Films

No Country for Old Men [2007]

Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald

It’s 1980. Llewelyn (Brolin), a seemingly unemployed Vietnam veteran, lives together with his wife Carla Jean (Macdonald) in a trailer in a little town in West Texas. While out hunting one day he stumbles across a massacre out in the desert; several men dead in and around bullet-ridden cars, one filled to the brim with heroine. He finds the last man standing a couple of miles away, dead underneath a tree still clutching his pistol and a satchel filled with two million dollars. He takes the money and becomes the target for Anton (Bardem), a ruthless and world-class assassin with funny hair. Anton is used to people quickly falling prey to his cunning, but finds Llewelyn a tougher opponent than anticipated. All the while, Sherrif Bell (Lee Jones) is trying to make sense of the massacre in the desert and quickly figures that Llewelyn knows or saw something, and that he’s in grave danger.

There’s very little that I can say to criticise this movie. The direction, cinematography and editing is excellently done. Usually I only notice it when direction is bad because I get annoyed at the movie. This time, however, I noticed how beautifully everything was shot, for instance by a great application of cropped shots and close ups. The acting done by the three main characters is top notch, and I thought that the application of gore was done rather well. It wasn’t over the top, but when it was done, it was realistic and not too gratuitous.

I can see how this film won a trillion oscars.

There Will Be Blood [2007]

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Ciarán Hinds, Paul Dano

In the 1890s, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a struggling silver miner, finds his true wealth in oil extraction while taking the orphaned child, H.W. (Freasier), as his own in order to create a family man image. In 1911, Plainview gets a tip on a valuable supply on the struggling Sunday family ranch in the impoverished Little Boston, California. In his quest to acquire the property, Plainview meets the sanctimonious Eli Sunday (Dano), the young reverend of the local church with his own ambitions for his diocese and the profit from the oil. As the oil drilling begin, Daniel struggles with different problems while his savvy ruthlessness gradually sinks into a slowly mounting malevolent madness.

I really liked this movie, even though the story is incredibly simple, and not really very surprising in any way, but it’s beautiful, and the cast is very strong. Even the almost demonic sermons given by Eli, which are bordering on the absurd, didn’t bother me, and actually fitted very well.

The first fifteen minutes are also beautifully shot, and give a really nice foundation of his personality; driven and not below getting his hands dirty in order to get what he wants. And all that without uttering a single word.

Cloverfield [2008]

Director: Matt Reeves
Actor: Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan, Odette Yustman

Before it came out, the information that was released about this movie was tightly controlled by the production company. A trailer and several websites were already available even before it officially had a name, and the online community was going ga-ga for this film, analysing everything that was released. They put things through spectrograms were let loose on soundbytes and image enhancers on each little piece of imagery, and speculation ran rampant. It even got caught up in another viral marketing piece that got started for the Alpha Omega roleplaying game, which was considered part of the film’s marketing strategy for a long time. In short; crazy town! The film had a lot to live up to, I guess.

By now, there’s so much information out there that if I give a brief synopsis of the movie, I won’t be giving away too much information. If you really don’t want to hear or see anything about it, you’d probably not read this review anyway, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it.

I had expectations for this film. Having read all the speculation and all the coveted pieces of fact released by the production company, I got the impression that the movie was going to be different than it really was. I thought the attack on Manhattan by the beast would be better explained, while right now it isn’t explained in the slightest, which, I think, is fucking awesome. I’m a big proponent for leaving things up to the viewer’s imagination, and not just pre-masticating the entire film for the audience, so I was happy like a pig in shit.

The story is relatively simple; Manhattan, New York – Rob is about to move to Japan to start a new job. His friends organise a massive goodbye party and his best friend Hud is filming it all, getting goodbye messages from all the people in attendance to give to him as a farewell present. Just before midnight a massive explosion is heard and the entire group goes up to the roof of his apartment block to see what they can see. There’s another big explosion, sending big chucks of flaming debris all throughout the city, causing massive destruction and confusion. The entire party moves out into the street and tries to get to safety. As they get down, they hear more and more reports from others in the street about a massive monster rampaging through the southern end of Manhattan, and another piece of debris comes bouncing through the street; the mangled head of the statue of liberty. The group gets split up and tries to look for safety. Rob, his brother Jason, his friend Hud (still holding the camera), Jason’s girlfriend Lilly and another friend Marlena try to decide what to do, just when the military starts to appear on the scene, trying to orchestrate a counter-attack. And so starts a massive scramble of the group to safety, while the creature still destroys and kills its way through the city, shedding smaller creatures, about the size of a large dog, off its body that also aid in the carnage.

Wow. I mean wow. This film had my heartrate up almost all throughout its duration. The visuals, while shakey are very satisfying, even though you often just want to rewind and make sense of what you just saw, and you really get the feeling of being right in there. The glimpses you catch of the monster are usually unclear, or the view is partially obstructed by buildings, but they give you just enough to be utterly thrilled. I loved this film. There’s not much character development going on, because the story covers only a small amount of time and the characters are thrust into this extraordinary situation in which most people just huddle down and go into survival mode. The acting is pretty solid, and you really get the feeling throughout the film that you’re watching someone’s unfortunate home-video.

Conclusion; it’s a fantastic monster movie. With a twist of lemon. At the end, you might be left with a dissatisfied feeling of wanting to know more, and getting some explanation. If you’re that type of person you might want to think twice about seeing this. :)

Office Space [1999]

Director: Mike Judge
Actor: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, Gary Cole, John C. McGinley

This low budget movie is, to be honest, pretty fucking awesome. However, it might not appeal to those people not either a) working in an office or b) stuck in a job that is devouring their will to live. Much like the hit comedy series “The Office,” some of the characters are so recognisable, some of the frustrations hit so close to home, that you immediately want to give up your job and seek a change in career.

The premise of the movie is fairly simple; Peter (Livingston) is a software developer working for a relatively sizable IT company. Software developer might be too lofty a term to describe Peter’s position because he’s basically a code-monkey working on the Y2K problem in various software packages. For those of you who haven’t actively lived through the Y2K hype, or aren’t familiar with software development; this means sorting through thousands of lines of code, changing a 2-digit year variable into a 4-digit year variable. I can’t imagine more mindnumbing work without thinking of factories and production lines. He spends most of his morning zoning out, pretending to work and just waiting for his day to end, and if we are to believe him, spends about fifteen minutes a week doing actual work. Bureaucracy is running rampant throughout the company, and Peter is frequently asked by his manager Lumbergh (Cole) to work on saturdays and sundays. Needless to say, Peter is dissatisfied with his job. However, he’s also not the most ambitious fellow in the world, something his girlfriend tries to remedy by taking him to a hypnotherapist.

That’s where the problem starts; he explains how he’s frustrated with his life and the therapist hypnotises him, telling him to forget about his worries and his stress. Before Peter is revived from his hypnotisement the therapist gets a heartattack and dies, leaving Peter perpetually unstressed and unconcerned with his work. And just in time for a big reorganisation of the company in which everyone gets to do job interviews for their own job. Hilarity ensues.

This movie is kind of like the club skank; cheap, easy, but a lot of fun for one evening.

Gone Baby Gone [2007]

Director: Ben Affleck
Actor: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman

Patrick (Affleck) and Angie (Monaghan) are a couple living in the same troubled, lower class, blue-collar neighbourhood in South Boston that they grew up in. They know almost everyone, and as such have made a good living as private detectives, specialising in missing people. When a little girl goes missing just down the street, and a media frenzy ensues, they are asked by Bea McKenzie, the girl’s aunt, to aid in the police’s investigation of the case. They feel a little out of their depth, because the cases they normally work are people skipping out on their car-payments or runaway kids, but they quickly fall in love with the little girl, Amanda, and try their best to help out. The reason for their involvement is because of their close connection to the neighbourhood, and people will talk to them that won’t talk to the police. The mother of the girl, Helene (Ryan), is found to be a terribly unfit mother, drinking, snorting and engaged in drug-muling for a rather psychotic druglord. Patrick and Angie team up with detective Bressant (Harris) and detective Poole (Ashton), backed by police captain Doyle (Freeman) to do what it takes to bring Amanda home. They dive deep into the seedy underbelly of South Boston, and uncover dirt on almost everyone involved, including the police. Patrick and Angie taking increasingly bigger risks and have to deal with friction between each other as the two no longer see eye to eye on the moral choices they have to make.

This movie was written by Dennis Lehane, author of other acclaimed books, like the one that Mystic River was based on, and true to form his depiction of lower class, blue-collar neighbourhoods is phenomenal. Ben Affleck did a wonderful job translating his vision to the silver screen, capturing the grittiness and the ugliness in spades. One of the things I really liked is that they managed to make everyone look either plain, or ugly. Casey Affleck’s performance is pretty good, though I wonder if his aloof, almost dim acting style – the same one that he adopted in the Assassination of Jesse James – is an act or just part of his personality. Regardless, it works well for this film, especially when it’s exchanged for an occasional delivery of some bad-ass lines. A good example is when he’s threatening the psychotic, Haitian druglord Cheese; awesome.

I liked this film, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of Lehane’s films brought to the silver screen, as well as more of Ben Affleck’s direction.