My review of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is up at SBS Film:
Extract:
"...I spent at least half of the film regretting the decision to see it in 3D. Where the poster is bright and colourful, those dark specs cast everything in a muted pall. The 3D effects are often distracting, with objects flying towards the screen at regular intervals. Every time you see the March Hare approaching, duck. But even in 2D the film will suffer from an over-riding problem: despite its fabulous cast and often wonderful production design, it just isn’t much fun."
3 comments:
sorry, completely O.T. but just had to share:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/60413/full_metal_classroom/
Scene from Full Metal Jacket is put into a fifth grade classroom.
Surely the whole point of the film was to challenge this (often fantasmatic) notion of the traditional action protagonist?
Indeed, if anything, the film is a proudly masochistic film. Rather than a character being defined by taking action/by what he can control, here he is defined by what he can't control. The moment of truth is when the fantasy of ourselves as a man of action breaks down. Larry's struggle is trying to perceive this point, that which is outside of his perception (much like PSH's character in Synecdoche, NY). He interprets the signs, trying to discover their meaning. We are constantly on the verge of a revelation but find ourselves left without answers. The struggle for both Larry and the viewer is maintaining a kind of faith even when all 'the truth is found to be lies'. Action here is resistance - which the film sees as a pathway to the divine.
In this sense, the film's 'conflict' lies as much in its aesthetic as in its character; that is, between the Coen's intense formalism and Larry's sympathetic protestations, with both sides rupturing the other. Larry's subjectivity is ruptured by the external formalism; and the film's 'God-like' view of Larry as an object is ruptured by his sympathetic questioning. The film leaves us in a point of limbo between these two perspectives, a space of uncertainty beyond our symbolic frameworks. This is where the film ends. Not at a moment of nihilism but at a point of divine revelation.
I read the script for A Serious Man before I saw the film and even then I was blown away by it. To this date, it's the most beautiful script I've read. And after a second viewing of the film, I'm still in awe at how layered and intricately written it is.
David - you've posted this in the wrong post - this is Alice in W-land, not A Serious Man, do you want re-post under the correct post? Interesting comments here that I'd like to reply to
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