Looking at this list, it’s apparent I’ve been slacking. So let’s dispense with Hollywoodland, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Art School Confidential, Serenity, and 13 Tzameti in fewer than 900 words total. Yes, it is a motley crew.
Why oh why did I assent to River Cities’ Reader film critic Mike Schulz’s inebriated suggestion that we record a commentary track for Lady in the Water?
The reasons for recording (with Bride of Culture Snob) this commentary track to The Prestige are many and simple:
I was struck by something Pan’s Labyrinth writer/director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview: Question: “So often in fairy-tale analysis, there’s a tendency to read any story of a young girl as a psychosexual parable, but this film specifically doesn’t go that way.” Answer: “Not at all. I consciously avoided it, not out of prudishness – though I probably am prudish – but out of the same reason why I tried to avoid the myth of vampirism in Cronos through using the most completely unerotic window I could; I tried to approach it like an addiction. In Pan’s Labyrinth, I knew that the psychosexual angle was really tired; it felt very 1980s for me, and I felt this was a movie about a girl who was on the threshold of making a choice, where she could cease to be a girl, but it was not about sexual identity.” Perhaps he should have told that to the movie’s designers and marketers.
It’s no surprise that Jen Chapin was pulled in several directions. Her father, the late Harry Chapin, is most famous for writing and performing “Cat’s in the Cradle” but was also a humanitarian, co-founding World Hunger Year in 1975. Jen Chapin is following her own social-justice calling.
This commentary track deals with a handful of themes: the blunt use of color contrasted with the almost tangential way the movie deals with its ostensible theme of liberty; the use of visual and aural cues to indicate the subjective nature of the film; Julie’s progression from isolation to active engagement with the world; and the relationship between the concept of “freedom” and Kieslowski’s obvious interest in responsibility. Plus, I call Juliette Binoche a “two-faced bitch.” How can you resist?
I was complaining to a friend about the final half-hour of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and he suggested I was looking at it all wrong. If you see the movie as a serious cop-and-gangster thriller, it does fall apart, with its escalating body count and that blunt-instrument final shot, juxtaposing unattainable dreams with vermin. But if you see it as a comedy … .
