Catching up on (fairly) recent viewing...
Kill Bill: If I tell you that my favorite Tarantino film isn't Pulp Fiction, or even Reservoir Dogs, but rather Jackie Brown, you'll probably be able to guess that I found Bill overrated. As for the gender roles, I was discussing them with a friend:
FRIEND: You didn't like his portrayal of women as cold-blooded killers?
ME: No, I actually found that rather inspiring. What bothered me was that they had no agency of their own; all that killing was for their men or for their kids, never for themselves.
FRIEND: *edges away*
Still, there's no doubt that Tarantino has a gift for crystallizing a visual of ineffable cool out of the older styles he pillages. David Carradine was a delight, even if his ramblings could have been trimmed a bit. Occasionally, Tarantino even slips into humanizing the characters; the sequence of the Bride punching her way out of her coffin had a surprising emotional resonance for me--enough that I went to see it twice during finals.
The Godfather: A review of this movie seems superfluous, and I don't have time for a longer meditation on the way its enduring popularity makes me despair as a feminist (the film itself is not misogynist, but the way the male audience has embraced it as a patriarchal fantasy is deeply depressing). What struck me this time through is that though the subject matter is now well-worn (and one can't fault Coppola for originating ideas that became so popular as to turn into cliches), the film-making is still fresh, vivid, strong, accessible. For all of his saturated color, there's still a tremendous subtlety to the direction that I really appreciated as I tried to figure out how he achieved various effects.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The first of the HP films to attempt an actual adaptation. The more I think about it, the more the structure of the film seems excessively loose to me, and there would be a million perceived loose ends for someone who hadn't read the book. The film finds the emotional truth of the book, however, and the cinematography offers gloriously melancholy support. Daniel Radcliffe continues to grow into his role--I find Harry's wordless but clearly very deep affection for Hermione to be particularly touching--and Gary Oldman and David Thewlis have trawled through the odd material Rowling offers them to produce appealingly coherent characters in Sirius and Remus.
I'm at a loss as to how they're going to successfully film the next book, nearly three times the length of Azkaban, but at least I'm back on board with the franchise, after dropping it out of sheer boredom after the first one.
Posted by Sarah T. at June 13, 2004 03:01 PM | TrackBack