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VierasTalo's Reviews

Displaying Review 1 - 5 of 17 in total

  • Written by VierasTalo on 30.04.2010

    This is not going to be a normal review. I will not make a list. I will not make a list of all the things bad, of all the things good, and all the things mediocre in this film. I will not give it a rating other than verbal. I will only talk about it. I will talk about why I think of it so important. Why I believe it to be among the greatest films of all time. This article will be a celebration of Synecdoche, New York.

    It is often, that great minds start out small. You could say Charlie Kauffman has done just that. His scripts have always tried capturing the human psyche; His first, a dark comedy, named Being John Malkovich, explored the theme in a strictly literal sense; the characters went inside another man's head and saw the world through his eyes. His second film, Human Nature, explored human behaviour from the perspective of a human ape of sorts. It was an interesting movie, but I always felt the theme is too heavy to be explored in the clichéd enviroment of a romantic comedy. Then came along Adaptation., a film where Kaufman explored mind by juxtaposition, and most of all, he concentrated on his own mind instead of that of a fictional character. Then, in what I consider the most overrated attempt of his career, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Kaufman decided with it that instead of exploring the human mind as a whole, he chose a central theme; Love. Then he used this theme to waddle through an entire script.

    But now, comes Synecdoche, New York. Where do you go after Eternal Sunshine? I think there's two choices. Either you choose another single emotion, and base the film around it. OR you do the unexpected, and you take on the entire human emotional spectrum. The latter is what Kaufman did. It's a deed most ambitious and almost megalomaniacal in size, but Kaufman chose to write a script about every emotion known to man and then direct the film himself. Much like the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Kaufman finally brings himself to be able to transmit great emotions to the screen instead of simple oddities and bizarre creations. Whereas Tarkovsky always drew power from his childhood, it feels as if Kaufman draws this power from humanity itself, in all it's flaws and petty errors.

    However, one must notice, that it is very easy to make a film that encompasses all human emotions. A movie that has just that can easily turn into a slideshow of faces with different looks on them, like in those drawing classes where they teach you to draw different expressions by showing you slideshows of them. A film being like that... well, it's inexcusable. Hence, you have to build a story around those faces. Kaufman creates it about a playwright, and his life. The film chronicles his life for about 40 long years, during which he experiences pretty much everything we experience during our lives. The experiences are portrayed extensively and with little glamour added to them. When Caden's feces is of weird colour, we see his feces being of weird colour. It makes us want to check our own feces. When he is sad, we feel sad. Synecdoche is capable of transmitting every single emotion it has on display into the emotional world of the viewer. You feel every cry, every laugh, every orgasm, every failure, every glimpse of hope, ever single one of the emotions Caden has throughout the story of his life. Every moment of Synecdoche, as a result, feels emotional and different from most films.

    This is why I think Synecdoche, New York is better than almost any other film made in the last ten years. It is emotion. We are emotion. We are Synecdoche. We are us.

    "What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone."

  • Written by VierasTalo on 30.04.2010

    The International is one bleak film. Tom Tykwer is an exceptional director, and this film proves it. The movie's greatest benefactor is it's script and Tykwer himself. First off, the script provides us with two interesting things; the main character is not a regular secret agent who kicks all sorts of arse in any given situation. Instead Clive Owen's agent is essentially a man who's been through too many ups and downs during his life and was never that good at anything. He isn't particularily excelsior at his job as an Interpol agent; in the very first scene, he accidentally smashes his face against the passenger mirror of an incoming car. There's plenty more of scenes with failures comparable to this, even though they're sometimes a far cry from being physical abuse. The script and Tykwer understand that failures like these, if played with even slight humour or if they're portrayed too much, will make the character a bumbling buffoon instead of someone to take seriously. So they don't overdo it. Owen's character is enough of a failure for us to believe him as a human being, and it's a very refreshing thing in a modern agent film where "humanisation" of the main characters usually mean that when he gets shot he limps for the rest of the film.

    The other big advantage that comes from the script is the bleakness of it all. Obviously, the world we live in, from a global perspective, is very depressing and there's not much an individual can do about it. That's that The International is all about. It's about the individual's inability to affect the globe. Tykwer, and the script, make this a very hard fact throughout the film and it affects the viewer in a positively depressing way. The story of this movie differentiates itself from the bulk of political thrillers, because this one feels by all means like a realistic film from it's beginning to the end. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. I've always appreciated realistic portrayals of humans and this world, and The International excels at it.

    Also worth noting is that Tom Tykwer is a superb cinematographer and every shot in this film is beautiful. The man is a modern poet, making beauty from the pen which's ink is the climate of our world; beat-up cars, white motionless plaster and shiny skyscrapers turn into absolutely splendid visuals in The International because of his expertise. He never overmines the events with his visuals either, a sign of a very good director. Be on the lookout for whatever he makes in the future, I promise you, you won't be dissapointed. I sure wasn't with this one.

  • Written by VierasTalo on 30.04.2010

    Making a good action scene isn't really all that hard. You just need some action to it, and voila. You have a good action scene. Then you just slap some cliched score ontop and edit it nicely. But let's take a look at what action scenes are about; They're about people being involved in action. Be it a car chase, a shootout or even a fistfight, it always involves primary or secondary characters duking it out with eachother. Usually it's the bad guys vs the good guys. Now what is the very definition of a good action scene? Its excitement. If an action scene fails to excite you, it has failed. Contrary to what you may or may not believe, action scenes do not make your palms sweaty just because they're good action scenes. If a movie was nothing but a collage of various back-to-back action sequences, you would not be excited. Why? Because of the people involved in those action scenes. No matter how well an action scene may be directed, you will not give a damn about what happens to the people involved unless you actually care about them. And what makes you care about them? Every other scene in the film. If all goes well with the rest of the movie and the good and bad guys are well written, during those shootouts you will be rooting for the good guys to overcome evil. The Rock is a movie that tries very, very hard to make you care for it's characters, but ultimately fails in it.

    The Rock revolves around Stanley Goodspeed, portrayed by Nicholas Cage. He's a very good bomb defusing-guy(all technical terminology can be removed, because that is what he essentially is), and so he is needed to defuse missiles who the evil General Hummel (Harris) has stolen. Hummel has set a base in Alcatraz, so naturally the only way to get to him is to get Sean Connery (named John Mason in the movie, but his role is Sean Connery with grungier hair), the only person ever to escape Alcatraz, to come with Goodspeed and a SEAL-team to the prison and lead them around it. The plot is pretty much an excuse for some well-made action, but as I said, it really, REALLY wants to be something else. Goodspeed is prettymuch a pretty boy, who works with a scout-like set of ethics, and his teaming with the loose cannon Mason is almost as hilarious as the combination of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in the Rush Hour-movies. Meaning that it really isn't a very good one. Goodspeed is probably the only character who gets some even remotely senseful (or working, for that matter) charecterisation throughout the entire film. For Mason, there's a 20-minute useless segment where he escapes FBI-containment to meet his daughter. Naturally, to get to her, he has to drive 100mph through San Fransisco with Goodspeed hot in his trail. After this scene, his daughter is barely ever mentioned, let alone this entire incident. So we had to watch a 20-minute, rather dull chase, for nothing? Thanks, Michael Bay! Naturally, the bad guy also gets some character development, because he's a former military guy, so he has a dark and political purpose to his actions. Does it change him? No. In fact, nothing that happens in this movie changes any of the characters, aside from causing a permanent case of death to most of them. Stanley Goodspeed is still Stanley Goodspeed in the end of the movie, even though he does learn how to shoot people and be an action-guy in general, and Sean Connery is still Sean Connery in the end. It leaves you feeling somewhat empty when the character development is this nonsenical.

    Now, from a technical standpoint, The Rock is a pretty solid movie. Despite the questionable material they're given, the actors do make the most out of it, and as a huge Michael Biehn-fan, it's fun to see him do an action role for the first time in a while. As I said previously, Sean Connery plays Sean Connery, and does it as well as he's done it for 20 years before this movie. Ed Harris is a bad guy for the millionth time, Nicholas Cage is a good one for the gazillionth time, and they do the same things they always do in their good guy/bad guy-roles. Which is nothing I would complain about, since it works. The score is something that elevates all the action scenes in The Rock. While not singularily making them good, it does come close to doing so. Bay does an alright job directing, making good action scenes but dull dialogue scenes. And with dialogue as ridicilous as some of the material in this movie, I honestly can't blame him. His way of making action scenes can be somewhat tiresome with the quick cuts and all, and especially for a movie that runs well over two hours, it makes for very good material to give epileptics some seizures.

    The Rock does leave you wondering about several plot holes, which I won't bother listing here, but you need to ask yourself, do you really care at all about the plot or do you just want to watch people get shot and shout really loud? If you do, put an extra 3 points to my rating to get what you're likely to think.

  • Written by VierasTalo on 02.05.2010

    Whenever someone decides to set out and make a film out of a videogame, there will be two things; 1) An absurd fan outrage if the movie isn't directed by Martin Scorsese or something, and 2) Positive expectations from most fans after seeing the first poster/trailer/whatever. I personally always try to remain unbiased when it comes to some of these adaptations, but in the case of Max Payne, it's sort of impossible in one aspect of the movie: The story. The games, especially part 2, have excellent storylines for the writer of this flick to draw from. The storyline in part 2 for example is adult, perfected, and respects the player as an intellectual individual, not so much as a gamer as most other games with good stories do (Fahrenheit, here's looking at you and your lack of a second act). This is why it's incomprehensible why the writing team of Max Payne took the route they did; this movie has the basic outline of an 80s cop action piece. From the so-called mysterious villain that's predictable from the second he appears (and it isn't Sucre from Prison Break I mean here) to the absurd conspiracy and the reasoning behind it. Every second of this film is predictable and the only things that can be considered as original are those most videogamefans were crapping their pants over are the so-called Valkyries, hallucinations suffered by V-addicts. They're cool and work well within the context of the story. There are some things that could've saved large portions of the story, primarily using Max's inner monologue more; it appears twice in the movie, once in the beginning and once in the end, and it sounds so kickass that it really could've been in it more often. Now it just seems wasted and useless.

    Let's move over to the more or less boring acting/directing-department since we got that story out of the way; There's only one REALLY bad thing about the acting here; Sucre from Prison Break as Jack Lupino. He fits the story in the sense that he also seems like something taken out of a horrible 80s movie, and reminded me of that over-the-top villain from Highlander. His character is written absurdly and he plays it so as well, and it makes him seem... well, retarded. It just isn't good at all. Otherwise most of the film has solid acting, with most of the actors making the most out of their characters. I don't think anyone cares much about any other actor in this movie except for how well Mark Wahlberg does as Max Payne. He's good at it, and that's it. Possibly the best part of the entire movie could be Payne himself, but due to the lack of inner monologue we really miss out on a lot of character development. But yeah, Marky Mark does a good job portraying the finnish national hero on film, and there's really no big downfall at his work. The director of this movie, John Moore, does a very good job directing the whole shamble. Visually, this is as good as it gets without the overt use of CGI alá 300. Snow has never looked as good as it does here, and Moore uses very tight editing tricks to make the action scenes intense and fun to look at. For example, during a fistfight around the first thirty minutes in, he uses Sin City-ish effects to change the screen red whenever someone gets hit. There's no blood in the scene, but this makes it look brutal regardless. Now, Moore's directing is the best thing to be seen, and Payne himself is third, so what would I say goes in second? The score of course. It's made by Marco Beltrami, whose scores of 3:10 To Yuma and The Crow: Salvation I absolutely love, and he does a splendid job with Payne as well. The score is in no way reminiscent of the videogame music, which is a good thing in this case since the melancholic sounds wouldn't fit a cop flick like this.

    Overall, Max Payne had potential to be the best videogame movie ever made, but the writing team fucked up severely, and hence it didn't turn out all that great. It's quite alright, and worth spending a few bucks on to see, but just don't go into it expecting something as good as the videogames.

  • Written by VierasTalo on 05.05.2010

    Snake Plissken probably made more kids come in the 80s than Pamela Anderson did in the 90s. Regardless, I never saw this film depicting his mission to retrieve the president of the US out of a barren prison, AKA New York. Finally someone requested me to review this film and I had to watch it. I didn't mind much, seeing as how I liked Carpenter's work overall (Cigarette Burns and Halloween especially). But... Carpenter is not an action movie-director. His best work is in horror and thriller. He is not a man who makes good and intense action scenes. He's the master of build-up, but the format of action movie doesn't pride itself on build-up, but big payoffs instead, and Carpenter lacks the necessary skill to pull them off excitingly. He has many chances, but almost every action scene here feels rather lackluster as Snake blasts through foes with his ridicilous-looking SMG or his fists. The only action scene that gripped me to the edge of my seat was the climax, and that's pretty much because a climax with that good a setting is somewhat hard to mess up. Carpenter's slow, realistic style of filming and editing doesn't suit balls-to-the-walls-action flicks like Escape From New York very well, it makes the action look depressing and slow. I'm not a fan of quick cuts, but I do think they should be applied in films like these if you can't make intense scenes otherwise. In a prior action movie of Carpenter's, Assault On Precinct 13, he managed to make the action interesting. He did so because the film was one half build-up, one half pay-off. Escape is more scattered than that; it has an action scene there, a dialogue scene here, two action scenes there, a fistfight here... It doesn't have a structure based around action, but it has a structure that's based around what the story requires, and the story does unfortunately require action throughout the film due to the predicaments Snake finds himself in. This is why I believe Carpenter was the wrong person to direct such a movie.

    If the directing goes wrong, I think the writing goes right. It's full of surprises and believable dilemmas for Snake to face. The basic setting also got me thinking; say that Manhattan would really be turned into a giant prison. How the hell would this be explained to the people in it? Sure, it's a setting many years in the future (the futuristic world of 1997!), but how could any goverment ever pursue all the people in a friggin' densely populated island just leave with no problems? "Sorry folks, we're going to turn this place into a prison, so ya'll best leave". I just had some problems buying that, but honestly I won't hold it against the script at all, just a little weird nitpicking I had. As stated previously, I think the script was rather surprising. There's a delightful scene early on when Snake arrives on the island; he goes into a cafe to hide from crazy people running around outside, and meets a blonde woman. They start talking. Turns out she wants him to take her with him to the outside. At this point I was thinking "This chick'll be a tag-on guide or something for Snake, what a cliched plot decision". Then, all the sudden, CRAZY PEOPLE BURST OUT OF THE FLOOR AND RIP HER DOWN AND KILL HER! How awesome! Snake hardly even tries helping her out, instead just running the fuck out of there. The movie is filled with these little surprises that sometimes succesfully manage to break action-movie cliches into pieces and replace them with original writing decisions. Also, the ending surprised me by being a rather multilayered and ambiguous-ending. It's something that you might think about after seeing it, and it completely came out of the blue to me as I never expected it coming. However, I should say that all these little things would be of no use if Snake Plissken wouldn't be in this movie. He makes it all worthwhile. First of all, Kurt Russell's performance is very good. He knows what the character is like at heart and manages to act out like he has a true, deep understanding of the character; he feels like he has been Snake his entire life instead of just the section of it that we witness within the film. But what makes him an even better character is his personality. The writing of Plissken is ingenious. He's built to be a true hardass, who, based on the ending, does have a heart too despite the tough exterior. His personality, from Kurt's performance to every line of dialogue he says, works in favour of the film tremendously.

    And that's why it's sad that all the other characters are just side characters. They're all there to support Snake's character on his quest. They have cardboard-personalities that never change, and the bad guy is really pretty darn unmenacing. With a cast like this I was really expecting all the secondary characters to be atleast interesting, instead I almost yawned every time a new one was introduced since I knew they'd just pop in, say their lines, then go away. It feels like a waste when you have an actor like Lee Van Cleef and all he does is be mean throughout the movie without ever being really all that interesting. From one thing to another, there's still a few things I need to call good. The special effects (models, CGI) and the set design is all very good for the low budget Escape had. Sure, you can tell the CGI is CGI, but atleast it isn't used to simulate actual real-life things, but instead only in computer monitors for example. The small-scale models and blue-screening is very well done, and at a few points it actually had me fooled to the extent that I thought they really shot footage of a small plane landing on the WTC. Then I remembered the budget and laughed it off. The prisoner-torn New York also looks great throughout; taking lots of things from older apocalypse-movies, the set designers created a realistically grim New York; you can still feel that it's NY, but you also go "something really bad has happened here". I think that's good. One thing that wasn't so good though on the production-stage is the props. This movie has some really ridicilous props throughout, seriously. From Snake's enormous silenced SMG to a huge red presidential ball safety capsule (or something) to a car with chandeliers as decorations(!) this film really made me laugh a lot with the prop design, and with the serious tone of the movie, it isn't a good thing.

    In the end, this movie would've been a nice treat, had it been handed to a different director. Carpenter is not a master of action, and it shows. Also, even though I didn't mention it much, like in Carpenter's movies usually, the score is fantastic... to listen to on it's own. Unfortunately it doesn't really create that much excitement or intensity during the action scenes. And as an action movie, the lack of intensity or sense thereof, is a minus.

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