The Counselor

By N

Did I miss the stroke of genius behind this cinematographic adaptation of Cormac McCarthly’s screenplay; or was it really what I saw: a typical story of a drug deal gone wrong, only this time the director explores human boundaries and death through the self-contemplation of his characters. The story is fine but not great, and approximately 100 minutes too long.  I am not going to lie: I was quite bored watching it that I had to check my emails. Three times.

Ridley Scott‘s direction of this movie mismatches the original screenplay. The whole experience didn’t work: the dialogues seemed too moralistic and pretentious; the characters were not much more than mere caricatures. As a result, you are never able to empathise with what is happening to them. Also, the movie takes us to Mexico, Texas, Amsterdam and London, but I found that the use of images to show those places was fad and didn’t add anything to the movie.

I have to say, the brochette of actors is impressive, but sadly this movie does not do them justice. I was particularly skeptical about the love story between Penelope Cruz and Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem’s caricatured personage, or the sex scene between Cameron Diaz and a car.  All of this played to a spectacularly non-convincing tune. Oh, and let’s not forget Brad Pitt…Actually, let’s.

Anyway, if you saw it, please tell me if I missed something, but in the meantime…I would be mean to recommend the film.

World War Z

By M

This movie is incredibly bad. It’s like a stew: everything is dropped into a cooking pan and then someone prays for it to be eatable. It isn’t.

The question they ask is: what would be relevant information in case the world is threatened to become a zombie heaven? The answer they give is: absolutely everything. I mean, that answer is certainly the right answer, the problem is that if you want to discuss that issue in a two-hour long movie you are in trouble, and by trouble I mean you just signed up for catastrophe.

I was about to write: the movie is full of cliches, but the truth is that it would be inaccurate to say that. The movie isn’t full of cliches, the movie is only made of cliches. Subtle difference. Very dangerous, simplistic and essentializing cliches on gender, countries, history, you name it! They even include cliches on the internal fights between international organizations.

I give you that when one reads the synopsis of this movie what I am saying doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Except there are two important parameters that make this movie, a priori, worth seeing.

First, the fact that Brad Pitt so fiercely defended it. I mean, I thought the guy was not only a good actor but also a smart person. I respect him. Of course this might be based on very weak reasons such as the fact that he worked with Terrence Malick or that he divorced Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie: two decisions that I would have made myself.

Second, the trailer. Honestly, the trailer suggests that there is a treatment of the human body, objectified at the extreme, that seemed extremely interesting. And to be perfectly fair, there sort of is some of that in the movie, but it is so deeply drowned in the stupid lessons on “history”, “learning” and “weaknesses” that you barely see it. A shame.

To balance a bit this post, I must say that the zombies are funny enough. Their scariest move is to chatter their teeth. I acknowledge that’s hilarious. But that’s pretty much it.

Do not watch it, no matter what, not even if it’s the last sequence of images available on earth.

The Tree of Life

By M

I adore Terrence Malick. Yet, I find his movies particularly difficult to defend because, in general, people around me dislike them, and for good reason.

Put yourself in my shoes: conversations about cinema generally start with people expressing their feelings about the movie, right? So, logically, you need to say pretty soon that you liked it, to which everyone replies reminding you of all the scenes that are ‘ridiculous’, ‘phony’, and, especially, ‘corny’.

The problem you have, you see, is that they are right.

This had happened to me with The Tree of Life, and more recently with To the Wonder, which I both liked a lot. Both times, I was tempted to tell people: ‘yeah, you are right, but just forget about the movie and pay attention to X’, but I realize how problematic it is to ask people not to pay attention to the movie when the conversation is about the movie. I’ll talk about The Tree of Life, which I watched when it came out, but it left me a scar deep enough I think I can still write about it.

Having said all this, I don’t quite know how to review this movie, so I’ll try to address the criticisms I remember, and tell you why I vehemently defend it.

So, after the 139 minutes that The Tree of Life lasts, and after I said how beautiful I found it, my friend tried to understand:

– Is that because you were sleeping when he showed us the dinosaurs?

– No… I was awake

– Oh, you must have fallen asleep when he showed us the planets

– Nop

– The lava?

No, of course I wasn’t, I saw all that and I acknowledge it’s almost impossible to defend such choices, but then, I read this interview with Brad Pitt explaining how challenging it was to work with Malick because he would wait until the light is exactly the one he wants, the butterfly flies the way he has in mind and… the dinosaurs interact? I mean, how great is that?

Malick is all about that, he is all about innocence and I understand innocence as a mix of naivete and despair.

Take another criticism: ‘Showing us nature for the sake of it is unbearable’, it would be, if that was what he was doing. But it isn’t. He is showing us a particular nature, a nature that is human made, that is as nature as human, which is actually what nature is. Think of the grass freshly cut, think of the singing noise of the irrigation system, think of Jessica Chastain’s bare feet on that grass.

Malick’s characters don’t talk much, they don’t usually go to work. I mean, they probably do, but that is not what he shows us, because he literally investigates how they feel, what they feel. The expression of pain in this movie is the most powerful expression of pain I have seen. And it lasts. You feel their pain from minute 1 to the very last. You feel how pain has repercussions (The Tree of Life – I know, his titles aren’t great), how it is transmitted from one generation to the next.

All the actors are absolutely astonishing. All of them express pain in their own way, in their own silence. Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Brad Pitt, three lost gazes on the floor.

The images are beautiful, they move as the characters move, because feelings are about that, because people are moving, so why shouldn’t the camera move, all the time, like the sea, does it ever stop, no, it doesn’t, why should it, it’s the sea… The close-ups, Chastain’s hair. The colors, the contrast, the black and white of Sean Penn’s measured life, in the urban America, far from the suburban America that intervenes nature, in an America that pretends to have forgotten that, except it can’t: the tree of life.

And finally, of course, the music. So obvious in its innocence. It’s like a child who would draw a heart and tell you ‘I think I should color it red’.

One last thing: I agree with everyone who said that he only got the Palme d’Or because Lars Von Trier went crazy. Still.

I recommend that you watch it.