Filmography
May. 5th, 2009 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Wild Blue Yonder
I'm kind of getting into Herzog. This is really quite a lovely little film, that takes all the conceits of alien films throughout history and turns them on their heads. The thrust is really a question - with all the wonders here on planet earth, why in the world do humans want to explore space? It also overturns the usual narrative of 'space invasion' stories. The space invaders turn out to be totally bloody useless at their invasion. They try to make an impact - and it totally fails. Fleeing from their dying world, they land on earth but fail to make a mark. The narrator is one of these failures, and how keenly he feels it!
The irony of the film is that humans, in search of an alternative place for humans to live in outer space, find their way to the planet that these aliens came from. There is a lot of cleverly used NASA footage here, as well as some beautiful filming from under the ice in the Antarctic Ocean. It's simply beautiful. There is also some fairly clever scientific bullshit, provided by genuine boys from NASA, to explain how the human astronauts there able to make it there so quickly. I have to say that I was quite pleased that proper NASA scientists decided to talk at Herzog's camera for the sake of Art. It was heartwarming.
So, I'm giving this four stars. It's a slow meditation on humanity and failure and the beauty of creation, and yes, perhaps it is more interested in the nature of that failure. It's obviously done on a dirt-cheap budget. But it explores interesting ideas, and makes a nice antidote to the Hollywood Blockbuster Blowing Up The White House Aliens that I'm sure will be visiting us very soon.
The Libertine
Oh lor, this was dreadful. It had such promise. The story of the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. Played by Johnny Depp. The idea of talent squandered, the desire for fame, the exploration of what it is to make art - kind of a seventeeth century version of Velvet Goldmine. Or at least, that's what it wanted to be.
Instead, it ended up being a fairly obvious 'let's let Johnny Depp be all sexy and smouldering and Jack Sparrow-esque, and watch the cash roll in!' kind of job. The script was atrocious. Some of the filming was good, but the direction was pretty dreadful. Frankly,corchen's brief appearance was one of the highlights, and so was Johnny Vegas managing to go against type - and when that's the highlight of a film, you know you have problems.
John Malkovich, playing Charles II, also had the most dreadful fake nose. It is not quite sure why.
So - a wasted opportunity. Clearly a brilliant idea, but very poorly executed. Two stars, I'm afraid.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
One of a series of early 2000s documentaries, or rather, film polemics, This Film Is Not Yet Rated seeks to uncover the mysterious workings of the Motion Picture Association of America, which is the body that gives ratings to films. However, the people who do so are completely anonymous, the only film ratings board in the world to feel this is necessary. This is a rather concerning lack of transparency, as is the failure of the MPAA to provide sufficient feedback to film makers about what precisely earns them an NC-17 rather than an R. This is more serious than you might think, because studios don't want to market NC-17 films; the R rating is what makes them commericially viable.
So far, so good - the argument holds. It's when it starts to get into the filmmakers whining about the way that it's all a conspiracy by the studios that you reach a problem
There are some other good points made too - for instance, the relative comfort the MPAA seems to have with violence over sexual content, and the way that homoerotic sexual activity is treated more harshly than heterosexual sexual activity. The commercial considerations of this, of course, are fairly straightforward. But one out-take scene revealed a very disturbing angle the film chose to leave out. It was a filmmaker talking about her suspicion that her film had been given an R rating rather than the PG-13 she had aimed for (thus cutting off a major part of her target audience) because the characters involved in a sex scene (and a very tasteful one, from the clips shown) were black.
The question of racism in the film ratings business, of course, was a far larger question than the documentary was going to be able to address. Dealing with the homosexuality question was quite enough material to keep the film going, and going quite effectively. But it's a question that still needs asking, and that out-take reminded you that what you were watching was carefully crafted polemic rather than strict documentary. Three stars - not a bad example of the genre, but I wouldn't advise anyone to rush out and see it.
I'm kind of getting into Herzog. This is really quite a lovely little film, that takes all the conceits of alien films throughout history and turns them on their heads. The thrust is really a question - with all the wonders here on planet earth, why in the world do humans want to explore space? It also overturns the usual narrative of 'space invasion' stories. The space invaders turn out to be totally bloody useless at their invasion. They try to make an impact - and it totally fails. Fleeing from their dying world, they land on earth but fail to make a mark. The narrator is one of these failures, and how keenly he feels it!
The irony of the film is that humans, in search of an alternative place for humans to live in outer space, find their way to the planet that these aliens came from. There is a lot of cleverly used NASA footage here, as well as some beautiful filming from under the ice in the Antarctic Ocean. It's simply beautiful. There is also some fairly clever scientific bullshit, provided by genuine boys from NASA, to explain how the human astronauts there able to make it there so quickly. I have to say that I was quite pleased that proper NASA scientists decided to talk at Herzog's camera for the sake of Art. It was heartwarming.
So, I'm giving this four stars. It's a slow meditation on humanity and failure and the beauty of creation, and yes, perhaps it is more interested in the nature of that failure. It's obviously done on a dirt-cheap budget. But it explores interesting ideas, and makes a nice antidote to the Hollywood Blockbuster Blowing Up The White House Aliens that I'm sure will be visiting us very soon.
The Libertine
Oh lor, this was dreadful. It had such promise. The story of the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. Played by Johnny Depp. The idea of talent squandered, the desire for fame, the exploration of what it is to make art - kind of a seventeeth century version of Velvet Goldmine. Or at least, that's what it wanted to be.
Instead, it ended up being a fairly obvious 'let's let Johnny Depp be all sexy and smouldering and Jack Sparrow-esque, and watch the cash roll in!' kind of job. The script was atrocious. Some of the filming was good, but the direction was pretty dreadful. Frankly,
corchen's brief appearance was one of the highlights, and so was Johnny Vegas managing to go against type - and when that's the highlight of a film, you know you have problems.John Malkovich, playing Charles II, also had the most dreadful fake nose. It is not quite sure why.
So - a wasted opportunity. Clearly a brilliant idea, but very poorly executed. Two stars, I'm afraid.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
One of a series of early 2000s documentaries, or rather, film polemics, This Film Is Not Yet Rated seeks to uncover the mysterious workings of the Motion Picture Association of America, which is the body that gives ratings to films. However, the people who do so are completely anonymous, the only film ratings board in the world to feel this is necessary. This is a rather concerning lack of transparency, as is the failure of the MPAA to provide sufficient feedback to film makers about what precisely earns them an NC-17 rather than an R. This is more serious than you might think, because studios don't want to market NC-17 films; the R rating is what makes them commericially viable.
So far, so good - the argument holds. It's when it starts to get into the filmmakers whining about the way that it's all a conspiracy by the studios that you reach a problem
There are some other good points made too - for instance, the relative comfort the MPAA seems to have with violence over sexual content, and the way that homoerotic sexual activity is treated more harshly than heterosexual sexual activity. The commercial considerations of this, of course, are fairly straightforward. But one out-take scene revealed a very disturbing angle the film chose to leave out. It was a filmmaker talking about her suspicion that her film had been given an R rating rather than the PG-13 she had aimed for (thus cutting off a major part of her target audience) because the characters involved in a sex scene (and a very tasteful one, from the clips shown) were black.
The question of racism in the film ratings business, of course, was a far larger question than the documentary was going to be able to address. Dealing with the homosexuality question was quite enough material to keep the film going, and going quite effectively. But it's a question that still needs asking, and that out-take reminded you that what you were watching was carefully crafted polemic rather than strict documentary. Three stars - not a bad example of the genre, but I wouldn't advise anyone to rush out and see it.
