wbryant1976 Reviews

Time to Leave (2005)

ruined for me by a plot device

[7/10 · 25 July 2006]

Possible spoilers beneath. i agree that Ozon is a great filmmaker -- Under the Sand and Swimming Pool are masterpieces in their way. but where did the outrageous plot line about Romain impregnating a random woman come from? So many gay movies are so afraid that life is meaningless without the hope of procreation, so there is inevitably either a drunken night in which our gay hero sleeps with a woman who ends up pregnant; or a plot twist in which we encounter a friendly infertile couple who need our hero's seed. why would Ozon invoke such a cliché in a movie like this? i wanted to think it must be a subversive appropriation of the convention, but in fact i think it's just lame.

Heights (2005)

Passion and Urban Ennui in NY

[9/10 · 17 May 2005]

This film begins with the Glenn Close character, a famous actress who could be Close herself, giving a master class in Shakespeare to a bunch of Juilliard acting students, in which she laments the lack of passion she sees in their performances and, more broadly, in the world she inhabits. Which is a fitting, and ironic, prologue for a movie that looks at the ennui of urban lives and the emotional earthquakes that disrupt them. This is a contemporary New York character-driven drama, but it reminds me of a 1970s movie -- in a good way. There are slightly retro split screens, long-lens conversations like mid-period Woody Allen movies, and a sense of lightness in the directing style that never becomes slickness. It's also refreshing to see an independent film that doesn't completely deteriorate in the third act -- it's almost become taboo to tell a story that is satisfying in the world of independent film, because it's seen as a concession to Hollywood. But this manages to do it in a convincing way without selling out to the forces of cheesiness or convention.

Look at Me (2004)

A skillful, subtle movie

[8/10 · 13 May 2005]

The film begins with a character speaking on her cellphone but unable to be heard because the taxi driver is playing his radio at such a loud volume -- which is a fitting preface to the rest of the film, in which characters try desperately not only to be seen (as in the title, translated only approximately from the French "Comme Une Image"), but to be heard. At the heart of the story is a daughter's inability to be heard, quite literally, by her father -- who will rarely acknowledge his daughter and refuses to listen to his daughter's cassette of her singing classical music. Aside from the main father/daughter relationship, the film is full of types that are at once fresh and recognizable (the unctuous friend of the celebrity, the slightly defeated wife of an author, who has subsumed her own passions for music to his passion to be a famous author). This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Jaoui's other work. Though not groundbreaking cinema, Look At Me is two hours very well spent in a theater.