Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1975)
Happy birthday, Eric Idle, 66 today.The favorite Python movie of some, but to me, uneven even by Pythonic standards. Which is not to say it's not pretty damned wonderful at its best.
Thoughts on movies, mostly
Or triplicity, or quadruplicity, or quintiplicity. A beautifully made scamflick in the tradition of The Sting and Nueve reinas: when you think you've got it sussed, think again.
Interesting New Yorker story recently, describing the thought processes behind some directing and editing choices by Tony Gilroy, including the decision to begin the film not in media res but five years earlier in Dubai, when Claire (Julia Roberts) seduces Ray in order to get access to the secrets he's carrying. Bad choice, in my opinion, but you can see why he does it. There is so much available here to confuse the inattentive viewer that it makes sense to ground us in something unambiguous at the start. What's lost, though, is any ambiguity in the scene that originally stood first: Ray finding Claire and trying to force her to admit that she recognizes him. The writing and performances of the verbal parrying are beautiful (and we get a couple of slightly different reprises later), but what would make the scene a really terrific mindfuck would be not knowing whether (1) Claire is gaming Ray, (2) Ray is confusing her w/ someone else, (3) Ray is, for reasons of his own, trying to play her, or (4) who knows what? Fortunately, [see second sentence of previous paragraph]: there's plenty of ambiguity and fun left in the sequence to serve.
Someday I'll see Tom McCarthy in a film and I'll think, "There's Tom McCarthy, the wonderful director of The Station Agent and The Visitor," instead of "There's that character actor who always inspires a visceral negative response in me."
So many that I'll be lucky to remember them all (including a much more detailed version for X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Let's see, there was . . .
OK, look, I love The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, but the critics who are calling this the best film ever about organized crime have this point: Coppola's films are, among many other things, romances, but there isn't anything romanticized in this gritty, naturalistic masterpiece. The four or five intertwined stories of these people play no González Iñárritu-esque narrative games. Instead, we simply see people in the grip--some more willingly than others--of the Neapolitan Camorra, and how they cope. (Spoiler alert: not well, mostly.)
What makes this even more compelling and hard to watch in early 2009 (though I'm sure this won't be the case a year from now) is the clarity with which the film portrays everything as an economic choice. And when your economy is in the shitter, the other choices are limited, and the dangerous choices become more attractive. Not that that could happen here.
Who among us has not been one or more of the following: