Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Something horrible has happened to you. Someone has betrayed you, double-crossed you, committed an act of unspeakable violence against you and/or your family. You drag yourself out of the mud, effortfully pull yourself to your feet, raise your fists to the sky, and devote the rest of your waking hours in the pursuit of the one thing you yell to the heavens:
REVENGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or, at least, that's what characters in these movies did. I don't know anything about it myself. I SWEAR.
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004) In the words of Uma Thurman's Bride: "Looked dead, didn't I? But I wasn't. But it wasn't from lack of trying, I can tell you that. Actually, Bill's last bullet put me in a coma. A coma I was to lie in for four years. When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a 'roaring rampage of revenge.' I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I've killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna KILL BILL." Very few movies make me as giddy from sheer movie-making bravura as Part One of Tarantino's revenge fantasia. If Part Two suffers a bit in comparison, that's only because it focuses more on the characters involved than the action. I still long to see the "Whole Bloody Affair" cut that fuses the two parts into one whole, but it looks like we'll never get it.
Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) A tale of revenge spun backward: We first see a man getting arrested for killing the wrong man, then watch him brutally beat that man to death, and then slowly learn why. Irréversible is a notoriously difficult film to watch, partially because of the sickening camera swoops and swirls that send the film careening backward in time, and partially because of one particular scene that occurs at the midway point of the film, wherein the murderer's girlfriend (played by the gorgeous Monica Bellucci) gets brutally raped and beaten to within an inch of her life in one unbroken nine-minute shot. This is sick-making cinema, and very much on purpose: There is a background noise with a frequency of 28 Hz (low frequency, almost inaudible), which causes nausea, sickness and vertigo, playing for the first thirty minutes of the film. If you can make it through, Irréversible is a unforgettable cinematic experience with fantastic performances and stunning, inventive camera work.
The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960) Adapted from a 13th Century Swedish ballad, Bergman's masterpiece was the basis for Wes Craven's notorious The Last House on the Left, although the two films couldn't be more different. Bergman's film is, unsurprisingly, focused on the spiritual aspects of the story, and the revenge-seeker's quest not just for revenge, but acceptance in the eyes of God. Max von Sydow gives a typically brilliant performance, but in some ways, this film is almost as difficult to watch as Irréversible - just in a very different, internalized way.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Make joining us one of your New Year's Resolutions! All you have to do is pick three movies that fit the week's theme. That's it! It's fun!
A new year, a new round of Thursday Movie Picks categories! I'm very excited to see what this series has in store for us this year. I have to say, I think we're starting off with a pretty good category - movies that have a character name in the title. Sometimes, naming a movie after your main character is the simplest, best thing to do. Especially if your movie is about an historical figure (think Frida, Wilde, The Glenn Miller Story). But I decided to go with movies NOT about real people.
Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007) Michael Clayton is a fixer at a corporate law firm. But when of the senior partners develops a conscience and goes rogue, Michael starts to develop a conscience as well. Which is a bit of a problem for anxiety-prone corporate counsel Karen Crowder. George Clooney gives a great performance in the title role, but the real revelation here is Tilda Swinton, who deservedly won an Oscar for her tremendous performance as Karen. Gilroy, good a director as he is, owes most of the film's tremendous tension to her and her alone.
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004) Bill likes to train his lovers to be assassins. Or he likes to take his trained assassins as lovers. One of the two. But one of them got away, so he takes his assassins to her wedding to kill her. Except that she only ended up in a coma. And when she wakes up, there's hell to pay. Uma Thurman gives the performance of her career as The Bride, whose mission it is to kill Bill, in what is, for my money, the best film of Tarantino's career (Part One). What I wouldn't give to see the unseparated "The Whole Bloody Affair" cut that Tarantino sometimes brings out.
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Dr. Strangelove is the strangest of Peter Sellers's creations in this darkest of pitch-black comedies - a wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist who can't quite keep his Nazi sympathies in check. If you've somehow never heard of this, the basic idea is that we're going to nuclear war with Russia, but the reason is trumped-up by crazy General Jack Ripper. So it's the war hawks (led by General Buck Turgidson) versus the diplomats (President Merkin Muffley) fighting over the fate of the world. One of my all-time favorite movies, Dr. Strangelove is political satire at its absolute finest. There are few casts more stacked than this - George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, James Earl Hones, Keenan Wynn - and even though director Stanley Kubrick may not have liked the idea, Sellers is BRILLIANT in his three parts here, absolutely nailing each one and, in Strangelove, creating a comic character for the ages.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves.
Ah, romance is in the air this month for Thursday Movie Picks! This week, we're taking a look at the May/December romance: A relationship where there is a large age difference between partners, usually with one in their twilight years (hence the "December" part). Confession time: I spent the better part of the last decade in what some might describe as a May/December Romance - the gap between our ages was just over twenty years. He was still relatively young, though (it wasn't until towards the end of our relationship that he turned 50, so I wouldn't classify it as a May/December, although some might. That doesn't have an effect on my feelings towards May/December romances, though. Sometimes they're played for laughs, sometimes they're played straight, and I think that's true to how these types of relationships are in real life, too: Some are true love, and some are... well...
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) Yes, it's a trope nearly as old as the screen: younger girl falls (or "falls") for much older, much wealthier man. Now, I'm not saying Trixie Lorraine's a gold digger, but she sure as hell ain't messin' with no broke... OH WHO AM I KIDDING. They get married after ONE DATE. OF COURSE she's a gold digger! The plot of this pre-code musical doesn't really matter (a depression-era producer is trying to mount a show but doesn't have money, enter a secretly independently wealthy piano player whose family naturally comes to try and stop him), because it's all really an excuse to have some Busby Berkeley musical numbers. The most famous, justly, is "We're In The Money", the opening number sung by Ginger Rogers. I also love "The Shadow Waltz", which features some of the most ridiculous costumes ever created, just for ONE SHOT where the girls are shot from above to look like a flower. That Busby Berkeley. What a fucking genius.
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004) The May/December Romance gone deadly. Beatrix (Uma Thurman) was very young when she first met the much-older Bill (David Carradine) and he took her under his wing, into his league of assassins, and somewhere along the way, into his bed. But after she became pregnant she decided she had to get out of the deadly assassin's life. To say Bill didn't take kindly to that is, well, putting it too kindly. Quentin Tarantino's fourth film was chopped in two for its release, and somewhere there supposedly is a cut that puts the whole thing together into one movie. I'd watch that in a heartbeat. Part One is an action-packed samurai extravaganza and Part Two is a bit quieter and more character-based. They balance each other out nicely (or at least, I imagine they do when put together). The saga of "The Bride" is probably Tarantino's best film, more than making up for its (relative) lack of ambition with stellar editing, cinematography, casting, and music (that trailer ALONE). And also pure awesomeness.
Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) THAT'S RIGHT, BITCHES. Let's be clear: Edward Cullen may be in the body of a teenager, but in reality he is 104 years old. ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR. Sweet, mopey Bella is a teenager. That's one hell of an age difference. Twilight may be the wettest blanket of a romance ever put on screen, taking the soggy weather of the Northwest a bit too much to heart. Pity poor Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, who have proven since that they really CAN act, when they're given actual characters to play.
