Movie Reviews In Brief
Atonement
For me, good dramas fall into one of two categories:
1) Movies about original characters I’ve never seen on screen before, or;
2) Movies about old familiar archetypical characters placed in situations we haven’t seen them face.
Unfortunately, on either of those levels Atonement falls a little flat, since it’s about archetypical characters doing the standard Hollywood things. We’re introduced to two people who are attracted to each other, and they spend the rest of the movie biting their lips and staring meaningfully at each other whenever they can.
Atonement is a classic Hollywood war-saga, wherein Two Tragic Characters Are Separated By This Deuced Conflict And Write Letters To One Another To Prove Their Love. The set-up’s a little different in that the reason the Two Tragic Characters are separated is due to the woman’s jealous younger sister, who sees them attracted to each other and does something very foolish and petty to split them apart, but the effects of the war are really what drives the heart of Atonement.
That could be an interesting plot, I guess, except that I always felt ahead of the curve. I guess some might witness the sedate pace as building character, except that the characters – at least in the first two hours or so – never did anything that surprised me. (Okay, they did one thing, and it involved the “C” word, but then it lost me again with a goofy swap-setup that would put a sitcom to shame.)
Atonement wants to spend a lot of time looking at these people so we fathom their intentions, but we instinctively get what’s going on, and so I found a lot of it redundant. I said, “Right, those two are attracted to each other,” and after I got it we spent another ten minutes on studied closeups and smoldering glances. I said, “Okay, the sister is going to stumble in on them,” and after I got it we spent two minutes on a slow, close-up pan. I said, “Okay, this guy with the funny face and the bad mustache is supposed to be a creep,” and then we spent another several moments with the camera panning back and forth.
I guess the intent is to really show the nooks and crannies of their acting, but given that nobody’s doing anything we didn’t see coming after their first introduction, I must have missed the point.
Everything that happens is drearily predictable, right up until the end – which, like the ending of No Country For Old Men, is meant to subvert the intention of moviegoers who know how this movie must end. It plays thoroughly on what you expect, which is good.
That ending is superb. It stuck with me the next morning, where I was still rolling the taste of it around in my mouth, trying to determine how I felt about it. That ending’s why it won the Golden Globes.
But still, it felt like an ending that was far better than the movie it was attached to – and unlike No Country For Old Men, which was superb and lean all the way through, Atonement felt a little too flabby for me, a little too in love with its own shots (though there’s one beautifully-crafted war shot that puts Hitchcock to shame).
As such, it was redeemed. But was it the best movie of the year? Not for me, anyway. I’m glad I saw it, but that’s about as far as it goes.
I should add, however, that James McAvoy, who did a suitable if unexceptional job in Last King of Scotland (playing second banana to the real meat of Forest Whittaker’s role), seems to have an eye for solid roles. Some people take their Oscar-film-appearing boost and fritter it away on Catwoman, but he seems to be positioning himself quite nicely. Go him.
28 Weeks Later
I wasn’t a big fan of 28 Days Later, which was a good zombie film but not the second coming of the undead Christ, as many seemed to think. What irritated me about 28 Days Later was the way it transformed from a zombie film into Rambo, wherein an untrained civilian whoops the entire army with nothing but wits and fists.
But I’d heard good things about this, so I Netflixed it. And I found it to be thoroughly unpleasant, but in a fascinating way – this may have been the best horror film of 2007, mainly because it has moments in it that made me genuinely sick to my stomach. That wasn’t due to the gore, which is splattery but not graphic; it was due to what was happening.
Those horrific moments come at a cost, though.
See, 28 Weeks Later is actually more of a documentary than a film. We follow a new outbreak, looking at the changed face of an England ravaged by zombies, and as such there’s not the usual horror trope of a lead character who will remain alive until the end of the film. Anyone can die here, and they do, often in shocking ways. There were several setups where I went, “Oh, this person’s protected by the screenplay, someone will clearly come to rescue them. That’s what happens when… Oh, Jesus, what’s going on? Help that person! God! I – “
Then silence, as I sat back, stunned. There was no rescue. They got punked.
The unpredictability comes at a cost, though, since there’s not as much of an emotional core. You’re following a story, not a person, and as such there’s no one you wind up ultimately rooting for.
28 Weeks Later may be the purest zombie movie ever. Nothing is safe. Anyone is up for grabs. Trust nothing. That’s its strength and its weakness.
Gates of Heaven
Roger Ebert’s been pimping this documentary about a pet cemetery for years, and I finally got to see it. Wener Herzog famously said that if the director could get his film about the workings of dead animals shown in a theater, he’d eat the shoe he was wearing, which led to an infamous short film.
Ebert’s long claimed that Gates of Heaven is proof that you can make any movie interesting, and in part he’s right. The kind of man whose only dream is to make a nice place to bury pets is someone who has an interesting take on life, to say the least, and as it turns out he gets a lot of competition from the rendering plant, which boils horses and dogs and cats down into glue and fat.
The rendering plant guy is the star of the movie. He is the blustering ancestor of Fred Willard’s ignoramus appearances in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, a guy who can’t understand why people don’t want to discuss tallow-making at dinner and tells the gleeful tale of how they once rendered an elephant. He’s completely in love with his job, and completely ignorant of other people, so he’s a wonder to watch.
The latter half of the film’s a little slow as we watch the stoner brother and his go-getter brother, who reminded Gini of the self-help-hawking dad in Little Miss Sunshine. But it’s still entertaining.
The film hasn’t aged particularly well, though. It was made in 1978, and documentaries have learned a lot from regular movies since then; the default here seems to be to put the camera on someone for five minutes and let ‘em rip, which works when the person is interesting and is tedious when it’s not.
But the political machinations of pet cemeteries, complete with grand tales of backstabbing, lawsuits, and jealousies, turns out to be pretty good grist for the mill. Who knew? Well, Ebert, apparently.
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