catapult magazine

Lots of good movies out right now. Who has seen them and what did you think?

25th Hour
Solaris
Gangs of New York
Adaptation
About Schmidt
Chicago
Russian Ark
Far From Heaven

How about Frida? Has anyone seen it? There’s none of the shooting in the head that dvdschp mentioned, but you do see Leon Trotsky’s assasination…ax in the head has to be nearly as good as being shot, right?

Frida was great. Yes, the hatchet scene was priceless. The coloring and imagery was exceptional in that movie. I could have done without the excessive sensuality, but then again, it was a true representation of Frida’s life.

Interestingly enough, after reading up a bit on Frida, I actually thought the sensuality was quite subtle in comparison to her actual life experiences (or maybe I’ve built up some immunity to it all-uh, whatever that implies). I also never got a true sense of her life-long pain in Selma Hayak’s portrayal, which is really what a lot of her art is about. Overall, I suppose it was an okay movie to familiarize people with an artist that doesn’t seem to be all that widely known (at least in most circles I’m a part of) and should be.

Oh, and affirmative on the hatchet scene. nice.

I’m going to jump off the bandwagon and say I didn’t like About Schmidt.

It.

Has.

No.

Plot.

Call me crazy, but I tend to like stories where something actually happens. Sure, there’s some funny stuff and some cool photography blah blah blah, but mullet-man was over-the-top and Jack was doing a toned-down version of his As Good as it Gets character. The first sequence of the movie had me in stitches (the clock-watching scene), but after that I was disappointed.

Adam,
I think you are wrong in that it had no plot…but it might have been a plot that you did not gel with. Point in being: About Schmidt is a segment of a mans life – the looking back and the looking forward and the reckoning of what has been accomplished and does it have any value. It wasn’t supposed to have all that much happening, I mean, how much can happen to a retired old man in a few weeks of his life…except maybe an eppifany and a new beginning?

Nicholson was perfect for the part, mostly because I don’t think that there had to be an enourmous amount of acting on his part…he just acted like he always does and that fit the bill. :) Now if only the eppifany would hit him in real life…that would be something to base a movie on.

I agree. Very little did actually happen in About Schmidt, but what did happen was incredible. It’s all in the last scene. It changes the whole movie. Bam. All of a sudden it’s not satire anymore. I thought it was pretty amazing.

I’d disagree about the acting comment, though. I think it was quite a performance. Nicholson’s natural charisma (displayed to HUGE effect in As Good As It Gets and almost all his other films) was almost completely reigned in for this character. Nicholson himself is anything but a boring, repressed, midwestern insurance salesman. And yet I bought it. As they say about actors: the longer you do it, the less acclaim you’ll receive, because it looks more and more like you’re not acting.

I don’t get to the site that often so I want to respond to why About Schimdt made me want to shoot myself in the head. I liked everything about the film except the part about Ngundo or whatever that kid’s name was. It seems to be there for two purposes only: to hide exposition (which it doesn’t do very well) within the letters Schimdt writes and the ending. I saw that ending coming a mile away. I’m not trying to be cocky but it just seemed obvious. And the whole scenario seemed so far removed from the story itself that it made it trite. Therefore, because the rest of the movie is basically Nicholson coming to grips with his wasted life and powerless nature, the ending seemed false. Whenever a movie tries to provide an answer to life difficulties and instead of truth presents a facade, I can hardly take it. Just like American Beauty. Thus, shotgun to the head.
I would have felt better if there were a resolution to the cattle motif as well, but all the film did was constantly compare him to a docile bovine. I was hoping for some sort of response at the end, but alas.

Sweet. Some disagreement.

Acting: Since when does it take talent to reign yourself in? I could reign in my natural self and call that acting, but it would be easy. Just wake me up at 5 and shoot all the scenes before 9. I didn’t see a character, which was actually what I was expecting. I saw a boring old guy.

Jason: I think David Ball would hate this movie, because nothing sustains the plot. The movie was not storytelling, it was mood-setting; a Barbara Walters piece on aging.

While I would question how American Beauty seeks to answer life’s questions—just because a movie makes you feel good about being alive doesn’t mean it gives answers—I would agree with Dave that a movie can’t just say something profound, even if it’s said well, understated and witty. The truth is still in what happens between characters and their situations. I could have learned what was in Jack’s head through a monologue without having to go through a series of unrelated events that slowly, surely tell us what we already know.

Hmm, after thinking about it, I really didn’t hate the movie quite this much, but it’s more fun to be polar, now isn’t it. The sequence at the campground was great. Maybe the thing is that this movie could never be a play and since I’m trying to write one right now, I’m a bit hostile.

Okay, can we go back to movies that make you want to shoot yourself? (Sorry, Adam) :)

I saw The Hours last night, and I think it was definitely a “shoot-yourself-in-the-head” sort of movie. Depressing. It reminded me a lot of Sylvia Plath and Kate Chopin.

Did anyone else see it? I can see how it might be uplifting, in its own depressing way—did anyone see it that way?

Yes, I saw “The Hours” not too long ago. I came out of the theatre and wanted to crawl into my bed for a week and just cry.

I’ve been mulling it over in my brain for a few weeks now, and I still haven’t found anything uplifting about it. What is it about women writers and depression and suicide? Or maybe it’s just writers in general? I don’t know. I was a little disappointed—I felt everything about the movie was forced and blatant. Virginia Woolf, as a writer, is anything but explicit and obvious. Her novels are full of symbolism, metaphors, and anything and everything that can be considered subtle. The Hours was nothing close to subtle. I felt like every connection that the movie wanted me to make was practically shouted into my ear, not leaving me any space to come to the understanding on my own.

It did, however, paint a very real picture of depression. I mean, depression so real that it made me feel it deep inside me. What needs to be going on inside a person to make her very deliberately walk into a river with rocks in her pockets and drown herself? A lot, as I found out in The Hours. The line, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—I seem to be unravelling” seems to be such a loaded, but incredibly telling, phrase about the desperation that can exist in human nature. The feeling of being out of control, and the scariness of that feeling.

All in all, an interesting concept for a movie (a novel, originally, I guess) but somewhat clumsily drawn out on the screen. Although I did love the scenes of Virginia Woolf sitting in her large study, surrounded by windows and sheets of paper everywhere, calmly writing. If anything about the movie was uplifting, it was that. That felt like a piece of heaven there.