405 reviews
Based on comments (and awards) most people were mostly taken by Hopkins performance in this film. It was apt, i think, he does well. But really what's fine about this film lies elsewhere.
Telling a story is, i suppose, a matter of framing a subject. The "what" are you looking at matters not as much as the "who" is looking and, specially "from where". Literature used to explore these paths, but eventually gave way for cinema. Books evolved to a stance of essay and pure thought, but have been abandoning its narrative drive. Cinema picked up on it, and for the moment is still the medium where narratives are experimented (series are, for the moment, mere illustrations of story facts, in the Griffith tradition).
So here we have a story of a man in his late moments. He tells the story, apart from a few establishing shots, no action happens outside Hopkins' scope. He is the one we follow, he is our narrator. But he is senil, and what he sees, or remembers, or says, cannot be trusted, not by us, and even less by him. What is true (if anything) and what is not? Here we enter a fantastic, well plowed field of cinematic narrative (and detective fiction) that has to do with the unreliability of what is being told: Rashomon, Roger Ackroyd, Memento... this is not the "look at the drama of the old person in pain", but "how can i live in this world if i can't trust anything".
The cinematic tricks here are extremely simple (never abandon Hopkins' stance) and incredibly powerful. What takes away from this are two things:
-most of the production seems to have been made around the intent to make Hopkins shine (i imagine that may have been one of his conditions to get on board), so much is focused on his character's suffering, and not on the ambiguity of the narrative
-closed spaces (flats, prisions, boats) are a cinematic mine. See what Polansky or Hitchcock did with it in terms of making space into a character, making space tell the story. None of that is here... the sets are lush and fine, i suppose, but they never loose the smell of a set. Filming architecture meaningfully remains one of the most challenging subjects in film.
Telling a story is, i suppose, a matter of framing a subject. The "what" are you looking at matters not as much as the "who" is looking and, specially "from where". Literature used to explore these paths, but eventually gave way for cinema. Books evolved to a stance of essay and pure thought, but have been abandoning its narrative drive. Cinema picked up on it, and for the moment is still the medium where narratives are experimented (series are, for the moment, mere illustrations of story facts, in the Griffith tradition).
So here we have a story of a man in his late moments. He tells the story, apart from a few establishing shots, no action happens outside Hopkins' scope. He is the one we follow, he is our narrator. But he is senil, and what he sees, or remembers, or says, cannot be trusted, not by us, and even less by him. What is true (if anything) and what is not? Here we enter a fantastic, well plowed field of cinematic narrative (and detective fiction) that has to do with the unreliability of what is being told: Rashomon, Roger Ackroyd, Memento... this is not the "look at the drama of the old person in pain", but "how can i live in this world if i can't trust anything".
The cinematic tricks here are extremely simple (never abandon Hopkins' stance) and incredibly powerful. What takes away from this are two things:
-most of the production seems to have been made around the intent to make Hopkins shine (i imagine that may have been one of his conditions to get on board), so much is focused on his character's suffering, and not on the ambiguity of the narrative
-closed spaces (flats, prisions, boats) are a cinematic mine. See what Polansky or Hitchcock did with it in terms of making space into a character, making space tell the story. None of that is here... the sets are lush and fine, i suppose, but they never loose the smell of a set. Filming architecture meaningfully remains one of the most challenging subjects in film.
At some moment in this film Jackie, recalling the past, admits her inability to distinguish between what was real and what was performance. That's the core of this very competent piece of filmmaking.
I sensed i might find something interesting for me in this film, so i came to it. What drove me away was the theme. Not being american, and being too young anyway for the Kennedy frenzy, i really have nothing to do with the mythology that surrounds it, one of those golden chapters in the epic book of America's self-idolization. Even less, i couldn't care less about the character of mrs.Kennedy. I know she created a certain role that to this day is followed by other public figures, not only american first ladies nor first ladies over all. But the public figure that i (and most people) am allowed to hear and see is simply not interesting: a kind of a construction, the creation of an interesting devoted wife, culture friendly backstage big woman. Could be an interesting character, but Jackie (the real one) was simply a bad actress.
Of course the circumstances of Kennedy's assassination are too cinematically, too rooted on a modern television moved society to be ignored, and Not recreated. So we have a couple who existed first For and On television, and we have a woman whose public life is the representation (the acting) of a life. That's dramatic, and that's what i think drove Larrain and Portman into this.
This director really knows what he's doing, this was his first film i saw, but i will look for more. The tension and pure cinematic pace is there. The sense of space as a scenery for the (acted) life of Jackie. The seamless integration of bits of public life that he recreates with bits of public life that we have filmed (the white house tour, the dallas bits), and the contrast to the unseen private life of Jackie. All that framed through an interview that a reporter makes, some time after the events.
Actually the framing of the Jackie story within her existance in the White House is crucial here.. Her "character" didn't exist before and is empty after her existance as a first lady. She is a character, a creation, a queen of masks.
Portman is in for the adventure. I think she does well. She understands what is needed, and indeed it wasn't easy. She is an actress putting on a mask and heavy makeup to represent a character who was, herself, a character, an invented person, created to be in front of the camera.
I wish to see this cinematic stance and craftsmanship applied to something that really matters.
I sensed i might find something interesting for me in this film, so i came to it. What drove me away was the theme. Not being american, and being too young anyway for the Kennedy frenzy, i really have nothing to do with the mythology that surrounds it, one of those golden chapters in the epic book of America's self-idolization. Even less, i couldn't care less about the character of mrs.Kennedy. I know she created a certain role that to this day is followed by other public figures, not only american first ladies nor first ladies over all. But the public figure that i (and most people) am allowed to hear and see is simply not interesting: a kind of a construction, the creation of an interesting devoted wife, culture friendly backstage big woman. Could be an interesting character, but Jackie (the real one) was simply a bad actress.
Of course the circumstances of Kennedy's assassination are too cinematically, too rooted on a modern television moved society to be ignored, and Not recreated. So we have a couple who existed first For and On television, and we have a woman whose public life is the representation (the acting) of a life. That's dramatic, and that's what i think drove Larrain and Portman into this.
This director really knows what he's doing, this was his first film i saw, but i will look for more. The tension and pure cinematic pace is there. The sense of space as a scenery for the (acted) life of Jackie. The seamless integration of bits of public life that he recreates with bits of public life that we have filmed (the white house tour, the dallas bits), and the contrast to the unseen private life of Jackie. All that framed through an interview that a reporter makes, some time after the events.
Actually the framing of the Jackie story within her existance in the White House is crucial here.. Her "character" didn't exist before and is empty after her existance as a first lady. She is a character, a creation, a queen of masks.
Portman is in for the adventure. I think she does well. She understands what is needed, and indeed it wasn't easy. She is an actress putting on a mask and heavy makeup to represent a character who was, herself, a character, an invented person, created to be in front of the camera.
I wish to see this cinematic stance and craftsmanship applied to something that really matters.
Irony has often strange ways to show and give meaning even to a terrible and dishonest film like this one.
The story is that the former lover of the president of a football team (FC.Porto) becomes estranged from him and decides to write a book denouncing alleged sports corruption and gangster type behaviour from that president's administration during the years she was with him. In a country like Portugal where maybe more than half the football fans support the opponent, usually loosing football club (Benfica), this had the potential to sell (books, film tickets, whatever...). The former lover teams up with a ghost-writer who's also a sport's journalist who passionately supports Benfica. The book comes out and they decide in the meanwhile to make a movie based on it. Depending on who you ask the purposes are threefold: money and revenge for the former lover, trying to invert to stop the winning streak of FC.Porto (the writer) and money (the producer who came along).
Caught in the middle of this is Botelho, married to the ghost-writer. He is a relatively talentless director, but he usually tries to make real cinema. But the combination here was to explosive for him, he was too much outside his element. So in the end he (and his writer wife) become estranged from the producer and neglect the film. Apparently the director alleges some difference of opinion regarding soundtrack (he wanted classical and jazz, the producer wanted contemporary pop).
Anyway, what i got to watch, streamed and forgotten in youtube, is a total mess: Botelho uses the Oliveira blocking (static shots, people facing the camera while having a dialogue etc.) to tell a sleazy story and that isn't even good sleaze. The sexy scenes are not sexy enough, nor even good exploitation, the dialogue is mediocre and so on. But mostly the film is dishonest. A number of characters are bad, very bad, the others are good very good. Everybody (even Breyner) is absolutely lost in this mess. The idea print an idea in people's heads (the president is bad and corrupt that's why his team wins, all the other people are good). They even change the origin of the woman (from Brazilian to Porto accent Portuguese) to avoid the predictable prejudice the Portuguese average viewer might have towards Brazilians. And the final dishonesty is a scene when Sofia is meeting her book editor: behind her are a number of photos of famous Portuguese writers and in a certain shot you get her head in medium close up mimicking the head of Florbela Espanca, seen in the background. For a director who prides himself to adapt to the screen the biggest writers in Portugal (Pessoa, Queirós, Mendes Pinto) to establish a comparison between a writer revealing some sleaze in a book to one of our greatest woman writers must have been heart-breaking. Oh love forces you to some terrible moves sometimes. No wonder he took the music cue and left the project.
I looked for this film because now, 10 years later, we have the courts and police investigating Benfica for corruption, justice officials and police bribing and so on. I wonder what film will these people do... Funny. The irony...
The story is that the former lover of the president of a football team (FC.Porto) becomes estranged from him and decides to write a book denouncing alleged sports corruption and gangster type behaviour from that president's administration during the years she was with him. In a country like Portugal where maybe more than half the football fans support the opponent, usually loosing football club (Benfica), this had the potential to sell (books, film tickets, whatever...). The former lover teams up with a ghost-writer who's also a sport's journalist who passionately supports Benfica. The book comes out and they decide in the meanwhile to make a movie based on it. Depending on who you ask the purposes are threefold: money and revenge for the former lover, trying to invert to stop the winning streak of FC.Porto (the writer) and money (the producer who came along).
Caught in the middle of this is Botelho, married to the ghost-writer. He is a relatively talentless director, but he usually tries to make real cinema. But the combination here was to explosive for him, he was too much outside his element. So in the end he (and his writer wife) become estranged from the producer and neglect the film. Apparently the director alleges some difference of opinion regarding soundtrack (he wanted classical and jazz, the producer wanted contemporary pop).
Anyway, what i got to watch, streamed and forgotten in youtube, is a total mess: Botelho uses the Oliveira blocking (static shots, people facing the camera while having a dialogue etc.) to tell a sleazy story and that isn't even good sleaze. The sexy scenes are not sexy enough, nor even good exploitation, the dialogue is mediocre and so on. But mostly the film is dishonest. A number of characters are bad, very bad, the others are good very good. Everybody (even Breyner) is absolutely lost in this mess. The idea print an idea in people's heads (the president is bad and corrupt that's why his team wins, all the other people are good). They even change the origin of the woman (from Brazilian to Porto accent Portuguese) to avoid the predictable prejudice the Portuguese average viewer might have towards Brazilians. And the final dishonesty is a scene when Sofia is meeting her book editor: behind her are a number of photos of famous Portuguese writers and in a certain shot you get her head in medium close up mimicking the head of Florbela Espanca, seen in the background. For a director who prides himself to adapt to the screen the biggest writers in Portugal (Pessoa, Queirós, Mendes Pinto) to establish a comparison between a writer revealing some sleaze in a book to one of our greatest woman writers must have been heart-breaking. Oh love forces you to some terrible moves sometimes. No wonder he took the music cue and left the project.
I looked for this film because now, 10 years later, we have the courts and police investigating Benfica for corruption, justice officials and police bribing and so on. I wonder what film will these people do... Funny. The irony...
I came to this after watching the finally finished Gilliam's Quijote. It probably works better to watch this one, the "sketch", the "failed attempt", after you saw the finished product.
That film, the finished one, is imperfect and chaotic. And that's good. It it as a film, what it was as a work in progress. It reveals Gilliam, and has a special place in his carrer. It's the final product of an obsession, and it follows the path of its very theme.
This one is nice, because we see in it some of the anchors that were kept in the later finished film, and that would probably have worked better in the original, at least from a cinematic point of view. It is clear that Gilliam had in mind the replacement of the "book layers" of the original Quijote by the layers of films in films. In other words, he wanted a world where several layers of paralel realities would affect each other, contaminate them, blur them. This is something he has been doing all his life as a filmmaker, and as such it is apt that he adapts Quijote.
In the book, at least in my reading, Sancho is the pivot, he is the articulation of all the layers, the one that keeps all the madness tolerable, and the one who places us, the "viewers" in the narrative. So having Johnny Depp play that role would have been magnificient. We can only imagine how it would have been, watching the few conversations between Gilliam and Depp in this documentary, watching the short bits of footage that were recorded (the fish fight is amazing) and trying to imagine Depp whenever we see Driver.
I got the impression that Depp was the one who suggested what is in fact the beginning of the new film. At least the breaking of the 4th wall in the matter of "la nuit américaine". That shows he understands the layers. He is a very fine actor.
Take this little film as a piece of a grander puzzle in the mind of an interesting guy. A Quijote film will probably always be better as a sum of bits and pieces, chaos and unreachable goals... This fits. I had a little too much of burocracy (whose fault, who's gonna pay, who should have done what...) and too little of Gilliam's mind. But these documentaries almost always fall on that trap.
"The Man Who Killed Quijote" was the first film in 2018 that completes a seamingly "lost project". We'll likely get Welles' The Other Side of the Wind later this year.. Year for completions, and probably for disappointments. Welles also had an ongoing Quijote project for half his life. Ah, those windmills...
That film, the finished one, is imperfect and chaotic. And that's good. It it as a film, what it was as a work in progress. It reveals Gilliam, and has a special place in his carrer. It's the final product of an obsession, and it follows the path of its very theme.
This one is nice, because we see in it some of the anchors that were kept in the later finished film, and that would probably have worked better in the original, at least from a cinematic point of view. It is clear that Gilliam had in mind the replacement of the "book layers" of the original Quijote by the layers of films in films. In other words, he wanted a world where several layers of paralel realities would affect each other, contaminate them, blur them. This is something he has been doing all his life as a filmmaker, and as such it is apt that he adapts Quijote.
In the book, at least in my reading, Sancho is the pivot, he is the articulation of all the layers, the one that keeps all the madness tolerable, and the one who places us, the "viewers" in the narrative. So having Johnny Depp play that role would have been magnificient. We can only imagine how it would have been, watching the few conversations between Gilliam and Depp in this documentary, watching the short bits of footage that were recorded (the fish fight is amazing) and trying to imagine Depp whenever we see Driver.
I got the impression that Depp was the one who suggested what is in fact the beginning of the new film. At least the breaking of the 4th wall in the matter of "la nuit américaine". That shows he understands the layers. He is a very fine actor.
Take this little film as a piece of a grander puzzle in the mind of an interesting guy. A Quijote film will probably always be better as a sum of bits and pieces, chaos and unreachable goals... This fits. I had a little too much of burocracy (whose fault, who's gonna pay, who should have done what...) and too little of Gilliam's mind. But these documentaries almost always fall on that trap.
"The Man Who Killed Quijote" was the first film in 2018 that completes a seamingly "lost project". We'll likely get Welles' The Other Side of the Wind later this year.. Year for completions, and probably for disappointments. Welles also had an ongoing Quijote project for half his life. Ah, those windmills...
This is a rather mundane attempt at a most repeated formula. It's bad, very bad, and Eddie Murphy is nowhere near to deliver all he can do in terms of comedy. All right, most date films are bad anyway.
Forget the sexism of his character which in the end we are supposed to "forgive" as opposed to the similar behavior from the female boss, whom we are supposed to look upon as demeaning and offensive. This is offensive today, i don't know how it played in 1992. I mean, Murphy's character finds out he's in love with Berry when he is in bed with his boss...
Anyway, there is one single element which, upon reviewing this one, many years later, struck me as something very nicely done, and that was the handling of the 2 sex charged supporting female characters: Eartha Kitt and Grace Jones. Both were in her younger days masters of their own quirky erotic universe, and expressed it in terms of pop culture. Here they are allowed to revive that sexiness, and in doing so they are the anchor to this project. Eartha as the "retired" leader but still the face of the company who promotes sexiness, and Grace as the actual face of that sexiness (as promoted in a clip aptly filmed by our voodoo wizard from previous adventures in film). These 2 ladies are worth it. Everything else isn't.
Forget the sexism of his character which in the end we are supposed to "forgive" as opposed to the similar behavior from the female boss, whom we are supposed to look upon as demeaning and offensive. This is offensive today, i don't know how it played in 1992. I mean, Murphy's character finds out he's in love with Berry when he is in bed with his boss...
Anyway, there is one single element which, upon reviewing this one, many years later, struck me as something very nicely done, and that was the handling of the 2 sex charged supporting female characters: Eartha Kitt and Grace Jones. Both were in her younger days masters of their own quirky erotic universe, and expressed it in terms of pop culture. Here they are allowed to revive that sexiness, and in doing so they are the anchor to this project. Eartha as the "retired" leader but still the face of the company who promotes sexiness, and Grace as the actual face of that sexiness (as promoted in a clip aptly filmed by our voodoo wizard from previous adventures in film). These 2 ladies are worth it. Everything else isn't.
Almost everything in this film is bad in terms of conception, but not so much in terms of execution. The whole thing reads today as trash film with a higher than usual budget. Production values are great, for the time and type of film.
Not much is made with the potential of the Kong story, at least nothing that wasn't already deeply explored in the previous 1933 film, and the Peter Jackson version. This means all the self- referential bits are either lost or are clumsy handled. So the Bridges character is still a photographer, but his character is used as a know-it-all who explains everyone around him what's going on, there's no film within in the island, and the show in New York is just a mechanical device that triggers the last expected sequence. Here that sequence is played in the twin towers instead of the empire state which the character from Lange references earlier. Impossible to watch any post- or pre- 9/11 which uses the WTC as a set without correlating...
But one thing is magnificent here, and only incidentally helped by the creative/production decisions. Because this is made into an exploitation vehicle, the sexual friction (quite literally) is brought to the center of the thing. See how Jessica Lange enters the film, as a desirable sex being, stranded on a rubber boat. The ship crew, Bridges and, of course, us, the audience, lust after her. Lange channels the unaware-on purpose explicit sexuality which was Marylin Monroe's persona, and she does it so well. And that's what works in this film. Jessica Lange would do so much better later, in terms of ambition and acting. But here she is all sex, all desire, all lust, and she brings out that obvious side of the Kong story better than any of the versions or spin-offs that have already been made. That's because she teases you into the thing, seduces the audiences as she seduces Prescott, as she seduces Kong. What else is acting? Because of her such cheap trash tricks as the Kong finger unclothing her become a powerful erotic depiction, and only because of that this film may be worth seeing.
Not much is made with the potential of the Kong story, at least nothing that wasn't already deeply explored in the previous 1933 film, and the Peter Jackson version. This means all the self- referential bits are either lost or are clumsy handled. So the Bridges character is still a photographer, but his character is used as a know-it-all who explains everyone around him what's going on, there's no film within in the island, and the show in New York is just a mechanical device that triggers the last expected sequence. Here that sequence is played in the twin towers instead of the empire state which the character from Lange references earlier. Impossible to watch any post- or pre- 9/11 which uses the WTC as a set without correlating...
But one thing is magnificent here, and only incidentally helped by the creative/production decisions. Because this is made into an exploitation vehicle, the sexual friction (quite literally) is brought to the center of the thing. See how Jessica Lange enters the film, as a desirable sex being, stranded on a rubber boat. The ship crew, Bridges and, of course, us, the audience, lust after her. Lange channels the unaware-on purpose explicit sexuality which was Marylin Monroe's persona, and she does it so well. And that's what works in this film. Jessica Lange would do so much better later, in terms of ambition and acting. But here she is all sex, all desire, all lust, and she brings out that obvious side of the Kong story better than any of the versions or spin-offs that have already been made. That's because she teases you into the thing, seduces the audiences as she seduces Prescott, as she seduces Kong. What else is acting? Because of her such cheap trash tricks as the Kong finger unclothing her become a powerful erotic depiction, and only because of that this film may be worth seeing.
Writing this now, 7 years after this film was made, gives a better insight into what Marvel has been doing. They have their set of superheroes, long embedded in pop imagination, mostly through comic books and animation TV series. Now they talk about "fictional universe" which is a way to say they will explore each of those characters within their original specific family of characters, as well as mix them with other families and, as in this case, zoom in on certain individual characters.
The biggest problem is that these decisions are based on popularity, ratings, market decisions. And Hollywood is today hostage to bigger and louder, more than ever. So there is no real narrative exploration, no filling of the spaces between the main branches. They just produce action stuff which is ordinary by any standard (visual, narrative etc.). Sometimes the film will be mildly interesting because of someone interesting they employ (Downey Jr, Swinton, Branagh...) but even there we just fill that each one could be doing something more interesting (and less lucrative). Other times they use what Downey Jr taught them in how he worked the Iron Man character: irony, winks, poking fun at the character, by deliberately stepping out of it. They learned the lesson and since than pretty much every film is conceived in such a way as not to take itself very seriously. So we have Dr.Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool... this last one actually has a cameo in this Wolverine mess.
What they did here was simple take a character (with whom Jackman is strongly associated) and just give it to us in high doses, more intense, more screen-time, more... Hugh Jackman has a strong enough presence to carry the thin character alone so they did it.
Because they have not much to say, nothing inventive to fill the narrative with, they copied the framework, and the mood from the first Rambo: the retired hero, who tries to live anonymously, away from the world, someone to whom unhappiness is ever denied and who will eventually get pulled back to the action painful world he is escaping.
But this Rambo has no Vietnam, no drive, no reason to be, no real pain. Even the pain of brutally loosing a loved one is replaced by the mere rage for being betrayed. Just claws and rage. So, nothing to see here. Adamatium claws are still just claws.
The biggest problem is that these decisions are based on popularity, ratings, market decisions. And Hollywood is today hostage to bigger and louder, more than ever. So there is no real narrative exploration, no filling of the spaces between the main branches. They just produce action stuff which is ordinary by any standard (visual, narrative etc.). Sometimes the film will be mildly interesting because of someone interesting they employ (Downey Jr, Swinton, Branagh...) but even there we just fill that each one could be doing something more interesting (and less lucrative). Other times they use what Downey Jr taught them in how he worked the Iron Man character: irony, winks, poking fun at the character, by deliberately stepping out of it. They learned the lesson and since than pretty much every film is conceived in such a way as not to take itself very seriously. So we have Dr.Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool... this last one actually has a cameo in this Wolverine mess.
What they did here was simple take a character (with whom Jackman is strongly associated) and just give it to us in high doses, more intense, more screen-time, more... Hugh Jackman has a strong enough presence to carry the thin character alone so they did it.
Because they have not much to say, nothing inventive to fill the narrative with, they copied the framework, and the mood from the first Rambo: the retired hero, who tries to live anonymously, away from the world, someone to whom unhappiness is ever denied and who will eventually get pulled back to the action painful world he is escaping.
But this Rambo has no Vietnam, no drive, no reason to be, no real pain. Even the pain of brutally loosing a loved one is replaced by the mere rage for being betrayed. Just claws and rage. So, nothing to see here. Adamatium claws are still just claws.
