Second movie in a row about people living in the bush, although this one took itself more seriously, which was a mistake, because on a serious level this film was absurd. The children were engaging, and the movie moved briskly enough, as we never knew what was coming next, which was partly because nothing made much sense, including the Viggo Mortensen character. Swiss Family Robinson, as I remember it, had more subtlety.
Sort of a Revenant Lite, with a wild pig instead of a bear and a fat 13-year-old instead of Leo DiCaprio. How could you not be charmed, though, by chubby Ricky Baker, a budding juvenile delinquent who runs away cluelessly into the New Zealand outback, where the redoubtable Sam Neill grudgingly tolerates him, then grows fond. For comic relief, the Child Care Services’ version of Inspector Javert pursues Ricky Baker in a chase that culminates in full Mad Max mode. I never understand how people survive out there on berries, leaves and eels, but that wasn’t really the point.
The story is better than the storytelling. How many people do we need to hear saying, “I can’t comment,” in order to grasp that a virus to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program is a state secret, an obvious fact to begin with. Then there is the problem of how to film computer code, which supplies the main visual for the movie’s first half. With so much shrouded in mystery, telling the story out of chronological order doesn’t help either. What saves the film is its final quarter, in which far-reaching questions about cyberwarfare and secrecy are raised: questions that perhaps have no answer.
A summer piffle – watchable mainly because it was French. Nothing was believable, or terribly charming, if that was the justification. Two young boys on an adventure, but it didn’t make us care about them or identify with any of their experiences. How much better was Mud, for example.
For me, this was too much of the same thing. It was beautifully shot – one of those films you remember as black-and-white, even though it was in color, with every other shot framed like a painting, a Vermeer or Hammershoi or Tooker. The lead actress was easy on the eyes, but the nuns all looked the same and the attempts to differentiate their stories didn’t amount to anything dramatically. When I saw the trailer I felt I’d seen the whole movie, and seeing the whole movie didn’t change this.
I was left totally blank – which, not coincidentally, was the main character’s only expression – by this story of an older dental technician in Caracas who picks up young men for his sexually deviate purposes and doesn’t mind being beaten up, rejected and exploited. Then at the end he maybe manipulates his young charge into killing the man’s father, but for what reason we’re never told. And then he turns the young man in. Nothing made sense or was particularly enjoyable to watch – compared, say, to Viva, which had a similar setting.
Just as art can be abstract or surrealistic as well as realistic, there’s no reason a movie can’t deviate from realism into an alternate world such as this, where people are not allowed to remain single and if they do not remarry in 45 days will be transformed into an animal of their choice. (Isn’t that sort of like what Hindus believe?) The characters in The Lobster inhabited this world quite convincingly and human nature remained eminently recognizable. I enjoyed that director Yorgos Lanthimos used actors from Ireland, England, Greece, France and America as his leads to give a universal flavor to the strange world. If there was a moral – something about love or marriage – I couldn’t quite make sense of it.
May there always be an England, particularly an England of manor houses, landed gentry, beautiful clothes and complete paragraphs – even better when described by Jane Austen. Kate Beckinsale is marvelous as the conniving Lady Susan of the book’s title and everyone else revolves around her, with the men rather more buffoonish and the women more engaged in society as a sport. Writer-director-producer Whit Stillman has the right amount of fun presenting his tableaux, with beautiful music and gorgeous settings. We can all concur as we laugh at the gentleman’s comment, “I think everyone should live on their own land.”
Aimless and about an hour too long, it gave the impression of being transcribed from the Scottish equivalent of Gone With the Wind and better suited to a TV miniseries – both of which turn out to be the case. Just when we thought we’d reached the end of a pointless but pleasant glance at life in rural Scotland, the “bad thing” we sort of knew was coming showed up and made a mess of the story. We did get a view of Scotland as a very different place with a lot of taciturn folk.
A fine comedic performance by Ryan Gosling as a bumbling L.A. private eye in this silly but harmless piffle that echoes much better noir films of the past. Russell Crowe lends heft to the proceedings, which go a little haywire once bullets, sadly but inevitably, start to spray.
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