wsherrett Reviews

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This is camping in the sixties?

[24 April 2011]

I know plausibility doesn't play a big part when people review these kind of pictures, but hear me out here. The film is set in 1963 to start, not 1863. These guys are given a half-assed teepee and a pup tent to sleep in in the Wyoming rockies, along with what looks like wool blankets. Was Randy Quaid's character assuming that they were gay? They couldn't spring for a couple of sleeping bags down at Sears?

So the story setup seems to be that Gyllenhaal's character is a major fruit to begin with, and Ledger's is so bottled up that he falls into it, and manages to keep it closeted, perhaps even transitioning out by his forties. The details of how the two characters got into the relationship seem to hinge on a curious bit of contrivance.

Old Joy (2006)

Maybe overpraised, but worth watching

[8/10 · 8 June 2009]

Having watched this after Wendy and Lucy, and listened to her interview with Terry Gross, it's easy to see that this is a filmmaker with a strong still photography background. Her style seems to be aimed at directly conveying the characters' experience with naturalistic dialog and long POV shots. Since we're looking at a strained relationship here, the dialog is pretty sparse. As a Portland resident, I know that Ms. Reichardt was picking locales that would convey a sense of industrial blight and decay, rather than just photographing a trip from Portland to Bagby Hot Springs.

Even though the cinematography is first-rate, I can't say that this is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, where the settings convey the tension that lies behind the long silences, or Kurt's eruptions of angst between tokes. There just isn't enough going on between Kurt and Mark to make a movie here. So Kurt is trying to conjure some of the magic of his twenties as a trenchant reality closes in - I would have liked to see more of a reaction from Mark than a series of WTF looks.

Artists who have successfully worked this ground, Raymond Carver, Bergman, Chekov, have done so with meticulous craftsmanship. Just to drop another name, William Faulkner talked about how much harder it is to write a good short story than a novel. Ms. Reichardt did a better job in her next film, Wendy and Lucy, in filling out the film style that she wants to create with a narrative that provides the viewer with a reason to sit and watch.

The Women (1939)

Cukor winks . . .

[13 December 2005]

Great moments in late movies . . . In the opening sequence, as the guests are entering the weekend retreat and gossiping about Rosalind Russell's character, one might be reminded of the similar opening of Renoir's "Regle du jeu," (my all-time favorite film), made the same year. As Russell makes her entrance, sweeping across the room, she stops and looks at a painting on the wall closely. When someone asks her what's the matter, she replies: "Oh, nothing - I thought it was a Renoir." An inside joke from Cukor to anyone in the present, or more likely future, who had seen Renoir's masterpiece. Cukor's film version of Luce's play lacked the grand ambitions of Renoir's allegory, but can be seen as a similar, if lower-case, commentary on pre-war American culture.

Winter Kills (1979)

One of the strangest productions in film history

[8/10 · 2 July 2005]

Condon wrote a magazine article about this movie production around 1980 that makes it ten times as strange as the story itself. Among other details:

The movie was financed with money from cocaine dealers.

When the production went over budget, the executive producer brought in additional "financiers", then was able to keep the crews working for two weeks - in New York - with no pay. Jeff Bridges and Tony Perkins both offered their salaries as collateral.

After the film was finished, the studio was purchased by a bigger studio which then ultimately declined to release it. At one point, at a test preview at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, passers by were being offered $1 to watch the movie.

A few months later, the executive producer was found in a New York hotel room, handcuffed to a bed, with two bullets in his head.

Unbreakable (2000)

A recycled premise, taken miles further

[24 July 2004]

Fans of this story might want to check out Peter Weir's "Fearless" from 1993. That movie starts out with Jeff Bridges walking away from a plane crash, the only survivor, without a scratch. The event has the same effect on his marriage, and the story deals with his struggle to overcome the numbness of survivor's guilt and connect with the world again. No comics or bench presses, however.

It's easy to speculate that Shyamalan saw the movie and saw a great premise that he could do a lot more with. Both directors seem fascinated with the process of dealing with the effects of near-death experience on the relationships of a survivor.