The Blog
This blog will be all about film reviews. I'm going to be watching a lot of movies, writing reviews, and hopefully not spoiling any movies you plan to watch.
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Verdict: Thumbs Up Arguably Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey represents a truly beautiful piece of cinema. Unlike almost any other movie, it shows how Kubrick could bring total control over a movie and shape it to tell a story in a completely different way than other movies. Millions of years ago, a group of apes struggles to survive in the African wilderness.They feud with a rival group of apes over the local watering hole. One morning, the apes awake and find a tall, black monolith. Curious, they hoot and holler and move up and cautiously touch it. The next scene shows one of the apes amid a pile of bones. The ape picks up a bone and swings it around and starts breaking other bones. The next encounter with the other group of apes results in one of them being clubbed to death by bones and a significant victory of the apes. The lead ape throws a bone into the air and as it comes down, the scene shifts to an orbiting satellite (implied to be a nuclear weapon) above earth. A Pan Am space ship drifts towards a massive rotating space station. After docking, Heywood Floyd, Chancellor of the National Council of Astronautics, departs and encounters some soviet scientists. They question him over mysterious news coming from the American moon base, but he lets on nothing. Floyd then travels to the moon. There, he has a conference with other scientist on the base about a magnetic anomaly in the Tycho crater, TMA-1. Upon excavation, it is discovered to be a black monolith. When Floyd arrives on site and the sun touches the monolith, a strong radio signal is sent out. In the year 2001, Discovery One drifts towards Jupiter. David Bowman and Frank Poole operate the ship with an artificially intelligent computer, HAL 9000. David and Frank believe their mission is to explore Jupiter and the Jovian satellites. However, the true purpose is to explore a massive monolith like that on the moon that orbits Jupiter. One day, HAL reports an imminent failure of a crucial piece of hardware and Poole goes out to change the component. Nothing is found to be wrong with the unit. Questioning HAL, David and Frank become concerned about HAL and plot to disconnect HAL. However, HAL learns of this, and in a scripted “accident,” Frank Poole is killed. When David tries but fails to rescue Poole, he finds himself locked out of the ship. After barely making it aboard alive, David disconnects HAL. He learns of the true purpose of the mission and continues with it. When he arrives at Jupiter and goes to explore TMA-2, he is sucked and transported across the Universe, observing strange things. He then ends up in a normal looking hotel room where he sees himself age before being “reborn” as a starchild, like the E.T.’s that created the monoliths. Even though it is classified as a sci fi film, it is more of a scientific speculation. There is very little fiction compared to the other sci fi movies of the time. Kubrick went and made a movie that felt like the near future, not some wild fantasy. To show how future spacecraft might simulate the effects of gravity, Kubrick had a massive centrifuge built. The scene where Frank is running around the edge of the living area is only possible because of the centrifuge. He also took a new approach to the design of the spacecraft, taking inspiration from NASA and having engineers design them instead of artists. Whereas in movies like Star Trek, ships are made to look cool, Kubrick had his vehicles made to look like what was going to be built. Kubrick wanted 2001 to feel real and every little detail was made to be as realistic as possible. Without this, the movie would lose some of its effect. Kubrick filmed the movie very much as if it were from a book. The shots are very long, sometimes borderline ridiculously long. Kubrick is allowing the viewer to become a person in this time period, immersing them in the surroundings the characters find themselves in. There is minimal dialogue and the images speak far more than the characters do. While it would be slightly more difficult to follow, it would be completely possible for all the speaking to be removed but the plot of the film still understandable. Apart from Kubrick’s brilliant visuals, the most decisive feature was the audio. Kubrick was very considerate when he chose what the music played would be. It underlines a subtle shift throughout the whole of the movie. As the movie progresses, the music starts out very happy and whimsical. As the movie progresses, this becomes gradually deadened and drab. In the final moments of the movie, the music yet again shifts to being psychotic and disturbed. All of these transitions corresponded with the plot progression and help to change the tone and emotion. Accompanying this was the long periods where all you could hear was the breathing of the astronauts. This made it feel like you too were in space, which is very eerie and somewhat unsettling. These all come together at the Star Gate scene where every form of understanding is thrown out the window. With flashes of Dave’s face or his blinking eye, it is deeply disturbing. All of these features are to make the audience feel as though they are with the characters but the characters are not aware of them. Like being a fly on the wall, everything is known and felt, but the characters will never know. Stanley ends the movie in a rather curious way. He shows life going through various stages, from late adulthood to elderly to bedridden. Starting with the apes, he shows humanity in its absolute infancy. These ancient ancestors are what humanity is to become. When the scene changes to space, it is humanities prime. It appears that humans have the solar system at their fingertips. However, once on Discovery One, humanity is aging. A computer needs to help take care of things and look after the men. Man can still put up a fight, but only just. Once Bowman is through the Stargate, he is know being fully looked after, no longer having influence. Once he arrives in the room, the process begins again, except this time, it is visually showing the aging process, with each older version of Bowman discovering the next. Then at the end of it all, David passes on and is reborn anew as the Star Child. Possibly even more incredible is who Kubrick is able to make you feel sympathy for. All the human characters lack much personality. From Heywood has the most emotion but it is rarely seen. David and Frank are both very dry. From their voices to their day to day actions are very subdued. They keep their emotions very much in check. HAL on the other hand is rather intriguing in who he acts and behaves. When HAL kills Frank, there is not so much sadness at his death rather than shock. You can feel the emotion in his voice almost as much as the humans, if not more. There is an incredible sense of innocence when Dave is disconnecting him and spite and, almost hate, when he tells Dave why he will not allow him back on board. However, as Dave is de-activating HAL and HAL begins to sing Daisy, which slowly becomes more and more disembodied, it feels like an old friend or a relative dying, it’s incredibly saddening. Kubrick manages to get you to feel sympathy for a misunderstood computer that killed four innocent men. It is almost inconceivable that you could feel for this sold hearted computer, and yet those final moments of HAL’s life are full of emotion and sadness. Dave’s reaction to what HAL is saying magnifies this. Hearing only Dave’s breathing and HAL’s dying voice feels so intimate, it feels as though Dave is pulling the plug on a dear relative. This moment is the most emotional of the entire movie. Kubrick’s ability to completely dominate and control the audience is what makes 2001: A Space Odyssey his finest work. Simply beautiful.
1 Comment
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Verdict: Meh The first act of Stanley Kubrick’s directing career, Fear and Desire was a rough cut of what was to come. With strong acting and clever cuts, Kubrick was able to bring emotion out with limited funds. Set in a fictional valley, four men are stranded behind enemy lines. The leader, a pilot, decides to go to a nearby river and make a raft to get back to their side of the lines. However, the group is discovered by a local woman. The group decides to tie her up and interrogate her. However, finding she can’t understand them, they leave to work on the raft, leaving the youngest, Pvt. Sidney behind. He falls in love for her and raves over her, begging her to love him. He frees her, hoping she will embrace him, but she attempts to flee. Distraught, he shoots her. When the oldest of the group, Sgt. Mac, returns to find him having gone completely crazy. Sidney, hysterical, runs into the river, claiming its blood. The group soon discovers that an enemy general is nearby and decides to try and kill him. Mac sacrifices himself so that the pilot and the other soldier can kill the General and escape in an enemy plane. As Mac, badly wounded, floats down the river, he comes across Sidney, standing in the river. With an incredibly limited budget, Kubrick made the best of a tough situation with superb actors. The strongest part of the movie, the actors drove the emotion and the plot. With only a very short period of time in which to develop character traits, the actors had to work hard to be able to develop their character in the beginning in order to have the majority of the time for the plot. While the pilot overacted and was obviously having to actively try, Pvt. Sidney and Sgt. Mac played their parts beautifully. From the beginning it is obvious that Sidney was nervous and fearful. Everything seemed to add to a mounting stress. When he snapped, he snapped and it was so brilliantly played it was almost worrying. Mac, while not fanatic and crazy like Sidney, was very strong from the off. If anything, the editing and cuts almost detracted from his performance. These two performance really made the movie. Apart from the acting, Kubrick was able to help enhance the emotion of the film through cuts during two important scenes. When the men go into a cabin and stab the men inside, food is flung everywhere. The dying men, food in hand, squeeze it to mush. In between cuts of food falling and going everywhere is scenes of the men stabbing and killing. The quick cuts help emphasize the frantic nature of the attack while the food is representing the blood and gore of the action. When Sidney goes crazy, the shots are all more or less the same but there are numerous fast past cuts of Sidney. This helps show what is happening to Sidney. Everything is happening so fast and it is disorienting and confusing. The sound editing also lends a small part to the film. Faintly in the background, there is a drum beat. When focused on, it is obviously a drumbeat acting as a musical accompaniment. However, when simply watching the movie, it sounds like distant cannon fire, booming away. It is a reminder that the film is set in a war and that fighting is ongoing, even when the action on camera is calm. While very rough and showing a clear lack of funds or maturity, Fear and Desire is a standout debut film for Stanley Kubrick and shows how, even at a young age, he has a natural talent for directing. Director: Woody Allen
Verdict: Thumbs Up Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris gets much of its emotion through the tones, making extensive use of color and music to help highlight the plot. Revolving around Gil Pender, a famous screenwriter and budding writer in a tense relationship, he discovers an odd characteristic about Paris. One night while his fiance is out dancing with a man he dislikes, he finds that he can time travel. He goes to a time in adores, the 1920’s. There he encounters famous writers, painters, and philosophers from the era. Every night, he goes back in time. However, he falls in love with a woman from the time and his fiancee becomes suspicious of him. She is convinced he has gone crazy and has an affair with the man Gil dislikes. In the meantime, Gil discovers that everyone has a soft spot for a time before them and that the extraordinary can become ordinary. Having realized this, he breaks up with his fiance and decides to stay in Paris. The movie is very focused on the idea of being in love with a “Golden Era.” To Gil, that golden era is the 1920’s with people like Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso. To suit this theme, the color palate is full of yellows and golds and soft colors. There is a very warm feel for much of the movie. However, it moments when Gil’s enemy, Paul, is around, there is a slight shift towards some cooler coolers such as green and blue. The mood never goes fully cold, but it does provide a clear shift in emotion. Music also helps to shape the tone of the movie. The music is very pretty and soft but not omnipresent. It shows up in moments when the movie feels magical or something special is about to happen. It follows Gil’s mood, and is around when one could imagine Gil would have butterflies in his stomach. Overall, the movie is pretty good and entertaining. The plot is solid and interesting and Woody Allen controls the tone and emotion of the movie very well. I would watch it again. |
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