mailjohnw

It took me about 20 minutes to accept the movie. The scene of Ralph Fienes drilling the drawl out of Alren Erenreich's elocution locked me in, and I "got it". THe love the Coens have,for movies, for all the "Hollywood Touches" that all the movie makers in the history of American movies pervades every scene. I have to fault the writing for and performance by George Clooney. There's something missing,maybe the actor's connection with the role, or the elusiveness of that due to spotty writing of the part. Altho, when I think "Victor Mature", Clooney's role works much better. Brolin is great, his secretary great. All in all absolutely delightful, very dear, even precious.

Excellent movie. It is really a play, with a play's limited sets, but with the movie camera's freedom to somehow annotate the lines with sub-textual commentary. The camera, is, however, never, intrusive, and remains mostly neutral (if that is even possible). The immense frustration of this absurd ritual for divorce transfers to the viewer. The 'wife", seeking the divorce, remains almost silent, save for several curt responses to the self-important rabbis ruling over the case. The underlay here is Middle East culture, fundamentalism in my book, trundling it's (formerly: its) tyranny down thru these ages, and it makes you wonder how sane peep still adhere, so desperately it seems, to this primitive and obsolete madness.

The movie seems slow, awkward in places, but it's a story which MUST be told, and for that reason it gets 8 stars.

Reviewers here are kinda harsh, calling those involved in this event "stupid", and one hard-ass said they got what they deserve ...wow, such compassion. This may be psyche 101, or 102, or whatever, but the reason this craziness happened was due to "triangulation". A simple dyad of one person interacting with another, one on one, under these absurd circumstances (a voice on the phone representing "authority", would not have not resulted in the actual, and enacted outcome. There is no power-relationship between the "cop" and Becky, for example. Rather, Becky is by nature obedient to the cop, but is, moreover, under sway of her manager, who, day-to-day, is an "authority figure" to her. The manager, in turn, is triangulating with the cop and her own boss, the regional manager, with who she's already in hot water due to an expensive loss of spoiled food. And so the manager's compliance is primed by her recent failures--causing an almost unnatural desire to "please", to redeem herself, to avoid more problems-- and the manager can easily be exploited. The manager's fiancé comes into the picture already believing--after all, his sane, and bossy, girlfriend called on him for help, and when he arrived at the restaurant she was participating in a strange "strip-search", which, despite being obviously outside of any reasonable justitifcation, or unreasonable for that matter, he complied with. Remember the bumper sticker; QUESTION AUTHORITY!!!

You have to laff when the "Queen"--often seemingly desperate to kiss her AH husband into some sort of affectionate submission (she always fails to receive anything other than an aggressively polite peck, which seems more like a 'kiss-off')-- the "Queen" plays the victim card, due to the financial upheaval in 2008. She's truly sickening, despite her "humble" roots. Were these pigs ever in real jeopardy? Well, their "conspicuous consumption, had to be "downsized" from poisonous excess to sheer madness, and meanwhile, the wonderful housekeeper has suffered and struggled to meet her own dreams--and you get the feeling she's cast her lot in with the wrong people. Fascinating and disgusting, see it.

The movie is about the awful "policing", by the so-called police in Rio De Janeiro on this horrid day and night. The inept sniper is the guy who lost the woman's life. Making the attempt to shoot the maniac at that moment was beyond stupid when for HOURS the maniac seemed to almost offer himself as a target in all manner of positions inside the bus. Frustrating to say the least, because if there's one theme here--and for me it isn't the "explanation" and justification of Sandro's motives for doing this crazy crime, not the social precedents set by a life of abuse and poverty, it is the profound incompetence of the Rio police, in a third-world country pretending to live by the "rule of law".

The narrator, the teacher, adds a cynical, or maybe merely resigned, note to the story. How'd the narrator get from who he is shown to be in the story, sans beard, to the guy narrating the story, with beard? I think the narrator, the necessity for him, let alone the very presence of him, is a weakness in the movie, but in the skeem of a really fine film like this, it's a minor mistake. The viewer, then, by the narrator's narration, understands that some water has flowed under the bridge since the last scene in the actual story. Tho many write that this movie is "about a substitute teacher", one who has trouble staying put wherever, I don't think it's about that. It's about community, community as it manifests, permeates, and undermines or supports a school in it's midst. It's about fighting indifference, violence, chaos--entropy--by the simple act of caring.

Three stars deducted for the very poor "implementation" of the two males in the "team". Poor writing, and concomitently poor acting, for and by these two superfluousities, drag down the otherwise clever and hip show. Not to forget, various gratuitous, and studiously, uh, inserted, sex scenes. Cheadle is great, as always. But he has to manage to push thru some contrived, manipulative script. They're really gotta milk the kid-is-a-tranny thing. Speaking of, the kid is a very good little actor. He got aplomb. But you know. Characters, generally, must drive a plot, and not be mere mouthpieces for the s o-called jokes, gimmiks, and gags, and that ain't enufly going on here.

Many Euro films, especially, and others, like Avanim, have no idea what it takes to make a good movie--a good STORY. The absolutely MUST be a plot, which is something other than tracing a characters moods. This movie is tedious, belabored, self-indulgent. It takes way too long for the dramatic shift to occur and the main character, whose life, feeding her child, for example, is studiously documented, listlessly drifts from scene to scene without the viewer having an emotional latch to grab. The script is really nothing but an agenda, and tho the movie has pretty good "documentary" style acting, but it ain't enuf: first things first: STORY.

I'm watching the DVDs of DEADWOOD third season and it seems that somewhere near the middle or the end of season two, Milch's writing became infected with writing disease. You can usually sleep this off, but perhaps the production schedule prohibited that.

Many people in entertainment forums marvel at Milch's writing, but it's a question of balance. Forgive the cliché, but sometimes "less is more". The Shakespeare bug bit Dave, apparently, and, no, it's not that he's trying to write like Shakespeare wrote, but he's trying, way too hard, to write GREAT--and he can't. Here and there he can, yes, but not for every character in every other line. A little greatness goes a long way.

Something gotta give when almost everyone is speaking in their very own stilted "high-style". The scenes bog down. The flow of the story falters, and even stops. Make way for The Writing! The story even becomes predictable, because every scene is merely a vehicle for Milch-speech. You're walking along, trying to groove with the story, and you step in a sticky puddle of piddle.

This is not how people apprehend a story, through the preciously special use of "language". People apprehend a story by identifying with its characters, perhaps in spite of the writing, and Milch's writing--like Mamet's, by the way--too often shackles the actors, and literally tries to steal the scene from them, always for the worst. The "writing", having a life of its own, eclipses the characters, that the actors have busted their guts over to bring to life. There ends up being just one character: Milch.

Having said that, I notice the stories flow better when people other than Milch write. Plot comes first, it seems, when others write. As it should. Minus the goofy "comic relief" half-scenes, the stories are compelling, and I'm sorta sorry there won't be another season--even if I believe Deadwood is pretty much tapped out.