| Hi, I'm new |
[10 Aug 2007|12:30pm] |
...and this seems like a good place to feed my film fixation. I found it after searching for other people/groups who like Gegen Die Wand [one of my alltime favourite movies - on a side note, has anyone seen Transylvania yet, starring Birol Ünel from GDW? Is it any good?].
So... hello!
I've been on a dvd spree lately. Thoughts on the three I've watched so far [I'll avoid any spoilers]:
Disco Pigs
Odd as hell, this. Irish film from a few years back, adapted from a play. A teenage boy & girl, 'Pig' and 'Runt' grow up next door to each other, twins in all but blood; their relationship sits uneasily between twins and romantic soulmates. In their emotional entwinement they're totally detached from the world around them, to the point of sociopathy, and run about terrorising and confusing everyone around them. Then age 17 hits, and Pig's feelings for Runt become decidedly sexual [perhaps too instantly, but as a narrative device I guess it's pretty necessary] - something she's not ready for. And everything turns to chaos. The two parts are played with fantastic rawness - Cillian Murphy's 'Pig' is a proper little droogie; a nasty and frightening car-crash character who you uncomfortably empathise with but can't exactly sympathise with. Elaine Cassidy's 'Runt' is more likeable, and equally watchable in a cloudy, dreamy sort of way. The feeling with the film [and, I anticipate, the play, though I've not seen it] is that the ideas for the characters spawned the story, and everything else was assembled in a mad rush; narrative, music, the works. The rawness is sometimes frustrating, but it really does suit the tone of the film and the characters themselves; too constructed a film would have felt contrived. As it is, I think it leaves you a little emotionally isolated, but intrigued. Three stars.
Domino
I expected this to be a slap-bang-wallop guilty pleasure. It was much more stylised and brutal than I expected. Keira Knightley takes a lot of criticism from film fans but I think she's mostly good in this, the right mixture of youthful nerves and self-assembled toughness. Her narration is irritating though, as is the tendency for people's words & phrases to be echoed pretentiously over the soundtrack, and the constant recurrence of the tagline, 'heads you live, tails you die'. It's like it's meant to be a druggy movie, when really, drugs play very little part in the story. I guess they were trying to keep away from tv-movie territory, but they've over-egged the pudding somewhat. The acting's excellent throughout, the cinematography's eyecatching but often distracting... ultimately, again it's not easy to care about the characters much. It's worth a watch but I wish I'd rented rather than bought it. Two & a half stars.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley
I'm doing what I always do, getting interested in one actor and working through their back catalogue. Another Cillian Murphy flick, directed by Ken Loach so you know it'll meet a certain standard. Actually it's phenomenal. Long but well fleshed out, it gives you a heartrending look at the 1920s Irish struggle for independence, through the eyes of the Cork locals that formed an early incarnation of the IRA. Liam Cunningham's supporting performance as an educated and principled train driver caught up in it really stood out for me. As an English viewer of the film, I'm really not convinced by the angst that surrounded the film's release, about it being supposedly anti-British; it portrays the struggle as experienced by one group of people, and I think it does it truthfully. There are momentary glimpses in the film, actually, of some of the English soldiers' own experiences of the conflict, and these do a lot to balance the film. Orla Fitzgerald's strong in it too, playing the love interest but holding her own both as an individual character and as a counterpart to Murphy, and not merely being the fluff balanced on his arm. I can see myself watching this film repeatedly. Four stars.
Now I've got Lady Vengeance, Death in Venice, Nil By Mouth, Munich, Dolls and Roma to work through. Onwards...
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contemplative
impressed
curious
enthralled