Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Never fear, I am alive!
I'm just... I've been BUSY the past couple of weeks.
[BEGIN PERSONAL STORY TIME]
You see, three weeks ago, I was offered a new job (YAY! This is a VERY GOOD THING!), and they gave me a start date of May 1. Awesome, right? I get to give two weeks notice and take a week off to relax and start the new job fresh as a daisy, right? WRONG. As it happens, our Annual Benefit at my (then-current, now-former) job was on April 27. And leaving right before the Benefit would just be a massive dick move, which I just couldn't do, even though it meant that my last three weeks there would be hell, because I would be doing extra extra work for the Benefit on top of my normal workload, and on top of that, I would be doing transition/end-of-job work. And then I would go into my new job having only had a weekend to recover. And of course, the Benefit was on a Thursday, so I was crazy busy with a million things and just didn't get the time to participate in this. I would feel worse if I had literally anything to say about cop TV shows.
[END PERSONAL STORY TIME]
But now, I'm back(!) and better than ever(?)!
Only..... are there THAT MANY movies about clones? Hmmmmmmm... let's see how outside the box I can get.....
Possession (Adrzej Zulawski, 1981) I don't even know if I can accurately describe this fever dream of a movie, but I will at least make a valiant attempt: Sam Neill returns home from business (what type of business is never exactly explained, but it's vaguely espionage-adjacent) to find his wife, Isabelle Adjani, distant, cold, and probably cheating on him. They split, but when he finds that she is neglecting their son, he becomes more obsessed with just what, exactly, is happening with her. We're eventually shown what is happening, but even then, and even after watching this COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE MOVIE twice, I'm not entirely sure what it is. Most of Polish great Zulawski's films start at about a 9 on an intensity scale of 10, and never let up. Possession, made when he was going through a divorce, starts at a 10, and only escalates from there. It is the most intense, visceral break-up movie I've ever seen, completely earning its place in the horror genre even though it's not REALLY horror (don't let the Carlo Rambaldi credit fool you), by dialing perfectly normal situations and conversations to 11 and letting them play out with two terrific actors told to go for broke. Neill has never been better, and Adjani more than earns every award she received (including the César and Cannes Palme for Best Actress) for her breakdown in the subway alone. Utterly hypnotic even when it frustratingly refuses to make any sense, Possession is completely unlike any other movie you will ever see, and more than worth a watch. Oh, and both Adjani and Neill play their characters' doppelgangers in the movie, although I'm not going to spoil how for either of them.
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) Sam Neill double feature, y'all!! Look, technically the dinosaurs are clones. Just sayin'.
OKAY FINE. HERE'S MY REAL SECOND PICK.
City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, 1995) Krank was created on a massive oil rig by a mad scientist sort, and is now a mad scientist sort himself. Unfortunately, however, he is unable to dream, which is causing him to age prematurely. So he has invented a machine that extracts dreams from children. In order to get children, he has help from some of the original mad scientist's other creations, including a brain named Irvin and six childish clones. Some movies are style over substance, but in Jeunet's films, the style becomes part of the substance, and the dream-like feel of everything here contributes to the "fractured fairytale/bedtime story" vibe of the whole enterprise, creating a totally original, completely new, entirely self-contained cinematic world that I would gladly visit again more times than I would any of our current "Cinematic Universes".
The Island (Michael Bay, 2005) Look, it's not like there's really such a thing as a "good Michael Bay movie", but goddamn did I enjoy this one. It's the story of two beautiful people who look like Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor who live in a dystopian futuristic society that has a lot of arbitrary rules but one saving grace: Every so often, there is a lottery, and the winner gets to go to "The Island", nature's last remaining paradise. Except, SWITCHEROO, it's NOT a dystopian future, but the real world (more or less), and everyone who lived where they lived are actually clones of "real" people who paid insane amounts of money to have a clone for when they need things like a kidney or a heart or anything like that, and this is what actually determines the lottery. It's patently ridiculous, but also fun, with both McGregor and Johansson turning in deliciously calibrated movie star performances.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun - and it IS fun - by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
AH writing. Sometimes the muse is with you. Sometimes it is not. Of course, there is more drama when the muse is NOT with you, so that explains why most of the movies about writers (both fictional and non-fictional, but for the rules of this week we're sticking to the fictional) are about writers dealing with writer's block.
Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011) One of the best movies of the '00s, Young Adult follows Mavis Gary, a writer of a once-popular series of young adult novels that is now being cancelled. Living a rather lonely existence in Minneapolis after a bad divorce, she goes back to her home town after receiving an invitation to the naming ceremony of her old high school boyfriend. And... well... things don't go so well. What's so amazing about Diablo Cody's script and Jason Reitman's direction is just how much of that story I just described is told in the background. But when you have Charlize Theron giving an unbelievable performance of one of the trickiest characters seen on screen in ages, you can afford to let the story simmer on the back burner. Theron gives an absolutely tremendous performance as the acidic Mavis, and she brings the best out of scene partner Patton Oswalt as a crippled former high school classmate.
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, 2010) Perfectly cast and designed, and directed with Polanski's typical chilly precision. Only with this story, chilly precision is EXACTLY what's called for: A ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is brought in to write the memoirs of a shady politician (Pierce Brosnan). Scandals start to swirl and before long, the ghost writer starts to think he may be marked for death because of what he knows and what he's seen. Perhaps not a brilliant thriller, but a really goddamned great one, with a flat-out brilliant, perfect ending.
Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006) Well, I mean, it's all right there in the trailer, isn't it? Emma Thompson is having a particularly nasty case of writer's block while writing her new novel. AND it turns out, through a metaphysical twist, that the character she's writing - IRS agent Will Ferrell - actually exists in the real world, and what she's writing is having a direct effect on his life. Perhaps a little too clever for its own good, Stranger Than Fiction is still enjoyable thanks to the sly performances of Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman, as a professor of literature whom Ferrell contacts to try to figure out what's going on, an the surprising chemistry between Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as a baker he's auditing.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three films that fit the week's theme (this week suggested by yours truly!) and telling us about them!)
Well, they say March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, and that's certainly true so far here in good ol' Manhattan - the winds have been whipping down the streets so strongly that sometimes they just push you right along your path. It's not awful but the wildly fluctuating temperatures are finally taking their toll on my body - I can just feel the cold coming on and I do NOT like it. I will be throwing everything in my arsenal at it in the hopes that it does not get worse, but I don't know... sometimes you can just tell when it's not going to go away...
BUT ANYWAY, who cares about my health (other than my mother)? We're here to talk movies!
One of the things the movies do better than any other art form is present "larger than life" events, which makes them ideal for showcasing the darkest side of Mother Nature. Unfortunately, most movies focused on such special effects-heavy adverse conditions don't have super-well-written scripts to go along with the impressive visuals, but I suppose you can't have everything.
Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996) I still remember seeing this for the first time in the local $2 second-run movie theater. I was 12. I don't remember if it was my first PG-13 movie or not, but I remember watching it in awe. Of nature, of moviemaking, of science... of just about everything on screen. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt are exes and storm chasers who are flung back together for a series of mighty strong tornadoes - NOT AT ALL because they love each other, ONLY for the science! They have to get close enough to the tornado's path in order to drop a container of mini weather robots that look like metal balls. But also far enough away that they don't get sucked up into the tornado themselves. It's a dangerous game, but somebody's gotta do it, and they're both crazy enough to get right up in there to accomplish their goal - especially since there's also a rival, better-funded team lurking about. It's thrilling stuff, and the special effects still hold up - shocking for a film made twenty years ago. OH, and the name of the machine they created with all the weather robots? Dorothy. Which leads us to...
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) In which a Kansas farm girl gets knocked on the head during a tornado and proceeds to accidentally kill one woman and be manipulated by a pink-wearing bitch who travels in a bubble and a charlatan of a Mayor into murdering another in order to return home. OR MAYBE it was all a dream! Oh, I kid, I kid. Everyone alive knows The Wizard of Oz. By now, it's part of our cultural knowledge - it's seeped into our collective consciousness in a way no other film has, and with good reason: It's the simplest expression of all the possibilities of film, the perfect introduction to movies for anyone. To know it, is to love it.
The Impossible (J.A. Bayona, 2012) Ya know what? I don't care about the whitewashing. I really don't. Yes, the real family the story is based on was Spanish, not British, but when we got these amazing performances from Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and Tom Holland, I don't really care. And on a purely technical level, this film is just astonishing. The sound design is one of the best, most inventive I've heard, putting you right there in the middle of the tsunami with these characters. It's a stunning film that deserved not one bit of the backlash it received.
