Movie Update 6

I saw some more movies. They were all pretty good. Some won awards!

Amadeus


Much like Milos Forman's earlier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this won a ton of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, this time for F. Murray Abraham as a Vienna court composer who had an equal amount of hate and admiration for Wolfgang Mozart. This was kind of an odd movie, with Mozart being shown as both a master of music and kind of a clownish person, and some of the performances felt a little off. It managed to stay interesting for three hours though, and I loved the way it depicted the writing and reading of music. Lots of interesting classical music throughout, even if some of the opera segments seemed to drag on a bit. Abraham really is good too, especially in the scenes when he's older.

Cinema Paradiso


I definitely feel conflicted about this one. I thought it was too long, at almost three hours, especially since the version to actually receive accolades was almost an hour shorter. On the other hand, the shorter version cuts a subplot that I felt added a lot of actual meaning to the story, which makes me wonder which version I actually would have preferred. It's a story about many things; the love of film, a romance that ended too soon, and a man's friendship with a mentor, whose death kicks off the flashback-heavy plot. The first thing came through the best, especially in the final scene of the movie, which is remarkably touching. And Ennio Morricone's scoring can make any movie better. Not great, but there's a lot of heart in it.

Downfall


For all of the terrible things that happen in this movie, about the final days of Nazi Germany's role in World War II, it didn't seem quite as sad as it maybe should have been. There's something just a bit clinical about all of the failure and suicides that add up over time, preventing it from becoming soul crushing but also from being a truly great film. Bruno Ganz is terrific as Hitler though, not really making him sympathetic (who would want that?), but making him seem like a person instead of an inscrutable monster. It overcomes the dozens of videos that put silly subtitles over one of the film's most dramatic moments, which is certainly worth noting.

Red Beard


Akira Kurosawa's final black and white film, and his final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, is another solid creation from a director that I respect more than I enjoy. If it was just the story of a young, talented doctor coming to work for a gruff but singularly brilliant aging medical talent, I might have liked it more, but too much time was dedicated to the sob stories of many of their patients, which never seemed worth the time they tacked onto yet another three hour marathon of a film. No single scene is bad, and almost all of them are pretty remarkable from a pure film making perspective. I just wasn't interested in watching a lot of them. It makes the story seem choppy and missing some sort of focus. Mifune is again amazing though, impossibly awesome and captivating regardless of the age of whatever character he happens to be playing. That only fifteen years passed between Rashomon and this speaks to his talent. Which is what makes it mystifying that they never worked together again after this, though I'm sure there were plenty of factors.

The Invasion

I didn't really expect to see this movie, I just sort of did. I wasn't totally against it, since I like movies about aliens, and if nothing else, there are worse people you could watch for an hour and a half than Nicole Kidman. I remember watching the 1956 version some time ago, and liking the idea. It was like a good, long episode of the Twilight Zone, focusing on an interesting premise and disturbing atmosphere in lieu of a bunch of special effects, and it worked quite well. The Invasion goes the same route, with a few good effects shots to set it up, but most of the tension and excitement comes from just watching normal people try to escape from emotionless shells of their former friends and family.

Most of the problems came from the ways they changed it from the original. They really avoided the whole alien aspect; the antagonist is an alien invasion in the sense that they are a form of life that was not created on earth, coming to take it over, but there are no pods or any of the other science fiction elements that make it a little more entertaining, in my view. It played a bit like just another thriller, when it could have been more interesting than that. With the horror/thriller angle comes the annoying flashes-of-images-with-loud-noises that masquerade as something actually scary and plenty of unbelievably dumb actions taken by the main characters. Kidman is a psychiatrist who holds her own intellectually at dinner parties, but still does things like just sit around when she's supposed to be avoiding sleep, as opposed to, I don't know, doing anything at all to keep herself occupied.

Daniel Craig is fine as the love interest, he's a good actor who can bring some respectability to any part he plays. He and his doctor coworkers are working to find a cure for the epidemic that's taking over the planet, which is explained much more scientifically than it was in previous incarnations. I don't understand the point of this, the audience is fine with the alien spore just working, we don't need medical terms we don't know thrown at us, and when they stumble upon possible cures quite easily it just seems less believable than if they never tried to justify it in the first place. This all leads to a disappointing ending which just isn't as effective as the original's.

The first movie used the premise to comment on topical issues like McCarthyism, and like other remakes, The Invasion updates it to say some things about Iraq. When they've taken over, the aliens bring peace to the world, ending wars and struggle, and it makes a point that maybe the world is better off with everyone turned into conforming, hollow citizens. The protagonists are trying to save the true nature of humanity, but is it really worth it? It's an interesting question which does a lot to make up for a lot of the movie's other deficiencies. It's reasonably exciting and entertaining throughout. There are some dumb moments, but you can just laugh at it and move on. If it's not the best movie in the world, it was at least enjoyable while we were watching it.