know it might just turn out to be beautiful.
  • Compared with the humorless, grimly responsible Claire, Justine is impulsive, self-indulgent and charming: the flighty grasshopper to her sister’s responsible, dutiful ant.
  • In the second half of the movie Justine’s fatalism will prove a more viable (or at least a more graceful) response to the prospect of global annihilation than Claire’s anxious practicality
  • the imminence of an all-obliterating big bang is a piece of information the audience possesses in advance of the characters on screen, an open secret that makes their earnest, trivial doings all the more dreadful and absurd.
  • Robert Altman, Noah Baumbach and Jonathan Demme might come to mind during the first hour of “Melancholia,” to say nothing of the houses of Windsor and Kardashian.
  • English is the language, and dollars are the currency, but this is less a specific America (a place Mr. von Trier has never visited and the theoretical location of most of his recent films) than an abstract space of moneyed entitlement.
  • Unlike other von Trier victim-heroines — including those played by Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves”; Nicole Kidman in “Dogville”; and Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” — Justine is not assailed and humiliated by other people. The element of male aggression that was such a powerful force in those films, and an integral aspect of Mr. von Trier’s creative personality, has been neutralized here. The men who hover around the wedding, including the clueless Michael and the officious John, are not menacing, just useless.
  • All of which, of course, amounts to nothing, since everything and everyone will be ashes soon enough. That is Justine’s state of mind, and Ms. Dunst is remarkably effective at conveying both the acute anguish and the paralyzing hollowness of depression. To the extent that the destructive potential of Melancholia is a metaphor for her private melancholia, it is perfectly apt. One of the chief torments of serious depression is how disproportionate and all-consuming the internal, personal sorrow can feel.
  • There is a grim vindication — and also an obvious, effective existential joke — in Justine’s discovery that her hyperbolic despair may turn out to be rooted in an accurate and objective assessment of the state of the universe. Mr. von Trier, inspired (if that’s the word) to make this movie by his own experience of depression, gleefully turns a psychological drama inside out. The world, Justine declares in her darkest moment of clarity, deserves its awful fate. The perverse achievement of “Melancholia” is how difficult it is to argue with her conclusion.
Pedro Gonçalves

Movie Review - The Ghost Writer - Writer for Hire Is a Wanted Man - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict
  • Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski
  • Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications
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  • The parallels with Mr. Blair and Lang spice up the story, especially as references to Iraq, torture and the Central Intelligence Agency are folded into the mix and placard-waving protesters gather outside Lang’s hideaway.
  • he’s delivering this pulpy fun at such a high level that “The Ghost Writer” is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists
  • Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff.
  • Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Mr. Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten.
  • “The Ghost Writer” seems to be as much about Mr. Polanski’s life as, well, that of Tony Blair, which only means that there are amusing points of convergence.
  • The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances.
  • And the way, when Lang chats with the Ghost — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose.
Pedro Gonçalves

'Thor,' With Chris Hemsworth - Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • there is also Idris Elba covered in gold armor, looking like a cross between the Wall Street bull and an Oscar statuette.
  • the absolute and unbroken mediocrity of “Thor” is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad.
  • Thor” is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.
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  • Nothing in “Thor” is, and I suspect that is not an accident. If you can’t remember what you saw, then there’s no harm in seeing it again. There is no reason to go to this movie, which might be another way of saying there’s no reason not to. Something like that seems to be the logic behind “Thor,” and as a business plan it’s probably foolproof.
Pedro Gonçalves

Cannes 2011 review: Melancholia | Film | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Presumably filmed in Denmark, and set in a weirdly stateless, featureless location – a sort of Scando-amerika
  • The montage of images at the beginning is interesting, as are some of the lush, hyper-real tableaux, like the dream sequences from Antichrist
  • the wedding reception scene is nowhere near as good as Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (the obvious model): it is tedious and exasperatingly redundant
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  • As for the approaching interplanetary disaster, this does not appear to affect the tides or the weather – there is just this big CGI planet hovering above – and it does not occur to anyone to turn on the TV and find out what's going on. Justine and Claire just carry on with the translated dialogue and the sedated acting, greeting Melancholia with glassy-eyed anxiety and mumbling resentment. Claire's husband, incidentally, is finally found face down in the stables: perhaps he has topped himself or just expired with boredom.
  • Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production
  • Perhaps this movie is another symptom of the director's much-discussed depression, or a kind of therapy that involves transferring his depression to the audience.
Pedro Gonçalves

'Inception': Only good if you're young? | EW.com - 0 views

  • Henry Jenkins argues that familiarity with video games makes Inception easier to understand. That last point is quite interesting: is Inception the first great video game movie? Not based on one specific game, but rather, on the whole stylistic structure of video game storytelling?
  • Jenkins points out how much of Inception rests on the notion of different “levels,” and of worlds within worlds. (More than a few people have pointed out the similarity between Inception‘s “Snow” dream and an early level in Modern Warfare 2.
Pedro Gonçalves

Tarantino's Django Unchained script: The word is out | Film | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Quentin Tarantino, who completed his screenplay for upcoming movie Django Unchained on 26 April and earlier this week woke to discover half the blogosphere had already read it.
  • Django Unchained seems to be an homage to Sergio Leone set in the deep south (rather than the old west) which tackles the predictably difficult subject of 19th-century American slavery. The lead character is a black slave-turned-gunslinger named Django.
  • the film appears to feature a plum role for Christoph Waltz, the Austrian actor whose performance as a dastardly SS colonel in Inglourious Basterds was rewarded with an Oscar last year. The part is that of a German bounty hunter and former dentist named Dr King Schlutz, who teaches Django the art of contract killing before helping him to find his still-enslaved wife.
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  • Tarantino seems to be repeating the same trick he pulled with Inglourious Basterds, which borrowed its moniker from a 1978 Italian war film of (nearly) the same name but ignored pretty much everything else. The original Django is a 1966 spaghetti western, directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Franco Nero as a ruthless gunman. Nero said he's been given a role in the film, but that may well be the only connection – other than that Tarantino will riff off the genre's tropes in much the same way he cheerfully rifled through the "dogs of war" domain last time around.
  • Reining in Quentin Tarantino would be like telling Jimi Hendrix to quit with the guitar solos – and yet someone might have to do it. Could that be the secret behind the screenplay's bizarre leaking? After all, if you're determined to win an argument, there's nothing like having a bit of backup.
Pedro Gonçalves

Melancholia | Movie Reviews | Rolling Stone - 0 views

  • Melancholia, a potent beauty of a film
  • Von Trier opens with a surreal hint of things to come, set to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde,"
  • The luminous Dunst deservedly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. Her incomparable performance, a slow accumulation of moods from despair to euphoria, never strikes a false note.
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  • Gainsbourg shatters Claire's careful mask of calm to show the raging insecurities beneath, prompted by concern for her young son and her husband's pompous insistence that disaster will be averted.
  • Von Trier draws us inexorably into the web of these characters. He loses us in a dream of his own devising.
Pedro Gonçalves

'The Ghost Writer': Polanski Escapes into His Cinema Nightmares - TIME - 0 views

  • Harris, who worked for the Sunday Times and the BBC when Blair came to power, was once friendly with the P.M. but later soured on his political decisions, especially Blair's support of the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris's score-settling.
    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      It's a SUV, not a sedan, and the very same car that appears at the beginning of the movie
  • The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth.
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  • One difference between Hollywood and European films: the first has to keep you jazzed every minute, while the second assumes that, having bought your ticket, you'll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details.
  • McGregor brings all his charm and intelligence to the vague figure of a Hitchcock hero who slips into circumstance and chicanery until he morphs into a Polanski victim.
  • we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required — think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, and of course, Chinatown.
  • The Ghost Writer may not be major Polanski, but it sure is essential Polanski.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Fever - Wallace Shawn - Theater - Review - New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Shawn has amusingly chosen to acknowledge this paradox in the new production that opened last night at the Acorn Theater, directed by Scott Elliott for the New Group. The evening begins with a Champagne reception (Pommery, no less) held on the stage a half-hour before showtime. Mr. Shawn can be seen mingling with hoi polloi, the dome of his bald head bobbing genially as he exchanges chitchat with audience members. (At the reviewed performance, not-so-hoi polloi gathering onstage included the novelist William Kennedy, the playwright Tina Howe and the actor Ethan Hawke.)
  • Despite the density and richness of its language, however, “The Fever” doesn’t go very deep in its analysis of the fundamental causes of the world’s inequities or posit any rational ideas about how they could be eased. Mr. Shawn is limited by the scope of the narrator’s experience, of course — an economist or political scientist he is not — but the resulting narrative circles around a few basic conclusions that seem thinner and more obvious the more they are illustrated or simply repeated.
  • Mr. Shawn’s literary models are more likely Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and at its best, “The Fever” does achieve the hypnotic force of those explorers of the uncanny.
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  • Mr. Shawn exposes the contradictions and compromises of the urban liberal mind with a mercilessness that is sly and at times hilarious.
  • The Fever” offers an intimate tour of the tortured consciousness of an angst-ridden, well-to-do American, but Mr. Shawn’s real goal is to hold an unflattering mirror up to his well-meaning, liberally inclined audience. It’s sort of like Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” with you, dear viewer, cast in the distasteful role of Kurtz.
  • “My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor,” our narrator unsurprisingly says toward the play’s conclusion. At least Mr. Shawn displays a self-knowledge to match his narrator’s when he has him continue, “And artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.”
  • Its simple finger-pointing at the egoism and materialism of the complacent bourgeoisie seems reductive.
  • More to the point, I think Mr. Shawn overestimates his audience’s taste for self-flagellation by a good half-hour. “The Fever” would cut deeper into the consciousness if it were shorter. He should know that a 90-minute monologue gives too much rein for straying thoughts about dinner plans and how best to catch a taxi after the performance. And perhaps — who knows? — a few audience members might put that half-hour to better use, studying or working for gradual improvements in the lives of others rather than lamenting their own egoism over glasses of Champagne.
Pedro Gonçalves

Review: Melancholia - Film - Time Out New York - 0 views

  • Melancholia marks the major return of the artist’s vitality,
  • the movie starts off with nothing less than the end of the world: two planets colliding in Kubrickian grandeur to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
  • if Von Trier has gotten there, it is largely due to the vivid yet mysterious presence of Kirsten Dunst
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  • As Melancholia’s Justine, though, she does an impressive swan dive
Pedro Gonçalves

Melancholia Review | Movie Reviews and News | EW.com - 0 views

  • Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work
  • Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work
  • Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work
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  • Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work
  • Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work
  • Claire (a soulful Charlotte Gainsbourg)
  • Melancholia is also the name of a planet that is hurtling on a catastrophic collision course with Earth on the very same day — a cosmic manifestation of that same crushing sadness
  • he sets aside all trickster impulses of provocation to create striking visual tableaux that, in their majestic simplicity, convey a profound emotional depth that transcends words
  • known to have survived a black depression himself.
  • The filmmaker blends the grand romanticism of Wagnerian music — specifically the famous prelude from Tristan und Isolde — with swooning dreamscape cinematography that magically melts sight and sound into one. (Von Trier has said that Antonioni, Bergman, and Tarkovsky are among his influences.
Pedro Gonçalves

'The Ghost Writer': Polanski Escapes into His Cinema Nightmares - TIME - 0 views

  • From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia
  • If an auteur is a director with an obsessive personal vision — or, in simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies — then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren't drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson's own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there was his 1977 sexual encounter with a 13-year-old; when he thought he was sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest.
  • The kinship to Polanski's oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director's 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil's autobiography.
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  • Lang, who becomes the focus of a war-crimes investigation in Europe, may be condemned by his past to remain in the U.S. — even as Polanski is condemned by his to keep out.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Ghost Writer | Movies | EW.com - 0 views

  • a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular.
  • Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we're really not on Martha's Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can't set foot there
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