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. We're always here, every Thursday, picking three movies that fit the week's theme - join us! The water's fine!
People talk a lot about the need to "open up" plays when they transfer to the big screen, their thinking being that because a film does not have to be confined to one set and can go anywhere, audiences do not want to sit for a couple of hours and watch something that takes place in only one location, unlike in the theatre, where you are somewhat bound by the constraints of the stage.
The following films, my picks for this week, are just three examples of films that put the lie to this idea. All that matters is that the film is made well, no matter where it takes place.
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) I could just as easily have made these picks only Alfred Hitchcock movies, but I decided against it. I've talked about him a lot recently. Rope isn't one of his best movies, but it's an interesting experiment that works more often than it doesn't. Famously ironing almost all the gay out of the stage play based on the Leopold & Loeb murder case (memorably brought to the screen several times, by lesser filmmakers than Hitchcock, but both Compulsion and Swoon have things to recommend them) and filming the whole thing so that it looks like it was done in one take, Hitchcock succeeds at the very least in putting us in the middle of the action of a stage play that also happens to be a locked-room murder mystery. In it's best moments, it's thrilling, but there's too much philosophizing from Jimmy Stewart, playing a character whose darker side he can't ably portray yet, and thus it drags for long stretches. But don't get me wrong: Mediocre Hitchcock is still better than the best films of many other directors!
Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967) Now THIS is how you do a single-room thriller. Audrey Hepburn, Oscar-nominated for one of her best performances, is Suzy, a blind woman living in a basement apartment. Her husband has just returned from a trip, bringing with him a doll, taken as a favor to a woman he met at the airport. Unbeknownst to them, the doll is full of drugs, and some very bad men soon come to the apartment looking for them. What follows is one of the most tense, edge-of-your-seat, dig-your-nails-into-your-armrest-or-companion movies ever made, as Suzy must match wits against Alan Arkin's evil head baddie.
Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011) Oh, dear lord, this one. Look, Polanski is very damn close to the top of his game here, but I will never for the life of me understand why they didn't just go with the original Broadway cast (Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, and Hope Davis) instead of the cast they did, nearly all of whom are miscast and most of whom don't really pull it off. Don't get me wrong, for the most part Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet are good, but.... when they're not, they're AWFUL. The story couldn't be any more basic: Two sets of parents meet to have a civil discussion about an incident where one of their kids attacked the other at school, and slowly things start to devolve until the adults end up acting just as much like children as their kids. But Polanski finds every possible angle from which to shoot in this cramped apartment, maximizing the set like no other.
