Blite2000

I should mention at the start that I saw the Director's Cut, not the original. Also, I don't want to go through my thoughts on the whole thing since other people have written far more capably on this movie than I have.

Overall, I thought the film was filled with excellent acting and ideas, especially Gyllenhaal, Barrymore and McDonnell. However, the ending wrecked it for me.

In essence, Donnie Darko gives you two choices: Donnie is either schizophrenic, or he is actually involved in a wild sci-fi adventure to save the universe.

Since Donnie is already, as far as we can tell, seeing a psychiatrist / therapist and on "medication" prior to the first appearance of Frank the rabbit, it is reasonably clear that Donnie *does* in fact have genuine mental problems (otherwise, why is he seeing the psychiatrist? unless the rabbit has been preparing things for a while?). We are later told, however, that Donnie has been taking placebos. We are (and, again, I assume) therefore supposed to assume Donnie is *not* schizophrenic, even though the film's strength would be its portrayal of a schizophrenic's world.

If Donnie is not schizophrenic, then the second choice presents itself: everything we are seeing is in fact real, and Donnie is genuinely following the tenets of a book written by a woman about time travel / multiple universes. But the "reality" approach is also a problem: the tenets of the book read like pure hokum - they seem two dimensional, childish almost - yet they are supposed to be grounded in science. Assuming that we are supposed to believe the world is real, the time travel book looks like it was written specifically to justify the plot of the movie. No explanation is given, for example, of why it is necessary to have "manipulated dead", or quite why this relates to Hawking's theories on space time which are referenced earlier on. Actually, I felt that the book worked better as a product of Donnie's schizophrenic imagination, since it sounded so obviously ludicrous that only Donnie himself could have been expected to believe it, and it is simply not tenable that Donnie's physics teacher would actually refer Donnie to both Hawking and a book that sounds rather like a children's story of which he happens to have a copy in his briefcase.

So, Donnie is either schizophrenic or really following the book. At the end, Donnie is back at the events that took place at the beginning of the film. Instead of escaping the fall of the aircraft engine, which led to the original course of events, he chooses to lie in his bed, the engine falls, and he dies. And with him dies the film.

If Donnie is schizophrenic, then the effect of the ending is that the entire episode was a dream, because he dies before the events happen - i.e. it never happened, so has zero emotional impact. This is the same problem that, incidentally and in my opinion, ruined David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

If Donnie is *not* schizophrenic, then we are expected to believe that Donnie has successfully time travelled / whatever back to a point in time when he had a choice. On *that* interpretation, there *would* be an emotional impact to Donnie's decision. *But* the principles by which he has proceeded are so patently ridiculous that the film loses all believability and becomes the worst kind of science fiction, where the rules can be made and changed at the will of the author (much in the way that Tolkien managed to save Frodo and Sam at the end of Return of the King by flying in eagles without any prior explanation, destroying the otherwise convincing sense of three books' worth of writing in one fell eagle-swoop). All the hints in the film that Donnie is a Messianic figure, choosing his sacrifice, come to nothing because the rules Donnie follows are not credible.

In essence, to me at least, the movie was a choice between a fantastic look at mental illness with the most cop-out ending possible or simply a pathetic excuse for a science fiction movie. Either way, the ending ruins it.

Which is a crying shame.

Well, I'd read the short story and had been waiting for this movie to come out for nigh on a year and a half with eager anticipation so don't expect a diatribe of gay-hate from this direction (I'm gay). Unfortunately, though, I have to say that I didn't take to Brokeback Mountain as well as some/many.

The story, such as it is (there's a reason it was written as a short story), covers the love between Ennis Del Mar (quiet, brooding closet gay cowboy) and Jack Twist (more lively closet gay cowboy), from the initial passions they share on Brokeback Mountain to the emergence of their (separate) family lives and their attempts to keep what they share going as they head towards a tragic end. And that's really *all* the story is - two guys, one more repressed than the other, in love. To me the main problem with the movie is that it takes this very simple theme and tries to flesh it out by adding vast sections dealing with each character's family situation. I'm not convinced it works - by spending so much time *not* dealing with the relationship between Jack and Ennis the film loses focus and it clouds both the flow of the tale and, ultimately, the emotional punch it packs.

The film also suffers from something I didn't expect: a focus on sex at the expense of affection. I've read this in another review, so it's apparently not just me, but I find it hard to understand why Lee chose to concentrate on the sex and violence between Jack and Ennis but shied away from showing *affection* at any point. It's hard to feel the love between the characters when every opportunity there is to reveal it is forsaken (for instance, we see the Jack and Ennis waking up in their tent wrapped around each other for all of three seconds, there are moments of horseplay which serve as a poor substitute and, *SPOILER* at the very end we finally catch a glimpse of a hug). Close to the end of the film there are a handful of scenes where the sheer power of emotion these two feel for each other is finally (and magnificently) credible, but otherwise it seems overwhelmingly to be sex and punches. I have no problem with seeing a lot of sex, but aren't these characters supposed to feel something other than anger and lust, too? The other gripe I'd have at Brokeback is that it's simply far, far, far, FAR too long and the plot can't sustain it. This is particularly conspicuous at the beginning. Lee - very uncharacteristically (compare, e.g. The Ice Storm) - goes for the wide, beautiful scenery approach for almost fifteen minutes of screen time in which very little characterisation takes place and, frankly, very little else relevant happens, either. Yes, the mountains are beautiful but there's a limit. And it's in this initial segment that the very odd choices the filmmakers have made in terms of what to give time to are most apparent: we have the overkill of vista shots eating up time (including a pretty shot of the clouds in the sky - which comes out of nowhere for no apparent reason), then *SPOILER* Jack and Ennis get to drinking in the early evening. Suddenly, the sky is black, hours have passed, and they're about to go to bed together for the first time. What?! Is it not necessary for the audience to witness what would have been the dialogue which could have made the whole relationship credible? Right from this excruciatingly slow (and wrong-footed) start the film is handicapped in time terms. The midsection meanders almost aimlessly and the ending, which *is* emotionally intense, feels very abrupt in comparison.

Finally, the new (compared to the book) family element to the ending presumably is intended to give us the idea that Ennis isn't shirking away from his fears any more. Trouble is, it was never really Ennis's family that Ennis was shirking away from. So it's hard to see how it's relevant in any way (maybe Jack's made him a good man?). It might have been better to leave it with the Ennis's discovery of the shirt (the significance of which has been muddied by the expansion of the family sub-plots).

All this is not to say that I hated Brokeback. There are some major plus points: the movie is beautifully shot; the acting is universally fabulous, including every single bit player; the final scenes are intense and heartbreaking (although if you've already read the story I suspect they lose some of their power); the score is wonderful. It's just a bit of a disappointment that it doesn't quite work the way it could have done.

I went into this pretty excited. After all, it's far and wide described as one of the best, if not *the* best film ever made. Frankly, I didn't see it.

The first problem I had with The Seventh Seal was the acting. The knight, Death, and the squire were highlights, but the rest of the cast had an almost pantomime-like quality that is very, very distracting. In fact, this may not simply be an acting problem - many of the set-ups of the film are pretty pantomime: there is a scene with the actors playing out a song involving a cock crowing while, behind the stage, another actor tries to seduce a girl, which is not only sonically grating but completely ludicrous. I tried to work out if it was intended to be satirical but it actually comes off more like the Benny Hill show. In another scene, in which one of the actors is made to dance like a bear on the table in an inn, the camera cuts to reaction shots of the crowd who burst into hysterical laughter in a completely non-spontaneous, false and bizarre manner. It just doesn't work.

The second problem I had was the contrived nature of the situations the knight finds himself in: at one point self-flaggelists walk into the village in a long procession waving incense and everyone kneels and weeps. This has been set up in advance by an explanation of who these flaggelists are. And, because of the set up, it, again, doesn't work. Similarly, when the troupe are in the woods towards the end of the film, they are faced with a character (who has previously been shown to be a *not very nice man*) with the plague. Why, other than to have the troupe look death in the face and make the terribly unsubtle point about whether forgiveness should be given to those about to die, is he in the woods miles from anywhere? Once again, it doesn't work.

Every question the film is trying to pose is given its own scene, so that the whole story plays like a series of distinct vignettes linked only by the knight character and two or three characters who are obviously set up to take a fall later in the film. *However*, Bergman sets up the film as a linear progression between the knight's knowing he is going to die and his ultimate death. You can't have it both ways - you either go down the vignette route or you go the linear route. You can't have the scene in the bar, the flaggelists, the burning of the "witch" all supposedly happening in a linear fashion, since they are all a little too random to gel together.

And, for me at least, the result of all this is that this is not a film that could ever be described as "subtle". You see every question coming even before Bergman gives it its ten-minute moment of screen time. The only thought left in your mind is what weird contortion of the plot Bergman is going to put us through to get to that question. And, as a result, the film is very boring to watch. At times I found myself begging that Death would show up just to add a little spice. And that's without even mentioning how *excrutiating* the songs are....

All in all, I'd say The Seventh Seal is very disappointing and I couldn't really recommend it. That said, though, any film that is rated so highly by so many people is always going to deserve at least a glance. It's clearly not trash.

Before I get into my (very brief) comment, I do regard Troi Couleurs: Rouge as one of the best, if not the best film I have ever seen. But I found Bleu flat, and worse, intensely boring. It is, to me, a meandering, pointless exercise in the meaning of fidelity / freedom. Characters behave quirkily without any seeming motivation, and arrive and leave seemingly at random never to be seen again just so that we can have another incidence of infidelity dumped into the picture. There is just too little backstory to make you care about Binoche's character, and too little plot to propel you into the film. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while "idea based" films can be enthralling, they can only be enthralling when there is a plot which successfully carries the idea (which is exactly what makes Rouge a masterpiece). Here, there's no plot, just the - pretty primitive - idea, which is exactly why I think Bleu is not a masterpiece.

I thought this film was utterly dire. Its satire was weak and horribly, horribly self-indulgent (why have there been so many films and TV shows made about screenwriters? how many writers do we know in the 'real' world?! why do we care?! why was Pacey more popular than Dawson in Dawson's Creek, etc., etc.). The "funnily bad" idea they build up for a movie within the movie isn't funnily bad - it's just bad (if you want funnily bad ideas for movies you only have to watch the first shot of The Player to see what can be done). The cameos are improbable and unconvincing. The plot is atrocious. And it has a happy ending.

Sharon Stone *almost* saves it, but not quite.

And then you finish it and think, was that the joke? Is the whole joke of the movie that the movie itself is an utterly, utterly dreadful, perfectly *bad* Hollywood hash-up? Is it, in fact, a masterpiece of knowing, well crafted high art? If that was the point, it fails even at doing that, because it's not even memorably bad.

I wanted to like this film. I couldn't. Watch the Player, rather than this movie which feels like Albert Brooks pompously declaring his genius to the world.

I thought it was good, if over-long. I've been reading the comments and people saying things about Indochine's realism. From what I can understand from my family (who are all half-French, half-Vietnamese, and who left Vietnam pretty much at the time the film wraps up), the sense you get of Eliane "being in charge" of the Vietnamese, and the failure to look at things from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese themselves, but only from the French perspective, is pretty accurate.

Society was essentially segregated in Saigon / Indochina. One member of my family told me a story about how they left the French "compound" in Saigon one day with their mother and - for the first time - saw the real Vietnamese people, in tattered clothes... Cue "why are they in rags, mummy?" "because that's the way most people live."

So, as I see it at least, I wouldn't criticise this film for the sense you get of the French being oblivious to the reality of their existence in Indochina. That's the way it was. That's the way most colonies were, in fact (think Shanghai). And I think that's the masterstroke of this film: that people lived their lives without ever thinking about the broader impact of what was going on, until everything just fell to pieces around their ears.