This final “half-season” of The Sopranos – only five episodes remain – reminds me of the movie version of Clue, in the sense that series creator David Chase has set up any number of possible endings, none any better than another. Each week brings new foreshadowing – a new suspect if you’re inclined to think that Tony’s going to bite it – but no real sense of a final destination.
Why is it that the skillfully made and human Babel doesn’t resonate more, and feel more honest and rich?
So now we get to the inevitable hand-wringing about violence in the media, in this case trying to tie the Virginia Tech massacre to Oldboy: “The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran [sic] Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.” The link is tenuous, and the assertion is utterly ridiculous.
Have you ever read or heard a discussion of a movie that made you think, They just don’t get it? Have you ever wondered, Am I the only person who saw the movie that way? Culture Snob is hosting a forum for essays, arguments, and provocations on misunderstood movies. The blog-a-thon will run Wednesday, May 16, through Sunday, May 20, although I won’t turn my nose up at contributions that arrive before then. The premise is that movies are marketed and evaluated coarsely and simplistically, and that they often contain a richness that’s never mined by critics and casual audiences.
Despite (and because of) its pedigree, Natural Born Killers is undoubtedly trashy, reveling in the killing spree of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) and joyfully joining in the public and media fascination with mass murderers. And it’s an invigorating, brilliantly assembled movie celebrating the way that cinema can make the ugliest human behavior thrilling.
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.