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Oh, so now it _wasn't_ the epically bad movie you saw last year? What an ironic disappointment.

Is it as disappointing as MIAMI VICE?

Give up, Jeff. They'll have to send Dave to Guantanamo to get the answer out of him.

Well, the one thing Dave said that actually sounds like a positive to me is that it is more Jude Law's character's story - which is as it was in the book (which I was afraid they were going to change).

Personally, and not having seen the movie yet, the casting seemed all wrong to begin with, so there wasn't much hope this thing would turn out right. Dave's review seems to confirm that, at least in regards to Penn and Hopkins.

I'm sure you're right, it was just such an enormous tease with no payoff.

I never bought into this movie. Something about it just didn't feel right. When everyone was saying it'd be a big Oscar vehicle I thought it'd be shut out. Looks like I was right.

I mean, I would love a movie that has Penn/Winslet/Law and Patricia Clarkson to be good, but it just didn't work out that way I suppose.

"Like any 57 year old film, there are certainly areas for improvement from the original."

What the...hell? Am I misunderstanding the intent of this statement, or is this one of the craziest things a cinephile can possibly say? Modern movies can be perfect, but old movies can be improved in a remake?

Is Citizen Kane improveable, or are you literally only talking about movies released in 1949?

Modern movies can't be perfect, and no movie ever can be, including Citizen Kane. Picture grade quality, sound quality, and a few other areas can be superior to movies of yesteryear if focus is given to them.

Tofu, that's a decent enough answer to my question, but is that really what Dave is saying? What I read into Dave's statement is the all too common conceit that somehow the artistry of movies is inherently superior now than it was. Which is, like I say, a truly bizarre comment to hear from somebody who treats movies as more than disposable entertainment.

A good portion of this review seems to focus on the differences between this movie and the 1949 "original."

That would be a point if the movie was attempting to be a remake of the earlier movie. It isn't. It's adapted straight from the book, and in fact Zaillian has never even seen the 1949 version.

NY Times

So I have to wonder, for example, about a perspective that "the film runs off the rails by becoming Burden’s story even more than Stark’s, while in the original, Burden provided the point-of-view and was party to many of the story points."

Hello...in the book the story actually WAS Burden's story even more than Stark's.

The film may or may not have its own flaws (haven't seen it, can't say). But it seems disingenous to say one of those flaws is that it doesn't stick to an earlier adaptation, much less "improve" on it.

Sorry, here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/movies/moviesspecial/10halb.html?_r=3&ref=movies&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

David, I think you missed the key point of Penn's performance. Crawford played it as bluster and bellow all the way through. Penn underplays throughout the film EXCEPT when he is making speeches. This emphasizes the "play-acting" aspect of his character in a way I found really intriguing.

And yes, Edelman deserves an Oscar for his marvelous work--and I say that as a devout loather of desaturated color.

So what about Clarkson's performance? There was no mention of it in the review. Since Mercedes McCambride won an Oscar for the same role in the 1st film, I would have thought there'd be some reference to it and Clarkson's performances in the review.

"Devout loather of desaturated color"? What a unique thing to have as a pet peeve. I guess you really hate rainy days as well.

DP saying that old movies are inherently less 'perfect' is kind of silly, and smacks of historio-centrism. It's like saying that Shakespeare's plays would be improved if they had more regular spelling in them, or that Picasso would be better as a digital collage. Every work of art is unique to its own time of creation and serves as a miniature time capsule.

"It is so insanely complex and so unsuccessful in giving us a reason for appreciating the complexity that while there are many quality pieces, there is no excuse."


"But judged on the scale it sets for itself, it is one of the year’s most profound disappointments."


I like these two observations. I haven't seen the film myself, but these are two very good, detailed and seemingly true observations.

jeffmcm: "Devout loather of desaturated color"? What a unique thing to have as a pet peeve. I guess you really hate rainy days as well.

Me: I adore rainy days, particularly in the late afternoon when I can curl up with a good book and MJQ on the stereo. But gray skies and desaturated color are two different things. The latter tells me that the studio was too chickenshit to let them shoot in black-and-white, so they came up with this half-assed compromise. If you're trying to evoke the early to mid-20th Century, you don't do it like that--you do it like Marty did on THE AVIATOR: full-tilt IB Tech.

btw

Release: September 22, 2006
Sony Pictures Classics

Directed by Murali K. Thalluri

Starring: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet,
Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins

Rated: R

I didn't know the director of 2:37 also directed All the King's Men! :P

Cadavra, you are right about desturated being the chicken way to do things. However, I have a feeling from the sound of it, that if Zaillian had shot the movie in B&W it would have raised the pretentiousness level another notch.

Uh, folks. Desaturated color ain't just black-and-white-lite. The two techniques give you entirely different effects.

Saving Private Ryan is a great example. You can't make the case that Spielberg was just being a chicken about black-and-white. He made Schindler's List at a time when black-and-white was even less fashionable than it is now, and it became a huge success critically, commercially, and with awards. If he'd wanted to shoot SPR in black and white, he'd have had an easier time of convincing the studios to go along with it, since he'd established a successful precedent and, you know, basically owned the studio he was working under at the time.

But he didn't -- he went with desaturated color instead, and with good reason. SPR in black and white would have had a tremendously different effect, and I don't think it would have been an improvement.

You are right in this case, SPR was shot in exactly the right way.

Profound disappointment? But the mindless Gurus of Gold had it ranked 7th for Best Picture! Does this mean that movies should actually be seen first before they are judged on their worth? What an interesting concept.

The desaturation and color transfer in "The Aviator" was incredibly annoying. I'm curious if it will work with "Flags of Our Fathers".

Speaking of.

I noticed the first print advertisement of "Flags" in today's LA Times. I think that's shameful. Kicking off a print marketing campaign to coincide with a tragic event to get the "patriotic" folks into the theaters... Fuck You Dreamworks/Warners.

Yeah, that's in bad taste.
What did you think was annoying about the color work in The Aviator? I liked it, but did you think it was distracting?

Very distracting. The scene where they are playing golf the scene where he's eating dinner with the blue peas. Just didn't like it. I noticed it was dominant in the first half but faded to normal color schemes in the second half. I liked the movie, except for that aspect of it. It won Best Cinematogrpahy so clearly it wasn't that distracting to others.

"Confessions of a Dangeroug Mind" did the same thing, if memory serves (wasn't crazy about that one).

Think Scorsese did that to mirror the cinematography techniques of the era being chronicled in the movie. It gets more normal as the techniques change with time.

But yes, the blue peas were strange.

The blue peas were in the part of the film set at a time when two-strip Technicolor was the norm. Greens tended to register blue in the process. I agree that people who didn't know what he was up to would well be perplexed by it.

I should clarify my remarks re desaturated color. While I do hate it, I am, like all good liberals, open to exceptions where it is genuinely a desired look (e.g., the climax of TAXI DRIVER, a dream sequence or flashback in an otherwise normally-hued film). But too often it is indeed a compromise for a subject obviously intended for B&W; ALIEN3 and SKY CAPTAIN are two of the worst offenders in my book. As for RYAN--World War II was a "black-and-white" war, and I believe it should have been shot that way. The comparison to SCHINDLER is inapt, as RYAN had a much larger budget and was considered--at least compared to SCHINDLER--a more commercial film. Plus SCHINDLER was on Universal's dime; RYAN was DreamWorks. As the late, great Sam Arkoff used to say, "When you're pissing your own money, you don't piss quite as freely."

I understand the "film was matching the look of the time the scenes were set in" technique. I just didn't like it or really find it that interesting.

The saturation in "Private Ryan" worked really well, I don't see that IT HAD to be shot in B&W. Also in "O Brother, where are thou?" where they made a gold, dry look for the "dust bowl" period it is set in.

I think Ryan was better in desaturated color, B&W has a distancing effect on modern audiences, an aestheticizing effect that would be at odds with SPR's 'you-are-there' mentality.
Perhaps Schindler shouldn't have been B&W for the same reasons, I wonder if Spielberg chose it to be in B&W to allow the audience a layer of separation.

Exactly right, jeffmcm. The effect of black and white is to create a more dreamlike feel, and also because of the history of film technology there's an ingrained societal association with history. Neither are appropriate for Saving Private Ryan, the purpose of which was to make this important historical event *not* so distant from audiences today who are largely born after it happened and learn about it via textbooks and other emotionally distant sources. To put you in the midst of Omaha Beach, to make it as real and tangible and immediate as possible, color was critical.

But not full-blown color -- the desaturated color enhances the grimness, the gloom, the dirt and muck, and the feeling of being far away from home in an uncertain, unpleasant place.

World War II is a "black and white war"? Come on. There's no such thing as a black and white war, or a color war. It's all about what you're trying to do with your movie, not what historical war is the nominal subject.

I don't know if anyone will agree, seeing as it has attained "classic" status criminally quickly, but does anyone feel that in retrospect Spielberg shot himself in the foot by not sticking with b&w throughout the past portions of Schindler's List? As I watch it now, the girl in red is really cloying. Did Spielberg not trust his audience to feel something without being hit over the head with it?

In my undergrad introductory film class, one of the professors deconstructed Schindler's List in order to explain Spielberg's tactics and why he thought it was somewhat overpraised, and he used the girl in red as a key example. Spielberg has never been really good at trusting his audience and it's only been since he finally won Best Director that I think he was mostly able to break through this tendency.
I still love the movie, though.

Sam: World War II is a "black and white war"? Come on. There's no such thing as a black and white war, or a color war. It's all about what you're trying to do with your movie, not what historical war is the nominal subject.

Me: I meant that literally, not metaphorically. Our memories of WW2 are the newsreels and feature films of that era, almost all of which were B&W; thus we "see" it in black-and-white. (THE LONGEST DAY, made in 1962 and costing a fortune, was not in color for that very reason.) Vietnam, by contrast, was a 'color" war for the same reasons. I'm not saying a WW2 movie can't be in color, and certainly younger generations won't have this built-in belief, but B&W does lend a certain authenticity to the proceedings that color can't replicate.

Incidentally, it's often been said that JFK was our last black-and-white President, because television became all-color while LBJ was in office.

I think the girl in red is one of the pivotal and most moving parts of the film. I don't think he was hitting it over the head at all.

However, Spielberg (and many, many directors are guilty of this) and his music choices... THAT does drive me up the wall. Use of music to manipulate emotions, he's got that down to a T.

I still think Schindler's List is a masterpiece. And I think the sum of the parts of "Saving Private Ryan" are less than the whole. Some of Spielberg's best work (and Hank's best work absolutely) are in SPR. The scene where they charge the bunker and Giovanni Ribisi gets killed, in particular, is devastating and brilliant and I was stunned watching it in a theater. My other favorite part, which is after the "ugly tree" speech, when Hanks decides not to share memories about his wife. That gets me every time.

"And I think the sum of the parts of "Saving Private Ryan" are less than the whole."

I think I know what you mean...

It's not just the bookends, there's something else about that movie that always made me feel it was uneven and just not quite the acheivement many critics painted it as. It's a great movie in my book, but not THAT great.

Many of Spielberg's movies (his later ones especially) have felt wildly uneven or just...imbalanced I guess, and lacking something. I do really like his films regardless. "War of the Worlds" is probably the only one recently I didn't like at all. I even like "The Terminal" (except for the last 20 minutes).

It's true, Spielberg's movies since Schindler have been rather lumpy and the seams have shown, story-wise. I think the bookends of SPR and the last act of A.I. are glorious and essential, but I think the reason so many people don't like them is because of the huge narrative speedbumps they present to the viewer.

Jeff: Did your professor mention that the little girl in red from "Schindler's List' is a direct visual quote from a famously hand-tinted sequence in Wiliam S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" (1903)? If he or she didn't, well, I'd take whatever else he/she ahd to say with a grain of salt.

No, and I've seen The Great Train Robbery and don't recall the image.
He did mention that the end sequence, with all the Schindler Jews walking arm-in-arm, was a visual quote from the 1930s disaster movie San Francisco, which was the grand finale of his presentation, destroying the powerful moment in Spielberg's movie for all us kids with the incredibly hokey moment from the old movie. My professor has gone on to assail Spielberg's movie in other lectures and writings, especially in comparison with Shoah and The Pianist. Personally I think the movies are apples and oranges.

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