Movies I have watched recently
Sep. 28th, 2012 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI'm splitting this into two posts. First for good movies. Amongst those:
Brick
I highly recommend Brick, which was Joseph Gordon Levitt's breakout adult role after Third Rock (if you can call a small distribution indie film a breakout). I saw it when it was released in 2005, and spent a lot of it going, wait, isn't that the kid from Third Rock from the Sun?
It is an archetypal noir. If I wanted to exemplify the genre to somebody, with just one movie that had all the features, it would be Brick. Which makes it even more interesting that it gets counted as "neo-noir" because it's set at a high school. But it's set at a high school in the way that Romeo+Juliet was set in a modern city--that is, in no way except sets and costumes. All the main characters are high school kids--or rather, they look like high school kids--but act like adults with the long history that entails. This somehow really works. The writer/producer has said that he wanted to make a new Dashiel Hammett story, but didn't want to fall into all the visual cliches of the old noirs. So he came up with this.
And it is, throughout, brilliantly plotted, brilliantly acted, and brilliantly shot. Though it may take more than one viewing to catch all the pieces of the plot.
Rewatching this now was of particular interest, because the writer/producer and JGL are teaming up again--on Looper. From the ads, I kind of dismissed it as yet another high concept shoot-em-up (something like RED, which is entertaining, but not more than that). But if it came from the guy who wrote Brick, it's probably phenomenal. And the early reviews seem to think so.
Sneakers
I love this movie. I really do. And I do not want to hear any trash talk about it. I rewatched it cause my dad pointed out that it's set in San Francisco, and I've been watching movies filmed in SF lately. This was kind of shocking to me cause--I've watched this movie many, many times, and can remember the visuals of many scenes. But watching it again, after having been to SF--there's a scene where Alcatraz is bang behind Robert Redford, enormous, and I'd somehow never managed to notice that. They talk about the fog horn at the Golden Gate, they talk about the toy company being in Palo Alto, and I'd somehow managed to never notice any of this because I didn't know the place they were talking about.
What I enjoy about the movie at this point, well, a few things. A) I love all the performances, particularly Ben Kingsley (this is the role that made me love him) and Mary McDonnell, who will forever be the woman in Sneakers to me, and was the best part of BSG, in my opinion. I have not watched her new show, but I am so excited for that when it hits Netflix. Anyway. B) I love the score. And C) the techno-nostalgia. Tape recorders! MS-DOS! Keypad locks! Answering machines! God, I get such a kick out of all the gadgets. This is the technological landscape of my childhood.
Brick
I highly recommend Brick, which was Joseph Gordon Levitt's breakout adult role after Third Rock (if you can call a small distribution indie film a breakout). I saw it when it was released in 2005, and spent a lot of it going, wait, isn't that the kid from Third Rock from the Sun?
It is an archetypal noir. If I wanted to exemplify the genre to somebody, with just one movie that had all the features, it would be Brick. Which makes it even more interesting that it gets counted as "neo-noir" because it's set at a high school. But it's set at a high school in the way that Romeo+Juliet was set in a modern city--that is, in no way except sets and costumes. All the main characters are high school kids--or rather, they look like high school kids--but act like adults with the long history that entails. This somehow really works. The writer/producer has said that he wanted to make a new Dashiel Hammett story, but didn't want to fall into all the visual cliches of the old noirs. So he came up with this.
And it is, throughout, brilliantly plotted, brilliantly acted, and brilliantly shot. Though it may take more than one viewing to catch all the pieces of the plot.
Rewatching this now was of particular interest, because the writer/producer and JGL are teaming up again--on Looper. From the ads, I kind of dismissed it as yet another high concept shoot-em-up (something like RED, which is entertaining, but not more than that). But if it came from the guy who wrote Brick, it's probably phenomenal. And the early reviews seem to think so.
Sneakers
I love this movie. I really do. And I do not want to hear any trash talk about it. I rewatched it cause my dad pointed out that it's set in San Francisco, and I've been watching movies filmed in SF lately. This was kind of shocking to me cause--I've watched this movie many, many times, and can remember the visuals of many scenes. But watching it again, after having been to SF--there's a scene where Alcatraz is bang behind Robert Redford, enormous, and I'd somehow never managed to notice that. They talk about the fog horn at the Golden Gate, they talk about the toy company being in Palo Alto, and I'd somehow managed to never notice any of this because I didn't know the place they were talking about.
What I enjoy about the movie at this point, well, a few things. A) I love all the performances, particularly Ben Kingsley (this is the role that made me love him) and Mary McDonnell, who will forever be the woman in Sneakers to me, and was the best part of BSG, in my opinion. I have not watched her new show, but I am so excited for that when it hits Netflix. Anyway. B) I love the score. And C) the techno-nostalgia. Tape recorders! MS-DOS! Keypad locks! Answering machines! God, I get such a kick out of all the gadgets. This is the technological landscape of my childhood.