The dumbest reviews of David Fincher’s Fight Club condemned the movie’s amorality or philosophy. Those that hailed it as profound, original, and daring ran a close second. That didn’t leave many to compete for third.
The conventional interpretation of American Beauty is wrong, and lauding or damning the movie based on it is a major mistake. Except for the prologue, American Beauty is a movie within a movie, not a straightforward narrative.
If Peter Weir’s movies fundamentally operate on basic levels and within simple formulas, they also resonate more deeply than those of virtually any other working director. Weir creates well-rounded and complicated characters, puts them in a premise, and watches them go. He is, in short, making character-driven movies, generally without pretense or intrusive style, which might be one reason he’s not held in terribly high esteem.
I had an amazing moment watching Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men. When the movie’s twist was revealed, I immediately felt cheated. I’ve seen a few con-artist films in my day, and this one – which had seemed so promising and interesting and different – was suddenly just the same as David Mamet’s, particularly House of Games.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was overshadowed in hype, box office, and awards late last year by that other odd, Charlie Kaufman-scripted movie, Adaptation. But Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a superior work. It is more engaging, more challenging, and more stylish, and it packs an emotional wallop that makes Adaptation feel even more glib and cynical.
I love Jeff Bridges. I love Tim Robbins. I love them equally, and (my gut tells me) in about the same way. We are a ménage à trios, even if they don’t know it yet.
Why are George A. Romero’s zombie sequels so effective? The performances are over-the-top and one-note, the music is dated and bad, they’re directed to showcase special effects rather than advance the story, and – really – they’re not terribly exciting or scary. Yet 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead remain great horror movies, two distinctive and very different films that showcase Romero’s peculiar gifts for social commentary and understanding human behavior.
Magnolia breaks through the self-aware emotional vacancy of the decade’s cool movies (both sterile and knowingly clever, epitomized by Quentin Tarantino) without losing its edge; it gets inside its characters’ minds and hearts with dazzling style. It is afraid of neither elaborate tracking shots nor a good, fairly won cry.
When Smoke was released in 1995, it received generally good notices as an intriguing but slight art-house film. Critics noted the literary sensibility of novelist Paul Auster, but they didn’t appear to understand how the movie fit into his body of work.
Did they do it? Capturing the Friedmans is wonderfully rich, and of all the things in it, this is among the least rewarding lines of inquiry for me. The most obvious point of the film is that we cannot know the truth of the accusations, so why argue about it?