In preparation for seeing The Brother’s Bloom, Rian Johnson’s second film, Cara and I finally got around to seeing Brick. Brick is explained with the one-liner: “A noir film set in a modern day high school.” That description, though, is so literal that I think it throws people off. When first hearing it your brain starts trying to process analogies. But, it isn’t an analogy.
What Rian Johnson did was take two very different genres, film noir and high school drama, and find a way to layer one on top of the other so that all the pieces lined up. It’s almost as if he had the idea in his sleep one night and then had to spend the next six months figuing out how to get all of the edges of each genre to match up.
About 3/4 of the way through I found myself getting kind of annoyed at the premise because it occurred to me that the high school setting was adding nothing to the story. This film could have easily been set 60 years ago and it would have worked. And then 15 minutes later it hit me: the opposite is true as well. If you took out all of the 40s movie dialog, and maybe toned down the violence this would be a really solid mondern day high school drama. Even as I write this I feel like I can’t describe how it’s like watching very different films, that tell the same story, layered on top of each other.
With all that being said, Rian Johnson didn’t get all of the pieces lined up perfectly. There are a couple of scenes that feel contrived and only exist to fulfill some noir trope. Also, some of the dialog is delivered really poorly. You can’t fully blame the actors because although the dialog is good, it is very unnatual. Imagine seeing an average high school rendition of Shakespeare, it almost always feels like the lines are recited rather than spoken.
Despite these flaws, I found myself thinking about it for days later. There is just something about how the story was told that stuck with me. I recently heard an interview on the Slashfilmcast where Johnson mentioned that his next film features time travel. Time travel is obviously a really tricky element that a lot of writes don’t do well, but with Rian Johnson, I feel like it’s in good hands.
Where The Wild Things Are Movie Trailer #2
“Funny People” is Judd Apatow’s third big screen venture. His latest film is a nice evolution from his previous films “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” “The 40 Year Old Virgin” was very much about the jokes. It’s infinity quotable and always makes me laugh, no matter how many times I watch it. “Knocked Up” kept these elements but added in a real human drama that the audience, especially people the same age as the characters, could connect with. “Funny People” takes that one step further with the focus being on the drama and the jokes (which remain hilarious) taking their place as support.
The movie opens with real home video shot by Apatow when he and Adam Sandler were living together. Opening with this home video really sets the tone of the movie. My biggest praise of the film is how genuine (almost) everything feels. The character’s relationships, decisions, and dialog all feel so real that if this film had been shot on handheld cameras it might have played like a documentary.
One big mistep for me were the cameos. Apatow, probably to try to pile on more genuineness, added lots of cameos from big name comedians. These cameos were probably meant to make George Simmons, Sandler’s character, feel all that more part of the real world. But, for me they felt like name dropping. I almost felt like Judd Apatow was looking straight at the audience and saying something like “Look how cool I am! I can get all of these awesome people to be in my movie!”
Seth Rogan, who plays Ira, is an awesome companion to the audience. Everything we’re seeing, he’s seeing for the first time as well. Although the story is about George Simmons dealing with death, we see it through Ira’s eyes. This really helped me to relate to Ira, and so when he had his own problems I really found myself rooting for him.
If you search twitter for “Funny People” almost every tweet comments that it’s too long. We follow George through this experience and watch as he goes through five or six stages. I thought each stage was well thought out, but cutting out one of the middle ones probably wouldn’t have been missed. For example there is a 20 minute sequence following what happens when George begins telling people he’s sick. That could have been dropped and the audience probably would have been happier. I really apprecaited that sequence, but I might not have noticed if it was gone. Overall the length itself didn’t bother me. At no point did I feel like a scene was obviously not needed.
In summary, some of the dialog feels stilted and a few of the characters’ emotional responses don’t land quite right, but I found it incredibly genuine. I’m not sure where Apatow will go from here, but he has definitely elevated himself even more in my eyes.
As a final note, I thought Sandler was really great. He gets a lot of cred for “Spanglish” and “Punch Drunk Love,” which are good. But this is definitely my favorite performance yet.
I recently purchased the five disk Blade Runner Complete Collector’s edition on Bluray. Blade Runner is kind of notorious, at least in my eyes, for being cut and released many times. And since the movie asks some questions that it never quite answers, some cuts bias the viewer to one answer or another. You can read all about that here.
The collection I bought has five cuts of the movie on it. To get a better appreciation for the film and film editing the plan is to watch each of the cuts over a five day period. Hence, Five Cuts in Five Nights.
The cuts are as follows
- Workprint
- Theatric release
- International release
- Director’s Cut (which the director didn’t really cut)
- The Final Cut (which Ridley Scott did cut)
I’m not entirely sure I’ll make it through night three, but we’ll see. Updates to come.
Cara and I went Geocaching for the first time today. We went 2 for 3, but we are planning on trying again for the one we didn’t get.
The three caches can all be found on Geocaching.com, here’s the short of it:
- Garden log - Found it. Spoiler alert: It’s the guestbook at Shelter Insurance gardens, which was pretty boring.
- Squirrel Shire - Not so much. We narrowed it down to an area of about 100 square yards, but it was in pretty deep brush and we weren’t dressed for it. So, we’ll go back with real shoes, tick spray, and jeans and try again.
- Backside tattoo - Found it. Took some looking, and we had to resort to the hint, but we added our selves to the log.
We used my G1 and a combination of Google Maps and an Android app called GeoBeagle to do the tracking. Our workflow needs some work, but for a first time thing we were pretty successful.
