Two Thumbs Up
Most of my movie watching of late has been of the Netflix variety, but it's Oscar season, so Mrs. FCB and I have ventured out twice in recent days for a real movie experience. You know, the kind where you can't hit the pause button when you want to go to the bathroom and you get to hear the banal conversations of the people in front of you -- while the movie is playing.
I know that with the death of Pauline Kael and the recent unfortunate illness of Roger Ebert, the cineophiles among the FCB readership are looking for a place to find intelligent and insightful movie criticism. Unfortunately, the link to that site isn't working, so instead I will tell you what I thought of the two films I have seen in recent days.
First, The Departed. How ironic that Martin Scorsese, whose best known works in recent years have been showy and cinematic "films" like Casino, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and The Aviator, has a Best Picture nominee and is the directing Oscar favorite for an old-fashioned movie. I liked The Departed a lot. Its story of two moles -- Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop embedded in Jack Nicholson's Irish mobster gang and Matt Damon as Nicholson's plant on the police force -- searching for each other is straightforward, well-told, dramatic, and riveting as it unfolds to its violent (hey, it's Scorsese) and not-altogether predictable conclusion. DiCaprio is terrific, blowing by an overmatched Damon and the expected but still entertaining Jack-being-Jack performance by Nicholson. DiCaprio is Oscar-nominated for his role in Blood Diamonds, and if he is better there than in The Departed, then he must have done one remarkable job on that picture (he was great in The Aviator as well).
Some have complained about the violence in The Departed (I thought it appropriate to the subject matter and not overdone -- but I admit to a high tolerance for that sort of thing) as well as its length, but these seem like quibbles. It's a really good, solid, entertaining movie.
And then there is Pan's Labyrinth. Wow. I mean, really, WOW. This is a great movie, one of the best I have seen in a long, long time. Run, don't walk, to see this picture.
The film is set in 1944 Spain. The Spanish Civil War has ended, but government troops are still fighting rebel holdouts ensconced in the mountains. The movie's central character is Ofelia, 11, whose widowed mother has married and become pregnant by the cruel, fascist captain commanding a remote outpost fighting a band of rebels. The captain requires Ofelia and her mother to make the difficult journey to the outpost because a son (he is sure the baby will be a boy) should be with his father when he is born. To cope with the strange and difficult surroundings, as well as a fearsome stepfather she rightly despises, Ofelia retreats into a fantasy world, in which she learns that she is a long-lost princess who can become immortal by successfully carrying out a series of tasks given to her by a faun.
The intersection of the child's fantasy world with the brutal reality occurring around her is at once depressing, shocking, uplifting, and, ultimately, heart-breaking. Director Guillermo del Toro, who received an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay (the film also is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film), does an amazing job of using the fantasy sequences to both inform and advance the "real" parts of the story, inevitably bringing the two together in a stunning final quarter of the movie that teaches us, yet again, that reality must prevail.
Wow.
I know that with the death of Pauline Kael and the recent unfortunate illness of Roger Ebert, the cineophiles among the FCB readership are looking for a place to find intelligent and insightful movie criticism. Unfortunately, the link to that site isn't working, so instead I will tell you what I thought of the two films I have seen in recent days.
First, The Departed. How ironic that Martin Scorsese, whose best known works in recent years have been showy and cinematic "films" like Casino, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and The Aviator, has a Best Picture nominee and is the directing Oscar favorite for an old-fashioned movie. I liked The Departed a lot. Its story of two moles -- Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop embedded in Jack Nicholson's Irish mobster gang and Matt Damon as Nicholson's plant on the police force -- searching for each other is straightforward, well-told, dramatic, and riveting as it unfolds to its violent (hey, it's Scorsese) and not-altogether predictable conclusion. DiCaprio is terrific, blowing by an overmatched Damon and the expected but still entertaining Jack-being-Jack performance by Nicholson. DiCaprio is Oscar-nominated for his role in Blood Diamonds, and if he is better there than in The Departed, then he must have done one remarkable job on that picture (he was great in The Aviator as well).
Some have complained about the violence in The Departed (I thought it appropriate to the subject matter and not overdone -- but I admit to a high tolerance for that sort of thing) as well as its length, but these seem like quibbles. It's a really good, solid, entertaining movie.
And then there is Pan's Labyrinth. Wow. I mean, really, WOW. This is a great movie, one of the best I have seen in a long, long time. Run, don't walk, to see this picture.
The film is set in 1944 Spain. The Spanish Civil War has ended, but government troops are still fighting rebel holdouts ensconced in the mountains. The movie's central character is Ofelia, 11, whose widowed mother has married and become pregnant by the cruel, fascist captain commanding a remote outpost fighting a band of rebels. The captain requires Ofelia and her mother to make the difficult journey to the outpost because a son (he is sure the baby will be a boy) should be with his father when he is born. To cope with the strange and difficult surroundings, as well as a fearsome stepfather she rightly despises, Ofelia retreats into a fantasy world, in which she learns that she is a long-lost princess who can become immortal by successfully carrying out a series of tasks given to her by a faun.
The intersection of the child's fantasy world with the brutal reality occurring around her is at once depressing, shocking, uplifting, and, ultimately, heart-breaking. Director Guillermo del Toro, who received an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay (the film also is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film), does an amazing job of using the fantasy sequences to both inform and advance the "real" parts of the story, inevitably bringing the two together in a stunning final quarter of the movie that teaches us, yet again, that reality must prevail.
Wow.
posted by FCB at 12:37 PM
1 Comments:
This movie deserves it all - and Guillermo del Toro cannot get enough praise for the accomplishment, as far as I'm concerned. And that little girl, who, I might note, acted with computer generated figures of all kinds . . . where's her award? Go see this movie. (Though I concede, it's not for those who can't sit through any violence.)
-- Mrs. FCB
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