Jamie Daily

Dirty Wars (2013) Review | Jamie Daily

Dirty Wars (2013)
86th Academy Awards 2014
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature (Jeremy Scahill, Richard Rowley).
Watched April 18, 2014.

 

I am going to be honest--Dirty Wars is a hard movie to review.  I wasn't the biggest fan.  This documentary following an investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill, as he looks into America's covert war tactics, is dry and boring, despite its subject matter.

 

The narration is probably what I had the most trouble with.  The unemotional, read off a page with little to no vocal inflection diction was the biggest distraction that this film did not need.  Its subject matter is provocative.  It should be interesting, and either revealing or infuriating, depending on which side of the Us War On Terror fence you are on opinion wise.  Instead, I just found myself being angry with the narrator and so distracted that I could not be pulled into the story.  

 

Objectively, there are some interesting investigations in supposedly some of the most dangerous areas in the middle east.  Before Seal Team 6 became famous for taking out Osama bin Laden, they were almost completely under the radar until Scahill found them.  He speaks about US cover ups, operations gone south, and civilians who should not have been killed.  

 

I wonder, had the narration been up to scratch, would the film be convincing?  I didn't jump the fence, so to say, but had the narration been less distracting, I may have felt up to researching further.  Paradise Lost: Purgatory 3, for example, was incredibly convincing without further investigation, albeit about a matter I knew nothing about before hand.  A documentary like Dirty Wars needs to be absolutely groundbreaking if it wants to convince the American public, who have probably already made up their minds about the war and the military, one way or the other.

 

The style of the film is reminiscent of Kony 2012.  It is perhaps geared at a younger audience, but I disliked the doctored images.  Everything together felt extremely amateur and weightless.  Something that should be emotionally charged at the same time as being informative was anything but.  

 

I am pretty unimpressed with this nomination.  If it sounds interesting to you, go for it.  Otherwise I would recommend you find something else to watch tonight.

 

 

These are my opinions of the filmmaking itself.  I am not stating anything about the subject matter, but the story telling, filmmaking, and postproduction are what I am reviewing here.

 

Head over Heels (2012) Review | Jamie Daily

Head over Heels (2012) 
85th Academy Awards 2013
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Animated Short (Timothy Reckart, Fodhla Cronin O'Reilly).
Watched January 28, 2014.

 

Head Over Heels  is a claymation, stop motion animated short that has a really cute concept.  It is about an older couple who has obviously been together for a long time--so long that they have forgotten what it means to be in love.  The symbolism for this is a little unique and extremely obvious--Walter lives on the floor and Madge lives on the ceiling.  They may share the same fridge, but that is about it.  One day, their house literally falls out of the sky and they are forced to reassess the way they have been viewing their relationship.  

 

While the concept is cute (and solid), the execution is not.  It seems more like an exercise in animation than a success at story telling.  What could have been told in less than five minutes instead is told in eleven and we spend a long time watching the couple fight over a picture, vacuum the floor, fiddle with antennas, and take a walk outside.  It is hard to make their faces communicate their emotions, and after watching ParaNorman (another nominated film that I will be reviewing next week), the animation seems extremely lacking.  

 

I really enjoyed the concept of this film, and it was certainly cute, but it is sad when an eleven minute short is too boring.  Unless you are studying stop motion animation and/or claymation, I would not recommend this film to you.

   

 

Speedy (1928) Review | Jamie Daily

Speedy (1928)
1st Academy Awards 1929
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Director, Comedy (Ted Wilde).
Watched November 21, 2013.

 

I will be completely honest.  I have watched several silent films so far, some of which I loved, some of which I did not, but one that I feel is no longer relatable is Speedy.

 

The comedy is just over an hour long and full of slap-stick that Americans would normally love and respect.  The star, who at the time was a bigger crowd pleaser than Charlie Chaplin himself, is none other than Harold Lloyd.  His character is very bad at keeping down a job, partly because he is obsessed with the Yankees, but also because he is probably the most unlucky klutz of all mankind.  

 

After losing another job, he takes his girlfriend Jane (Ann Christy) out to Coney Island where the slap-stick and ill fortune continues.  They pick up a dog along the way and ruin his new suit in the process.  The whole story climaxes at the end with Jane's Pop Dillon (Bert Woodruff) who runs the last horse drawn trolley in the city.  As long as he runs the trolley once every twenty-four hours, he keeps his rout, but the big railroad tycoons are trying to take over and offer Pop pennies for his track.  

 

The one thing Speedy seems to do right is recognize that Pop's rout is worth a lot of money and he will do everything to make sure that the trolley stays running, Pop doesn't get hurt, and the tycoons pay up.  

 

Speedy has three distinct acts.  In the first, Speedy loses his job and takes Jane out to Coney Island anyways.  There is essentially no dialogue, only slap-stick comedy.  When it comes to films depicting complete idiots who fail at every turn, I have very little patience.  Although others find it amusing, and I could understand how this film could entertain in 1928, I grit my teeth and often leave the room because I can't stand to watch it.  That is how I felt the entire 71 minutes of this film.  It was extremely uncomfortable.

 

In the second act, Speedy has a job as a cab driver.  He does everything from having an out-of-order sign on his car (unbeknownst to him), to getting several tickets, to driving the Great Bambino Babe Ruth himself to a Yankees game.  He does absolutely nothing right and loses another job in the same day that he gets it.  Yet again, I could not sit still while watching.

 

The third act is my favorite.  Speedy finally succeeds at something and he has a goal--protect Pop and save the trolley.  He enlists the help of some old veterans who have their game nights in the trolley and feel fiercely protective of it.  The railroad tycoons have hired some thugs to take it out of commission, but Speedy and his boys will do anything to stop them.  

 

There were a lot of things I could do without in this film, but it did have a few highlights.  Ann Christy does a lovely job and I enjoyed her character as well as her performance.  The shots of Coney Island are exquisite and if you have the opportunity to see this portion of the film, I would recommend it simply so that you can see it.  The lights, the booths, and most especially the rides are so nostalgic and lovely.  Lloyd's last silent film captures the heart of Coney Island perfectly.  Despite this, however, I could have done without the first two acts entirely.  I wish that the story had more of a focus and got less sidetracked while attempting to make the audience laugh.  Perhaps it is because America had come to expect this sort of comedy from Lloyd; I wouldn't know.  I wish that they had instead beefed up the third act and made it almost the entire movie.

 

That being said, I am unfortunately not a fan of Speedy and don't plan on ever watching it again.  The recommendation to see it is very hesitant, although I would love for you to see some of the Coney Island shots and perhaps Babe Ruth himself looking very uncomfortable in the back of a speeding cab.  Besides that, however, I really disliked most of the rest of the film.

  

The Other Side of Midnight (1977) Review

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)
50th Academy Awards 1978
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Costume Design (Irene Sharaff).
Watch November 18, 2013.

 

Have any of you read those famed "romance" novels?  You've probably at least seen them on the shelves.  The ones with the half naked men and women in a provocative embrace?  That's what The Other Side of Midnight is.  Full of plenty of unrequited love, nudity, sex, and passion--not to mention plots of murder--this novel based screenplay is an interesting nomination.

 

Noelle Page (Marie-France Pisier) is a young French girl whose piggish father tells her that her beauty and body are the only things she has to offer the world.  He essentially sells her off to a shop keeper, where Noelle is expected to do more than tend the cash register.  She escapes to Paris where penniless and possessionless, she is is rescued by a young American pilot named Larry Douglas (John Beck).  He takes her in, feeds her, beds her, and when his orders come in he tells her to buy a wedding dress and he'll be back for her.

 

But he never comes back.  Noelle, still pursuing fashion as a career, soon finds herself modeling and then acting.  Knowing that men only want one thing, she takes her father's advice and uses her body to get the roles she wants.  She rises to fame quickly and once one of the wealthiest men in the world takes an interest in her, she leaves her director beau fairly quickly for a life of luxury with the Greek Constantin Demeris (Raf Vallone).

 

Larry, in the meantime, has married and is finding it hard to hold down a job since in the end of the war.  Noelle discovers this and offers him a job as her personal pilot in Greece.  Not knowing she is the girl he once ditched, Larry and his wife Catherine (Susan Sarandon) move overseas.

 

Of course Larry will eventually find out who Noelle is.  She has loved him ever since the beginning and no money or spouse can stand in her way.

 

The movie is outlandishly long.  The story begins during World War II but you hardly know it.  Occasionally there are swastikas, but that's as close to the action as we get.  This may be because Noelle is distinctly indifferent to anyone else's suffering than her own, or it may just be an awful choice from the original author.  You decide.

 

Although Noelle was indeed slighted, once she begins to see herself as little more than sex, she loses all strength and is no longer a powerhouse woman.  She is presented as someone intelligent who only takes care of herself, however she comes across as easily used and lacking in a lot of things, most importantly self respect.  

 

Catherine is everything that Noelle should have been.  She is strong, intelligent, supportive.  She has an amazing job in the city but moves to Greece to support her husband.  Although she will do anything to keep their relationship strong, I do not see this as a weakness.  She has a drinking problem but leaves it before she would leave Larry.  

 

Larry is the most unattractive, weak, and grating character the movie can produce.  He is amazing in the beginning, but he seems to lose everything with the war, and in my opinion he never gets it back.  

 

The  movie is too long, the ending makes the entire film pointless, and the third act is so different from the first two that I almost stopped watching entirely.  The cinematography is boring, the editing isn't much, and the story line is far from special.  I do not recommend it.

The Master (2012)

The Master (2012)
85th Academy Awards 2013
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 3 awards.
Nominated for Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Supporting Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Best Supporting Actress (Amy Adams).
Watched April 25, 2013.

Photo Source: Acesshowbiz 

Everywhere I look, the world of reviewers is raving about The Master.  Hardly anyone has anything negative to say.  To be quite honest, there have only been two films I have watched so far that have driven my writing on this blog to a complete standstill, and this is one of them.  It was all I could do to sit through the first half hour of this film, let alone the remaining 100 plus minutes.  

 

While the acting was all well and good and those embodying their characters gave intense commitment to their character arc, the story itself was lackluster and slow moving.  The emotional depth was so one note that it was hard to keep my eyes open.  When the story attempted to get deep and perplexing, there was so little explanation and so much left to the audience to discover and decide that I lost interest immediately.  I am a big fan of films that make you think, but this film made me so uncomfortable that I had to walk away from it several times.

 

In the most simple of terms, the film is about a cult.  A man named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) returns home from World War II a broken man.  He spends his nights making and pushing his moonshine (generally made out of soap and paint thinner, among other things), and his days searching for his next job, because he can't seem to hold down anything.  His world changes drastically when he happens upon a storybook ship adorned with lights and laughter.  He hops aboard and finds himself the new pet of The Master, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

 

Author and thinker, Dodd leads around a gaggle of ex-wives and family as he teaches about past lives and healing faults and hurts of the past.  He argues that the earth is trillions of years old and that by healing our past wounds we can become a more perfect species.  

 

Despite how interesting and soul searching this might sound, that's really all there is to this film.  There are some awkward experiences and a few fists are thrown here and there, but the film really stays at a standstill and by the end there is very little growth seen in any of the characters.  Freddie maybe has the most change, but the rest are determinedly still.  

 

While there are some winning scenes of impeccable performances, the scenes together do not combine into anything moving or resolved.  I would not recommend this film, and will likely avoid it from now on at all costs.

 

Pina (2011)

Pina (2011)
84th Academy Awards 2012
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film (Gian-Piero Ringel, Wim Wenders).
Watched April 9, 2013.

Photo Source: LA Contemporary Dance Company 

Most of the reviews I read for Pina were absolute raves, but I did manage to find one that agreed with me and made me feel like a little less of a weirdo.  If you love modern dance, contemporary, and ballet, and also have an eye for the abstract in art, you probably will not agree with me.  I generally like contemporary and classical ballet, along with other styles of dance, but this documentary was fairly alienating and is definitely aimed at fans of Pina Bausch, the choreographer genius behind the dances in the documentary.

 

Pina passed away from cancer just five days after she was diagnosed.  The film was already in pre-production, but after her passing it became a tribute to her choreography and her genius in the dancing community.  The documentary features several dance numbers that she and her company performed during her career, but they are broken apart and are never shown from beginning to end, but rather sprinkled throughout the narrative.  They all tend to incorporate elements--earth and water--or obstacles.  There is very little dialogue, and when there is, it is usually a brief, somewhat ambiguous statement from one of Pina's dancers about Pina and her style of teaching and choreographing.  There are also original clips of Pina herself in both the studio as well as the stage.  She embodies so much of her dance that after watching her, the other dancers seem as if they are chasing her greatness.

 

From someone who knew nothing about Pina Bausch before the film, I almost know less after watching it.  I know her name and that she was a dancer and choreographer.  However, the documentary revealed little of her story and her character, but focused mostly on the imagery of her dances and therefore her ideas translated through dance.  However, the fact that her dances were broken up made it more difficult to discover their meaning and therefore grow attached to them.

 

I am not a dancer and therefore the messages did not translate well.  I was very confused and bored until the last few minutes, when I was finally able to discover some of my own meaning in a few of the dances.  One of the last scenes has the group of dancers doing a certain "line dance," if you will, along the ridge of a mountain, and I found this shot quite beautiful.

 

All things said and done, I am glad to cross the documentary Pina off my list and move on to something else.  I would not recommend it if, as I mentioned before, you don't care for modern or contemporary dance and if you would rather there be some dialogue or verbal explanation of story.  I am a great lover of story, and there was little depth in that regard for me.  However, if you are a lover of dance and a lover of Pina Bausch, please disagree with me and see the film for yourself!

 

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)

The Pirates!  Band of Misfits (2012)
85th Academy Awards 2013
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Animated Feature Film (Peter Lord).
Watched March 14, 2013.

 

Photo Source: Cartoon Excellence

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is like a bad Saturday cartoon, only with much better animation.  

 

I couldn't sit still through the film and kept my eye on the clock, which is worse than watching water boil because the film was an hour and a half long.  When your favourite part of the film is the end credits, there is something significantly wrong with the story.

 

The Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Jackman) has been trying for years to win the Pirate of the Year award, and has lost every time.  It's not hard to see why when his competitors fly in on waves of booty with excessive Pirate pizzaz.  Although his crew of misfits--albinos and "surprisingly curvaceous" pirates among them--stand behind him wholeheartedly, their luck never seems to come, until they ironically discover Charles Darwin out at sea.  He excitedly points out that their parrot is actually an "extinct" Dodo bird and talks them into going to London to win an award for scientific discovery.  Although Queen Victoria is a well known pirate hater, The Pirate Captain can't see reason and thus makes the trip to London, crew in tow.  All is well and good, with good laughs and all, until around this portion of the film, where everything seems to get confused and I got lost among the plot points that began sprouting out of nowhere.  

 

The plot kept going and going--circling back in on itself and exploring areas that had already been revealed and discussed.  The bad guy keeps resurfacing, the good guy somehow always fails miserably until the opportune moment, and you're never quite sure how many movies you are watching--be it one or seven.  By the end of this film, I wanted to rip my eyeballs out… or run around the block a couple times to get my impatience out.  While the claymation was great, the redeeming qualities were few and the film as a whole was absolutely terrible.  Despite all of this, I ended up watching almost the entire ending credit sequence because it tied all of the plot lines together in minute shorts that were more funny than the rest of the movie put together.

 

There were hilarious supporting characters voiced by even more amazing actors.  The Aardmans have such an incredible reputation for producing some amazing claymation stop-animation films with hilarious stories and wonderful charters, but unfortunately I found much to be desired in this film and am not surprised that the film fell short of an Academy win.

 

Personally, I would not recommend this film.  However, your kids might like it, and I have read several reviews in which adults quite enjoyed the film as well.  Perhaps my patience with meandering stories has been frayed lately, but I doubt I will ever watch The Pirates! Band of Misfits again.

 

 

Bullhead (2011)

Bullhead (2011)
84th Academy Awards 2012
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film (Michael R. Roskam - Belgium).
Watched February 10, 2013.

 

Photo Source: Jared Mobarak Design

Bullhead is a tough watch from almost the very beginning.  Although the opening ambiguous shots are overlapped by an almost poetic narrative, the beauty is short lived.  The entire film views like an independent, but the opening half hour is more like a student film.  

 

Once the technique cleans itself up, I could focus more on the story.  Unfortunately I wasn't encouraged by what I saw.  It is the underworld of pumping hormones into cows in Berlin.  You wouldn't think it would be as seedy as it is, but it's like the mob, only with our friendly barnyard animals and their owners.  There are dealers, mob bosses, informants, comedic reliefs, and police investigations.  Underneath it all, there is a dark storyline that alters the whole mood of the film when it reveals itself.

 

Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is the one bright spot in the entire film.  He is a dark, hulking, heavy lidded man who doesn't talk much but tends toward anger after drinking and stalking a pretty shop girl.  His dark secret causes him to push everyone away because he fears he will never truly belong.  His family's farm has been benefiting from hormones for years, but after eating with the boss, he gets skittishish about the police investigation.  Schoenaerts pulls off this deep and complex chracter exquisitely.

 

Jacky's story seems completely separate from the rest of the film.  It is as if someone thought of an idea for a never before seen character study but kept adding more and more sub-plot--so much so that the main idea got lost by it.  The two story lines are at war with one another--not to mention the actors who are all fighting for screen time.  Although the cinematography is appropriately dark, I found zero redeeming qualities in this film.  What might be considered a bright comedic point is probably lost in translation and the frequent bits between two idiotic mechanics didn't bring me a lot of laughs.  

 

As a result, after watching Bullhead, I am incredibly wary of the rest of the foreign language film nominations from this year.  Perhaps I should not judge them all by this experience, because it was an F in my book.  I do not recommend this film.

 

Sources: Jared Mobarak Design, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Acid Cinema

W.E. (2011)

W.E. (2011)
84th Academy Awards 2012
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Costume Design (Arianne Phillips).
Watched January 13, 2013.

photo source: IMDB 

In no lifetime will you hear me say that the costume design in W.E. was not divine, because it was.  That, and the performance of Andrea Riseborough, are the two qualities of this film that endeared it to me, but there were few others.  The story could have been intriguing and it could have been a creative, well made film.  Madonna, however, followed a rising trend of late by mixing past with present and that was W.E.'s downfall.  

 

The film is about the highly controversial romance between Wallis Simpson (Riseborough) and the heir to the throne, King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy).  He fell in love with Wallis, who was an American woman already married.  Wallis Simpson became the most hated woman in Britain and lived with it the rest of her life.  Once they were married, Edward was never allowed back in England, except for after he had died and he was buried there.  Wallis was allowed to accompany him for only the funeral, after which she returned to France.  

 

On the modern day story side, we follow a woman named Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) who was named after Wallis and who has an almost disturbing obsession with the afore mentioned romance, and most especially for her name sake.  She is married to an abusive Psychiatrist and finds solace filling her days exploring an exhibit of the Windsors' possessions at Sothelby's in New York.  It is here that she befriends a security guard (Oscar Isaac).  He finds her obsession endearing as well as troubling and eventually saves her from a desperate situation.

 

Except for the fact that Wally is completely obsessed with W.E. and occasionally sees Wallis come to her with advice, their stories have very little to do with one another.  Both want children desperately, and neither are able to conceive (while they still hold onto the past, at least).  The cinematography is a bit interesting and fresh--reminiscent of Madonna's music videos.  There are a lot of extreme close ups of eyes or interesting bits that go around a tree and then up and away, but they lend very little to the story and are a bit out of place as such.  What is the motivation for the shot?  

 

If Madonna had forgotten the present and merely focused on W.E., as I assume she really wanted to focus on Wallis' side of the story, it could have been quite good.  To this day, there continues to be hatred for the woman who almost destroyed a nation.  Even after both she and Edward were gone, to see the effect on herself and their relationship depicted in this film was interesting.

 

Once again I must admit that the costumes were incredible and if I could only watch this film for the bits with Wallis and her impeccable style, I would.  Be that as it may, I would not recommend this film.

 

 

Sources: IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, The Telegraph, NY Times, The Guardian 

La Luna (2011)

La Luna (2011)
84th Academy Awards 2012
1/5 Stars
Nominated for 1 award.
Nominated for Best Short Film--Animated (Enrico Casarosa).
Watched January 4, 2013.

photo source: Whoa, This Is Heavy!

La Luna was an interesting short, but not one of my favorites from Pixar.  Quite the contrary, actually.  There was very little plot or development, very little attachment to the characters, and was more of an exercise in animation than something that should have been up for an Academy Award.

 

Written and directed by Enrico Casarosa, the creator of Up, I was a pretty let down.  It is a coming of age story about Bambino, who is being introduced to the family business for the first time.  He is rowed out to sea with his father and grandpa, who anchor themselves to the moon instead of the ocean floor.  They then climb a ladder and Bambino finds himself on the moon's surface, where it is covered with golden, glowing stars.  His father and grandpa, who seem to always be at odds, teach him that they must sweep, rake, or mop up the stars, depending on their tool of choice.

 

This is essentially the entire plot.  There was zero depth and although the animation was gorgeous and Bambino was cute, there was nothing else to endear me to the story and therefore I am pretty unimpressed with the seven minutes I spent watching it.  The next time I want to watch a short from Pixar, I can guarantee you I will be watching something else.

 

Unless you can find this one for free (I suppose it will accompany Brave, because this is the film it was released with), I would not suggest searching it out.

 

Sources: Whoa, This Is Heavy!, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, 411mania, Paste Magazine, Reeling Reviews