sammousseau

This is undoubtedly an incredible movie, but at least for me, it's far from the best ever made.

Technically, though, this is up there. It's added to the ever-growing list of mine of the best cinematography I've ever seen. It may not be the most beautifully shot, but I think this is definitely the most weighty and dense cinematography I have ever seen, far and away. The most meaningful and complicated, and it's groundbreaking. The repeated focus on the background and foreground, and how deep the camera lens is willing to show us, is truly unlike anything I've seen before. They make for some truly spotless photography choices I have seen. Every shot composition is not only beautiful to look at, but each one holds profound layers of meaning and significance that I can't even comprehend. And the lighting is seriously some of the best ever. It's perfectly lit, and it looks immaculate. We have one character beamed in light and another a striking shadow, yet it never looks disjointed or messy or muddled. It's crazy. It's an astonishing technical achievement. And the editing has a perfect nonlinear structure. The structure of this movie is one of the best I've ever seen. And each and every editing choice is perfect, the dissolves, the time jumps, the montages, split screening, match cuts, it's all truly remarkable. But it's the structure and the unreliability that takes your breath away. Balancing multiple perspectives as well as fluent pacing, this is one of the most perfectly edited films I've ever seen. And all of the groundbreaking effects, the matte paintings, the projections, makeup, manipulation of background and foreground and screens and cinematic trickery. This is an astonishing filmmaking feat and the blueprint for technicality. No wonder this is taught in film schools. The model film for shot-by-shot analysis.

But for me to go full up on this thing it really needed to knock my socks off narratively and it didn't. Don't get me wrong, the narrative is insanely balanced and compelling, I was never bored, and Orson Welles directs and acts the heck out of this thing. The direction is probably some of the most innovative, creative, technically cohesive I've seen and his performance is a monumental depiction of a man built around multiple perspectives, a man whose fortune grows as his mentality dissolves. But that's just it. I just saw There Will Be Blood, and it's the same thing, a man who becomes externally wealthy but morally bankrupt. And There Will Be Blood I feel like did it so much better. I get the framing device is trying to give you an unreliable look at Kane through multiple perspectives, which leads the audience to decide who he was. But this film could have still given him a lot more complexities and still have his overall figure be a mystery. Especially because it markets itself as a psychological deep dive. Now, Kane's journey is still instantly compelling, and he has some layers as well as range, but it never goes deeply. It's just a bunch of things that happen to him and how it tarnishes his legacy, his fortune, his political influence and whatnot. But never personally. We never really see how any of it affects him personally. We get charismatic charm from him as well as biting personality, but I feel like his character could have gone deeper. How can this be the best movie of all time if it isn't even the best character study? There Will Be Blood, The Conversation, Forrest Gump, Drive, Rocky, and even Oppenheimer and Lawrence of Arabia (if you consider it those) all display characters front and center with far deeper complexities that I cared a lot more about. And there were multiple instances of telling over showing for aspects that could be densely interpretable or ambiguous. Again, I don't know if the whole point was for him to be shallow, but I would have cared a lot more about this movie if the character was deeper. And it seemed like they were trying to do that too.

But this movie is excellent. It's remarkable. The technicality is some of the best I've ever seen, Orson Welles has done a huge credit to filmmaking and cinematic history with a towering performance and directing job for the ages, and even if some of the ambiguity was taken away and the film was more shallow than I wished, this is still an expertly calibrated movie, always compelling and never boring, with "Rosebud" and Charles Foster Kane forever iconic. A great classic film, I just think there are so many films better than this one. But it's great. Maybe on a rewatch I'll understand it more, and it's probably me. It probably is the masterpiece everyone says it is. But for now I'll just say it's an incredible piece of work and an excellent movie with a slightly flawed script but with a tremendous impact on cinema history. I'll forever respect it and I'll go as far to say I love this movie. It's a great one. Worth a watch. I'll probably watch it again to see if my thoughts have changed.

There Will Be Blood is a monumental achievement in filmmaking from the master Paul Thomas Anderson. My first movie of his, this was an absolutely breathtaking cinematic experience that I will never be able to forget. Methodical pacing, vivid editing, gorgeous cinematography (with unique lenses and lengthy shot durations), gripping sound design, a haunting score, and some of the most lived-in production design I've ever seen, building an era so perfectly and beautifully it seems the film has been made in that very time period, all contribute towards a masterful technical experience. But it's the close character study, with one of the greatest downfall arcs in cinema history, that truly sticks with me. A superb screenplay that densely considers so many weighty themes, masters storytelling and pacing this plot perfectly, employs crisp dialogue as well epic scope and scale, and gives us one of the most iconic characters in cinema. And the directing feat from Paul Thomas Anderson is an all-timer. But it's Daniel Day-Lewis's mesmerizing performance of such gravitas, nuance, and layers that will forever be with me. A top ten performance of all time for me probably and one of the top three of the century so far. He is absolutely astonishing in his captivating intensity, force of layers, and outbursts so strong and so scene-chewing you feel like he could fling out of the screen and murder you at any second. Paul Dano is also amazing with an almost equally great performance of commanding intensity, nuance, and instability in his own right, and that all-timer ending is something I will never be able to forget. An absolute masterpiece.

Blade Runner 2049 is an astonishing sci-fi epic in every way from director Denis Villeneuve. There's some of the most perfectly lit, methodically composed, intimately framed, and beautifully deep cinematography ever put to film, effortless worldbuilding that weaves perfectly into the dense story (fusing with it instead of being told in dumps), monumental scale and elaborately detailed sets that make the perfect futuristic Los Angeles, ravishing sound design, deliberately slow and hypnotic editing, and an all-timer sci-fi score from the master Hans Zimmer, emotional, dramatic, memorable, and beautiful. But among this audacious filmmaking achievement, perhaps its greatest strength is its complex human story, which explores the line between humanity and artificiality in a much deeper way than its predecessor, contemplating intuitive and philosophical themes. There's such a melancholic beauty and sadness behind every frame, every (minimal) line of dialogue, every actor's facial expressions. It's heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and haunting, staying with you long after the credits roll. And Ryan Gosling gives a tremendous decade-defining performance, starting off as hardboiled, stoic, and emotionless before devolving into profound layers of meaning, sadness, range, humanity, and melancholy. It's a truly emotionally transformative acting feat that is one of the best we've ever seen from the actor.