Reviews

This movie is realistic, emotionally-gripping, and very historically informative about a period of culture and politics in the UK in the 1980s. There is a constant back-and-forth between the characters and the larger world-historical events that are conditioning their lives (Thatcherite neoliberalism, the war over the Faulkan islands, the rise of the Nationalist movie, the increasing panic over immigration and how it affects a nation's nostalgic collective identity). I have never been so impressed by so a young actor (Thomas who plays Shaun): his experiences and emotions are so real that the audience partakes in them (plus, unlike Combo, he still can cry shame-free).

I just put up a review for Inglourious Basterds and I can help but compare these two very different movies according the rubric I developed there: with Tarantino, the aesthetics outweights (or eliminates) the thematics, or any larger universal moral content. With Shane Meadows it is almost the diametric opposite: the moral reflection of the 10-year old boy (about racism, friends, and nationalism) is more sophisticated than Tarantino's whole ensemble. I say "almost" the opposite, because Meadows obviously had his own carefully crafted cinematic aesthetics, which others probably called 'realism.' So This Is England is still a very aesthetic movie, in a realistic sense, but as a polar opposite of the bravado-fantastic aesthetics of Basterds. They are two genres and obviously both have some merits, but Meadow's choice of realism certainly encourages moral reflections on the effects of violence much better than Tarantino.

Watching Tarantino's latests makes even the average non-critic movie-consumer realize that there can be a huge disjuncture between the aesthetics of a movie and its thematics. Tarantino obviously has talent for the former, but not the latter, at least not in a clear way (this isn't necessarily a bad thing though). Of course, as everyone will say, the dialogue is good, the acting great, and the cinematography beautiful. And perhaps this will make it a great movie for some who also find its motifs of righteous revenge and bodily destruction satisfying. The best scenes in the movie are the scenes of building suspense, like the encounter in the tavern basement. I can't help but like Brad Pitt's character too, but maybe that's because I'm from rural Virginia.

What bothers me about the movie is precisely its imbalance, the masterful cinema that has left behind any sort of moral message. Tarantino's ethics are very perverse: he turns Jews into Nazis, which seems to be the implication of the movie (just think of the last scene with the Bear Jew spraying bullets on Germans trapped in a locked room). Tarantino is hanging everything on the question of whether 'righteousness' justifies violence (in a similar way to Boondock Saints and a million other movies appealing to masculine code of redemptive violence). I will even hold out the possibility that Tarantino is aware of the moral-messages he is communicating, a very real possibility if the trivia facts on IMDb are true, such as how Tarantino makes several cameos: as the first German to have his scalp removed, as the hands strangling Hammerstock to death.

How could one watch this movie, and not ask about its ethics? Even if Tarantino is consciously manipulating moral-messages, that does not necessarily rescue this movie from nihilism. Its the same nihilism in pulp fiction too: kill or be killed. Or, kill the ones who have killed your kin. Except now its writ large on the mythology of WWII so sacred to the 21st century mind.

This movie is certainly worth watching from Netflix instant-play if you are bored. I think it has a lot of praiseworthy qualities too. The chronology is perfect--there's a reason why for most of the movie you are wonder where Laura Linney disappeared to. Since one of the things I think makes a great movie is character development, I was pleased with the changes Liam Nieson's character experienced: from irrational revenge to humble repentant conciliation with his wife's seducer. A curious line at the end of movie by Liam Nieson, "she certainly knew us well,' or something like that, goes to show the thoughtful organization of this movie: did Linney know that her husband's anger would convert to the passion for her memory, regardless of whose memories they were? that he could surmount his instinctual possessiveness of his former wife? Especially important here is the character comparison between Nieson and Banderas: one an organized new-money manager friends with Bill Gates, and the other a experience-seeking working man who likes non-committal romance. Both like a good chess game though.

We were kind of relieved that the space-creepiness turned into a more philosophically rewarding plot about clones, loneliness, and human rights abuse. Really, great plot. It seems like more blockbuster movies these days from Moon to Avatar are realizing the corruption of the corporate-military-technology complex and how there are no limits to the means it would adopt to make more money, from genocide (avatar) to self-destructing clones (moon), as long as it can keep it secret or have good PR. Moon is probably even more explicitly critical than Avatar about our contemporary political situation (a nod to the immigration debate in a last broadcast from earth).

The movie posed some interesting questions related to my research interests about the social constitution of subjectivity: how we need people to mentally survive, even if we project personhood onto machines or even get only the most limited images/videos of other people from the Jupiter link. We are social beings. Thus the most endearing moments of this movie are when the clones finally start to work together and have empathy for each other's sufferings. Another question is about identity itself: is the self a unity or a disunity. I interpreted the plot as an allegory for split subjectivity: the two clones are really the same person but notice their hostility towards each other. In other words, the self is not a unity, but can be at war with itself.

Thank goodness I did not read any spoiler summaries before watching this movie, which would have been ruined completely if you knew that Kyle died in advance (hey, I put the alert up...).

Best line, the principal calls Robin Williams an *!?-hole, and Williams replies, "yep" before running off to go skinny-dip in the high-school pool. This is a moment of pure authenticity, but in a very anti-social way.

It's hard to put my finger on why I think this movie is great. It has a reflexive quality to it, by that I mean, its level of comedy is superb and makes it feel like the whole plot is an inside-joke the director is having with the audience. Movies with sexual frustration are usually better than romantic comedies. In fact, this movie is heavily anti-romantic: each character realizes how absurd their love-relationships are, from the Gothic fetishization of dead Kyle to the fame-based oscillating relationship Ms. X has between Mike the creative writer and Robin Williams the poetry teacher. I guess the movie is a satire about the professional-private split in our modern lives, the silliness of institutions and about the absurdity of achieving success (e.g. only a faked suicide-note for his son gave Williams the literary success he so desired).

This movie is fun to watch, though one starts to feel kind of voyeuristic soon, watching so many "intimate" moments between animals. I put 'intimate' in quotations, because the script given to James Earl Jones is full of human projections upon the animals with more or less success; at times the captions are far-fetched and detract from the movie; other times, they are hilarious (like with monkeys avoiding getting their hands wet). Hands down, the funniest animal is the bird doing the jumpy wide-wings mating ritual; we couldn't stop laughing.

This movie is incredibly sad and in a very un-Disney-like way, leaves a lot of loose ends. I suppose this is the Realism of Nature, yet, the storyboard in the captions makes it nearly traumatic as a viewer (like the baby elephant going the wrong way and the daddy polar bear who dies because of global warming making the ice thin...the same point and animal in CGI in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth). I guess I am very appreciative of the camera-work capturing such beauty, but for strictly an artistic experience, the captions should be dropped and viewers should make their own interpretations (which happens anyway!)

The best part of this movie is the quality of acting (Patrol, Wilkinson, Affleck, Rush, Firth etc.). Next to that, the good screen writing. Obviously whoever wrote this script knows more about Shakespeare than all my children's children will ever know, as evidenced in the play-within-the-play structure and the combination of Romeo and Juliet themes with other Shakespearean plays. Another one of the reasons why this movie was so successful is the dramatization of character change (also pulled off my the golden cast), not too mention, the frequent plot twists. My favorite of these twists is when Patrol is still pretending to be Thomas Kemp on the early boat scene with Shakespeare and young Williams' reaction of homo-surprise. But let's not even get into gender discussions here...

No doubt, this movie deserves a second watching, but only if you want to make sense of the phenomenological time-line. I'd rather accept the confusion of the second half of the movie because the general gist of what is going on is clear even if its complicated to weave the scenes together.

A few things will bug you (or at least bugged me) about this movie. How they treat their friends, how they treat their wives, and their somewhat base uses of the time-travel box (first to make money, then to change the past). However, you do see how emotionally and physically straining the experience is, it really takes a toll on Abe after the failsafe jump.

You have to wonder what the point of this movie is, just a thought-provoker? I finding movies without more social content to be superficial no matter how mind-bending they are.

My partner's favorite part of the movie was the relationship between Holmes and Watson, how they just knew what the other was thinking and how they worked together so well it was mostly tacit (even when fighting!). I also liked the cinematography of Holmes' mental thought, when he modeled out solutions or his course of action, but this is just a cinematic pleasure.

The more interesting questions have to do with Holmes' character, as I imagine is the case with the books. Despite the backlash from the book-fans of Holmes, one thing is certainly the same in book or movie: the scientific attitude of Holmes, the use of reason to demystify appearances in the investigation of a case (ah, the human sciences were tightly interwoven with forensics at their origins!). Everything 'magical' is explained away by Holmes by the end of the movie, except the second-order cinematic ironies...this is another point my partner made: why the repeated death by hanging scene of Lord Blackwood at the end? Is that not the magic of fictionality? It appears the scientific character of Holmes has an ironic structure at heart: after all, the story is not true!

Without good cinema like this, we risk losing the memory of a very peculiar spirit possessing the youth of the United States in our recent history. Raymond Williams would call it a 'structure of feeling': a certain mood of liberation (spiritual, sexual, social) permeates this movie. More about the behind-the-scenes organization of Woodstock than the actual concert content of the festival, it does present a likable protagonist who "finds himself" in many ways: becoming more assertive in his relation with his parents, learning how to let go of control, coming out of the closet(?), and interacting with his peers in a new (psychedelic) way. However, the most powerful moments of the movie are endangered by the drugs motif, you know, the obligatory far-out turn to multi-color computer graphics, I think, detracts from the uplifting social content of the story. In conclusion though, the many moments of 'letting go,' bonding and exhilaration make this a very fun movie to watch an be inspired by.

The only reason this movie is not as bad as it could have been is that Butler's character comes to the realization that his gender doctrine is inaccurate, e.g. "men are simple," "men only care for women who look hot." One of the deleted endings shows Butler confessing the partial truth of his soapbox, and this is point of the running theme in which Butler's personal history of letdown is revealed and his final hypocrisy when he realizes that he is in 'love' with Heigl's character, that is 'love' not 'lust' as the distinction is made by Butler himself on the Ferguson talkshow. My worry is that instead of a shift to something better, Butler's gender doctrine regresses from bad to worse. The conclusion of the movie, adapting the title, would be the truth is not ugly, but actually what Hollywood thought all along: bachelor sexuality is OK for a little while until monogamy and family obligations triumph.

What does Butler's character represent? He is an archetype for a very real masculinity although he is simply more articulate and blunt than his fellow machos about the premises of hegemonic masculinity. So Butler's character is somewhat separate from your average joe: he represents a liminal space of sexuality, neither conservative but nor is he a radical in any sense since his views conform to the heterosexual matrix. He is full of contradictions: an irresponsible womanizer yet also a traditional dad-figure--maybe there is no contradiction though...it seems the reason it is hard to pin down Butler's archetype is because he is simultaneously a provocateur who challenges social norms AND a sexist. Yet this is a position that more of us may be in, of all genders, than we like to admit.