End Of The Week Shorts #78
Not Donnie Yen's finest hour. Legend of the Fist sees Donnie Yen pay homage to his idol, Bruce Lee. This is simultaneously the best and worst thing about this movie. It is made fun by the ludicrous presence of the ghost of Bruce Lee, which is embedded into the spectacle-centric action which formulates, as Lee (Godard and Belmondo... eh?) perfected it, a 'cinema of the cool'. Alas, whilst it is enjoyable to see Bruce Lee-esque drama and action, Yen and director, Andrew Lau, can only manage a cheap imitation, awkwardly mapping elements of the 70s directorial style (subjective POV, flash zooms, exuberant hero shots) and Lee's mannerisms onto an uninteresting narrative that fails to bring about themes of depth, characters of interest and drama of particular weight. In short, this is a Bruce Lee film without Bruce Lee. It would be trash if Donnie Yen wasn't present; it is he alone that makes this watchable. Mediocre, but a good time.
Among the many things that Persona does, it re-defines the concept of seeing life in black and white. Such a world is not simple, not at all easy. Existential voids bleed light, the unknown suspends the knowable, silence echoes around all that can be spoken, truth floats through rivers of perspective whose waters only ever come close to merging and whose banks are impenetrable. The subject and the object in this world is indistinguishable, alas, it is one contrived and fallen into. The true question hanging over Persona concerns maternity, its basic interrogative being: What would a child see and think? How would they exist in the shadow of our two main characters? How do our main characters exist as that shadow?
It's almost embarrassing, but ultimately freeing, that I have seen this around 10 times, yet still fail to grip it properly. I have no conclusion, no analysis today, but if you have not seen this, it is a must-see.
I never particularly liked The Big Lebowski until I stopped considering it to be a highly quotable cult crime/comedy picture. There is an element of this film that is doused with character and personality; a 90s cinema feel that seems ever so slightly Tarantino-esque, a feel of a cinema that wants to befuddle and subvert as to find a niche audience, to appear above the Hollywood slump heap as to become a new Hollywood ideal. This kind of cinema, rebellious in a quasi-French - I suppose you'd call it American - kind of way, grows tiring, I find. But, The Big Lebowski does not, thanks to the fact that it is through-and-through a Coen bros film. This, in my belief, is one of their typical hero narratives that exists in close relation to Fargo, Burn Before Reading, No Country For Old Men, etc. This is a film, as many Coen bros films are, that genuinely tries to find new ways to confront the path of the hero. For this, I find this perfectly brilliant, especially when watched soon after a few other Coen bros films. Much more could be said, but I'll hold my tongue for now...
Meadows' films are a joy to watch for their rag-tag sense of realism, for the fact that the actors are so often improvising and having fun, but more so, are simply being themselves. This Is England has many sequences in which the line between documentary and narrative are blurred so that the cinematic space feels uncannily familiar. As with Small Time, but maybe to with lesser intensity, this at times feel too familiar, too British, to me. If we stick with a look at the performances, this of course aims to do and say more than Small Time, and in turn demands much from its cast, especially our central character, played by a 14 year old Thomas Turgoose. Whilst impressive, the performance is not perfect, but, above all else, this achieves something rare: genuity. Much could be said about the narrative of This Is England, but what strikes out hardest is just this.
Not too bad - a phrase I am overusing in my reviews of stand-up specials, but... not too bad. I'm too familiar with Rogan's podcast to have been particularly surprised by any of his premises, but I still had some strong laughs when the intensity was ramped up and the act-outs centralised. There is a little too much play with the explanation of comedy and the weird space around it in the modern day as this has been done to death (as I end up saying after almost every stand-up special now) over the past few years. Rogan has one or two funny things to say in this new, rather uninteresting genre of meta-defensive comedy, but I wish he'd talk more about his cats and less about the internet. The last thing I'd say is that whilst this was good fun overall, the continuity is off and so the editing jarring. In the end... not bad.
Less a movie, more a memory test, Die Hard With A Vengeance is an endless, endless, selection of set-pieces; each successive new one having you ponder what on earth was happening 20 minutes ago and what on earth could be happening in 20 minutes (hopefully some credits).
I don't dislike this at all - I have just seen it too many times. This leaves me marvelling at just how long and drawn out this is on each revisit. I know this from being a child falling asleep at night with this playing on VHS (and may have been reminded of this a little last night): so much of this movie functions like a radio play with the endless barrage of dialogue and exposition, especially in the first hour or so, making the images somewhat redundant - or at least a side-dish of spectacle. As said, I don't dislike this - it is simply a monster of meandering Hollywood entertainment.
A non-specific, non-spoiler review.
Enjoyable, but really rather messy--objectively bad at many points. Tonally inconsistent, lacking depth and meaning, riddled with holes of logic, cliched, awkward, meandering, this does so much wrong, but somehow manages to do a substantial amount of good. The comedy and the subtle (yet highly undeveloped and unexplored) relationship between Venom and Eddie is what saves so much of his film, making, especially on this first watch, the second and third act light and really rather engaging. The plot and narrative arc, however is inexcusably bad. I don't know if someone drafted half of a script and threw this in the 'done' pile, or if this has been hacked to death, but Venom feels incredibly incomplete and stripped. I would happily see a three hour version of this with 30-45 minutes more of character exploration. As is, this wastes so many opportunities, but was a good time.
I have a soft spot and fascination for original low to mid-range budgeted sci-fi films. After the 80s and 90s,it seems that this form of cinema has been lying quite dormant.
The Titan is not a game changer, but it is somewhat intriguing. It asks what will have to happen if humans are to undergo a profound change to escape earth? In such, it explores the transformation of a volunteer solider into a creature able to survive on a moon of Mercury and the effects of this on his wife. It then questions the value in this transformation, in bidding goodbye to humanity, and concludes that this will be necessary, but can only be properly done if lead by symbolically feminine motivations; other planets and new humans born not out of adventure but nurture. This isn't stated with much complexity or nuance, and the exploration of character is rather shallow. Such leaves The Titan only mildly interesting and, as implied, far from a game changer.
In the world of stand-up comedy there is a common dichotomy drawn between the painfully real and the ridiculously funny. This very rarely appears in cinema simply for the fact that seeing a joke about, for example, terrorists, is far more real than just hearing one. This emphasis of realism in comedy is detrimental to its capacity to make an audience laugh. Four Lions is one of the only films I can call to mind that dares to do what no other comedies do; it takes a premise of dramatic and serious weight, a premise of real consequence, and pulls absurdities out of it. How well this works is, however, questionable as there are just so many scenes with a depressing underlying subtext that is hard to disassociate from; how, for instance, are we to simultaneously care for our main character and find scenes with his young son funny or his ironic demise hilarious? Maybe this is possible in retrospect, but the daring comedy that this is is fleetingly impressive and sometimes incredibly funny, yet ultimately a bit too dark for me. Maybe more is to be explored.
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