Barky44

There are people in the world who are, quite intentionally, their own worst enemy. This is their story. Alternately, it's about a man and his cat.

Like all Coen Brothers films, "Inside Llewyn Davis" is a character study. Theirs is a style that takes a trait of humanity, cranks it up to 11, and puts it through its paces. In this case, they take on people who purposely sabotage their own happiness.

The film follows Llewyn Davis who, recklessly and tortuously, destroys his relationships at every opportunity. Time after time after time, he returns kindness with selfishness; responsibility with irresponsibility; support with abandonment. Grossly judgmental, incredibly unsympathetic, utterly foolish, this is a man who brings on his own suffering with an odd sort of sustained glee. He seems to revel in his own misery, constantly making bad decisions, and then getting mad at those who did what he told them to do.

This is an odd juxtaposition with his chosen artistic pursuit: folk singing. Folk singing is all about empathy and connection, but Llewyn can't empathize, and definitely can't connect. This is pointed out to him time after time after time, but he just doesn't pick up on it. At all. Therefore, he fails. He is very similar to his co-star, Ulysses, a cat who (in a very characteristically cat-like manner) seems disconnected from what is happening around him, until it's time to wake someone else up from a sound sleep.

It's not a bad film, there are some quirky, funny moments in it. But I gave it 7 out of 10 because it lacks that characteristic "special heartwarming spark" of a Coen Brothers film. "Raising Arizona", "Fargo", "Hudsucker Proxy", and "O Brother, Where Art Thou" had a heartwarming character or situation to help pull you out of the morass of darkness, intentionally acting as counter-point to the misery of life; but "Llewyn Davis" doesn't really have this. I suppose the cat is meant to fill this role (there is a neat little moment when Llewyn and the cat track each other's expressions quite effectively), but it doesn't really work as well as (possibly) intentioned.

An OK movie. Not the Coen Brothers' best.

American Hustle is a fine movie, I suppose. I'm not really sure, to be honest. The problem is it's such a hamfest of a movie, it's hard to focus to know for sure.

This film has a lot going on beyond the characters and the story. It's set in the 70's, and such a horrendously clichéd version of the 70's it distracts you from those characters & story. You've got the red velvet leisure suits; the badly-fitting toupees; the ridiculously over-sized automobiles; the tight-curl perms; the bra-less, droopy dresses (OK, some distractions are worth it). Folks use "ham" to describe over-the-top acting, but here we have undeniably "hammy" use of sets, costumes, props, and locations. It's as if someone said "find me everything 70's and dump it in this movie!".

The problem is they don't just use these clichés for setting and atmosphere (like "The Ice Storm", for example), they just pile them up throughout the movie, right down to hackneyed scenes involving 70's-era mobsters late in the film. It's a cliché fest, and that distracts from the rest of the story. It's hard to take the main protagonist seriously under those ridiculous glasses.

Then again, it is a fairly shallow plot, with a somewhat weak "surprise ending", wrapping up the con inside a con inside a con. You've seen it all before, in movies of the "con man" genre over the decades. I'm guessing the writers wanted to dump all the 70's clichés into one film and wrote tossed together a con-man script to tie them together; OR they had a fairly weak script and felt they needed to dress it up with 70's nostalgia to generate interest.

The movie is OK. It has some funny moments. But it's not worth a full-price movie ticket, and is definitely not worth an Oscar nod.

Peter Jackson's 3-episode interpretation of The Hobbit is turning into a sticky, gooey mess. What a horrid series of films.

This isn't about book purism or Tolkien loyalty or any of that. I understand the difference between writing and filmmaking, and why one can never translate directly into the other (especially when the latter occurs 75 years after the former). My contempt for the Desolation of Smaug concerns filmmaking itself: storytelling, dramatic tension, character development. Even the framing, action and stuntwork do not work in this film.

The root of the problem is PJ does not have an internal filter. He dreams up ideas of increasing ridiculousness, and throws them on the screen whether the story benefits or not. He dreams up wonderful elvish combat maneuvers: they're in the film. He dreams up various orc prosthetics: they're in the film. He dreams up goofy, hammy character appearances: they're in the film. He dreams up immense set pieces and constructs unbelievable battles in the midst: they're in the film. But you can't do filmmaking that way! Good films, even good action films, need to be built on a solid core of character and story.

In fairness, the Hobbit itself is not particularly meaty in those areas: it's a bit goofy, a bit sparse. It was a children's book, after all. But that's what a good screenplay needs to reinforce in such cases. It's what PJ and his writing team did in LOTR! They beefed up the story and added emotional context to the characters to make the audience care about what was happening. When Frodo was confronted by the Witchking in the Two Towers, you were afraid for the guy because the film, up to that point, made you care!

In the Hobbit, however, they are not shoring up the character and story in this three-layer cake at all. Instead, they are slathering on such a heavy coating of empty frosting in the form of goofy action sequences, sticking on gumdrops of forced slapstick comedy, and pouring on a thin crust of chocolate sprinkles in the form of CGI (much of which is poorly done and pulls you out of the film). In the end, you have a cake that's inedible because of all the sugary crud slathered on top. All this "stuff" totally overwhelms the cake in the center, completely obscuring the overall storyline, and smothering the characters of Gandalf, Bilbo, Thorin, and the rest of the poor dwarfs (who mumble along in complete obscurity for the duration of the film). Even Smaug gets short-shrift (he is a marvel of visual magnificence, but is also reduced to a slapstick fool before too long).

What PJ does not have is a filter. You can tell he's gained so much power as a filmmaker that no one is challenging his decisions. He gets away with everything no matter how ridiculous, no matter how distracting, no matter how smothering. He has no sanity check, no capacity to self-edit. And the film suffers for it: it's so overdone in action and set pieces, you become bored with it. I was praying for the movie to be over by the end.

When you engage in any creative endeavor, it's important you get all your ideas on the table, no matter how outlandish. But then you ALSO need to learn how to edit, how to scrape away everything that is not helping you tell your story or portray the vision. It can be a hard thing, giving up that great idea, but if it helps you reach your goal, you drop it by the wayside, and focus on what's important.

PJ did not do that, and as a result, we have a sticky, gooey, sickly-sweet mess of a cake that will surely give us all diabetes.