Here is where I will keep track of the flicks I've watched. If you see typos or errors, or you really like what I wrote, or maybe you flat out disagree with me. Don't be shy! Lemme know what YOU think.
A movie based on a meme? I had my doubts but it's actually a good indie flick with a couple great character arcs, with some real tension to the story brought about by you wondering if there's a time machine or not. It's sweet and funny and poignant and romantic and it's got good morals too. It has some crazy bashing at the beginning, but on the whole it redeems itself with the idea of respecting people and being honest about who you are, the value of relationships, etc etc. I really enjoyed it.
It's produced by the Duplass brothers, (Jeff Who Lives At Home) and stars Mark Duplass as the man with the plan, the ad, and the time machine? There lies the mystery. Also there's Jake M. Johnson as a an assholey magazine writer? editor? on a road trip out of Seattle supposedly to check out the story behind the classified, but really he sees it as a vacay opportunity to look up an ex while exploiting his interns - Aubrey Plaza and Karan Soni. The interactions between Duplass and Plaza are where the heart of the story lies, also much of the humour. Plaza is especially good with the deadpan cynicism, but the movie is ultimately about abandoning the comfort of cynicism. I'd suggest you don't watch the trailer unless you enjoy having the majority of the plot points spoiled. Or watch it if you like knowing the shape and colour of a flick beforehand, but personally I think that creates a less satisfying movie experience.
Here's a song from it I really liked - it doesn't wreck the story.
This trailer gives some background to the development of the flick, more than it telegraphs the story.
And this is the trailer where you it's pretty much whoomp there it is, we've connected most all the dots for you already.
Jesus does Isabella Rossellini ever look like her mom Ingrid Bergman.
Aside from that observation, I forgot to write anything about this movie right after I watched it, so this review will be brief.
It was good. The story is great, except for a rather anticlimactic ending, and the acting is stellar by everyone involved. Joseph Cotton is a snoopy American with a snazzy manner, suspicious of that foreigner Charles Boyer. While Boyer is sleazy and supercilious, he's awsome spooky too. Ingrid Bergman is the fragile object of affection, eyed possessively by both men and she's more than just a pretty face. It takes skill to appear vulnerable and tormented. Angela Lansbury is great in her role as a maid on the make, and she's pretty gorgeous and nasty too. It's a good portrayal of the upper classes in the fussy and mannerly Victorian era. I liked the sets and costumes, it looks beautiful, and it's altogether, a pretty great thriller, that's entirely entertaining. I can see why the term gaslight came in to use, because it's such a memorable production particularly in terms of illustrating the diabolical type of evil it would take to "gaslight" someone. It makes sense that the title was coined as a term and referenced over time so often because it well depicts the matrix of deceit and manipulation the abusive/Svengali male entangles around their thrall in order to control them and this is an insidious dynamic which gets play in most all abusive relationships.
I got caught up in the story too. The villain is a terrible man, and what he does is soooo wrong. I was getting mad watching him be such a snakey jerk. Still, it's soooo sexist! It's redonkulous how often female characters are written as lambs to the slaughter victims. Whatever though, because it's worth a look. It's a fun psycho-killer showdown, satisfaction guaranteed!
Last night I went to see A Dangerous Method. I was quite excited and full of anticipation since it's a Cronenberg joint with a star studded cast: Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, also Kiera Knightley, and Vincent Cassel as mental patients who are more than the usually portrayed gibbering idiots.
It wasn't what I expected. Actually it sort of was what I expected, because the trailer makes it look like a gothic romance with Knightly's Sabina Speilrein as the prize in a pissing contest between the two doctors, and I wasn't far off.
More accurate, it wasn't what I hoped. A romantic triangle develops. Sabina's Choice? Gone With The Psychiatrist? There's Something About Psychotherapy? It mainly focuses on the interpersonal relationships of Jung to his patient/student/colleague/lover Speilrein, with some dramatic exposition between him and Otto Gross, (Vincent Cassel), another psychiatrist who becomes his patient. I was more interested in the relationship between Jung and Freud, and that is shown, but mostly the gradual deterioration from mutual admiration to animosity that developed between them. I was hoping it was all about the dangerous method - the how and why to the development of the ideas behind psychoanalysis. But instead of that I got a lot of shrieking Kiera Knightley. I didn't like her performance much, at least not her bony gaunt face grimacing with over the top madness. I mean, sure you can depict the ugly reality of psychosis or delusion, obsession etc, but what was shown seemed so phony and affected. I found it hard to square what I watched with my real life interactions with people who have mental illness. Perhaps I haven't been around enough crazy people.
What did I like? I liked how Jung made fun of Freud for interpreting everything in sexual terms. I liked how Freud is petty and wanting to maintain his power and authority. I liked how Freud was jealous. The humanisation of him was interesting, but there definitely felt like there was a simplistic castigation of him and a simultaneous elevation of Jungian ideals. Dinosaur Freud being evolved out of relevance by the more spiritually minded questing and robustly lusty mammalian Jung upstart.
After reading this article, I'm even more disappointed in the flick.
The importance of Sabina Speilrein was alluded to, but not explicated, in fact exploited would be more accurate, because not much is known of her intimate relations with Jung. The details of their possible sexual and romantic exploits are completely imagined, yet most people who watch this flick will take what they see as fact. In truth, I'm kind of appalled at how her story has been ransacked and prostituted as a literary device in service of titillation.
Also on the do not want side, Viggo Mortensen had a ridiculous nose appendage, a Jewish schnozz, that looked absolutely fako, and Kiera's accent sounded like Ver iz Sqverel, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Natasha.
Finally, I think Fassbender did a better job in Shame. I think his role in that was more nuanced, difficult and challenging than this one.
"This action that i foresee has nothing to do with melodrama. It is that life that lived by me now is a series of exceptions. I was (am?) not unique but special. This is why i was an artist. I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things i also see and show them something different. Nothing to do with not being able 'to take it' in a big city or with self doubt or because my heart is gone"
Since Francesca was raised by artists, she was schooled from birth about the importance of art. George, the painter father said about art and the work ethic, you don't wait until you're inspired. You go to your studio everyday and sharpen pencils when you don't have an idea. You get one eventually. His daughter was even more driven. When her dad was visiting her in NY and complaining about his career, she asked him if he'd called anyone that day and admonished him, you make ONE career related call everyday. He had his most prestigious opening in a group show at The Guggenheim, 5 days after she died.
Francesca took her first photograph at 13, when her father gave her a 6x6 camera. By the time she went to art school in Rhode Island she'd already developed a substantial portfolio. One of her classmates noted, that they were there to figure out what they wanted to do, but she already had that down. She was a photographer.
Self portrait at 13 - a punnish photo with the photo cable linking to a cable knit sweater.
She was amazingly gifted and preternaturally driven. I think she was bipolar. Not much is revealed about her mental illness, or what diagnosis she had. All that's shared is she killed herself during a depression.
She had tried to commit suicide shortly before she actually succeeded. Her family was able to intervene and save her, but they weren't able save her from herself for long. It can be very difficult to help someone who is mired in a trough of depression. What is the cure for despair? How do you alleviate it? Her father said, "We seemed to be able to do nothing in particular to help her, and I just think that things unravelled." His face betrayed some emotion at this point. Otherwise he was so, so, stoic when talking about her. You'd never know the pain he felt at losing her. And the mother, wow, she was really good at compartmentalising her feelings about that. When asked how she dealt with the guilt, she said she tried not to feel it.
January 19, 1981, the day Francesca jumped off the Barbazon building was, according to George, a bad day. She didn't get the NEA grant she was waiting on, and trifling though it may sound, her bike was stolen. George and Betty bickered a bit about whether she knew that she didn't get the grant, but George was adamant that she knew. Whatever prompted her decision to end it, she'd had enough. Living can feel like such a burden when you are depressed, the weight of endless days of null headed existence stretching ever on can be a palpably horrifying contemplation. "My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments . . . instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things…”
It seems to me that her high expectations were what killed her. She was so focused focused focused on her art career, and the art world is a crucible of intent itself focused on fame and acclaim, where she wasn't achieving or being recognised in the way she wanted. And her personality was, as many described her, intense...she was intensely needy emotionally, craving validation. “I am so vain and I am so masochistic — how can they coexist?” It must have galled her tremendously that her talent wasn't recognised. And she was young, only 22; I don't remember having much perspective when I was that age.
Her friend Sloane said, "She was a fragile person. It caused her to make beautiful pictures."
There's a scene with Charles, Francesca's older brother and a video and electronics artist, as the family splashes around in the pool of their beautiful pastoral Italian summer home, he's talking about how they all have egos, they all make art, and no one's art is better than another's. Even though that's true on one level, on another it sounds like so much sour grapes. Neither his work, nor his parents' got the attention that Francesca's did, her fame in the art world completely eclipses theirs, and they all have had to deal with that inescapable fact. He says also, that he felt different, but that Francesca was special.
Both her parents continued successfully on in their careers. Her mother, mostly with ceramics and her father, mainly a painter. But Francesca? The fame and success she never got to experience, eventually far outstripped theirs. As one friend said, "as time went on and the kids needed tuition or whatever, I'd pull out another Woodman print and sell it. I have a stack of them." Her suicide and the subsequent interest in her body of work is the tragedy that informs the Woodmans' lives. She made photographs for 8 years and for all their creativity, they were merely the bloom of what surely would have matured into swaths more intriguing and complex work. And that loss of her potential is also the tragedy of her suicide. On making it to 77, her father said he enjoyed his perspective on life as a 77 year old and ruefully observed that his daughter never got to experience that. "I think to stay alive is a pretty good thing to do."
Betty said that her work changed after Francesca died. She stopped making functional pottery. When an admirer of an installation said "Your work makes me feel good", Betty mused that maybe that's why she does what she does - that she's trying to make herself feel good.
Betty Woodman's installation piece for the American Embassy in Beijing,
in honour of the 2008 Olympics. She works on it throughout the documentary.
Some of her father's photographic work actually incorporates his daughter's photographs into his own, a form of memento mori. His style mirrors hers, as if he became one of her disciples in order to honour her.
Her sudden and premature death has inevitably shaped their lives, and as much as they are stoic about their loss, they are artists first and foremost. Their life is their work, and her work has become a part of their lives as well. Betty and George must be the executors of Francesca's estate; they are the ones who decide how their daughter's photography is shown and promoted. They have been able to nurture her career in a way they couldn't when she was alive, and small comfort, though it may be, I'm sure it's satisfying that they have been able to keep that aspect of her alive in the public eye. That her photography finally got the recognition and respect Francesca felt was her due, must give them succour. Pride is what may have undone her, that and her mental illness, but in the face of her talent, at least their pride over what she accomplished, must mitigate some of their grief, at the loss of her.
