Reviews

The subject is offering - but the way of making it true, sorely lacking...! The main flaw is the lack of consistency of ALL characters - these two guys don't know that you need CREDIBLE FLESHY HUMANS to make a story engaging? Then, the script is over-messy, way too dense for most of the audience, crowding together much too many plots, facts and details, right from the beginning, to allow a normal breathing for the narrative - and, when we come at last to make some sense out of it, it simply falls flat: another plot to conquer the world by manipulating politicians and dignitaries - this time, via web games! It's simply too little, for such a laborious effort.

Further, all the storyline (and the way of shooting it) is so packed with action, tension and gory show-off (plus the legitimate special effects), that it keeps from start to end "right under the ceiling" - and the effects is disappointingly anticlimactic: the Sandman comes to your eyelids around the 15th minute into the show, and will never leave again till the end! What I liked the most was the staff guy who calmly utters "Oops", when the villain buys it. That detail really had a touch of style.

Gripping, superbly done - but with a close to nil stake... The script is disorganized, linear, messy, fragmented (ATTENTION! Not in the GOOD sense! It's a well-known thing that Tarantino couldn't care the less of the rules, and usually this dislodged structure works ("Pulp Fiction" does remain a masterpiece), but here, unfortunately, it serves no purpose, except a useless piece of acrobatics with history.

However, what remains is the masterful direction and shooting - and, of course, the genius acting of Christoph Waltz, an incredible revelation! His way of pronouncing around the words is so savory, that I still enjoy repeating with relish some of his lines - my favorite being: "J'ai oublié de commander la crèèème..." Absolutely splendid!

An intelligent, sensitive, cruel and ironic reflection about realities intertwined... Past and present, self and alter-ego, movie-in-the-movie and movie-about-the-movie-in-the-movie, all mingle together following a strange and thorough recipe. Almodovar meditates about the condition of the artist, without the melodramatic heroics of so many fore-goers, by choosing a painful paradox - the one of the creator who loses his crucial tool (same as Beethowen grew deaf, same as Luchian lost the control over his hands; here, Mateo Blanco is a movie director who turned blind - and now, fourteen years later, reconsiders everything that happened in the past. The narrative is built with a savvy mastering of all the joints, producing both insight and increasing tension. Definitely, not a movie easy to follow - one than you should see again and again.

Unfortunately, it's true that all the structure is a bit over-long, and the pace tends to lag in certain parts - but, since the concluding impression is that of "I want to come back to this movie", I guess the boring bits will become less so at a second and third viewing. Aftr all, Antonioni's "Blowup" also started by confusing and exasperating me - and, around the seventh of eight time, I was already gushing loving "wow!"s over every shot.

As a translator of the Romanian edition of "Marley & Me", I had the privilege to reach into the depths of the book, and thus become even more aware of the movie's faults. First of all, the script mistakenly keeps too close to the (real-life) story - which is simply forbidden, when we want to tell a story with the camera. Cinema has its own rules, and any road that departs them will point fatefully to boredom - at least.

One of the main problems is that so many of the truly significant feats of Marley, those that helped his family discover the true meanings of life, are featured only in... words, while the visible actions center only around the same and same burlesque scenes. The dog's undoubtful love and loyalty to his masters is shown only in his routine jumps all over them, when coming back home. And the dogs themselves, those who played Marley's role at various ages, are sorely inexpressive - except the puppy at the beginning, who's adorable indeed (but this is his own merit, and the one of God - not of the movie makers)! However, "Marley & Me" gathers momentum in the last section, when it discovers indeed its own meaning: that of empathetically depicting the tragic demise of the hero. My own pitbull girl, Arella Bonnie Wagner's, was put to sleep in June 5, 2008, after ten years of happily living together, so I lived again those moments all along the final scenes, and I can safely state: SO IT IS. A Dog's departing back to our Creator is indeed a unique heartbreak. At least for this, I must pay my respects to David Frankel: although he sucks at comedy, he really does have a genuine tragic thrill - which, in itself, is more than enough.

By the way - children shouldn't be shown this movie without parental advice. The excruciating good-bye of Marley can easily become more traumatic than a whole host of Rambo-like and Saw-wise slaughter scenes!

Definitely, psychopathology is one of the most difficult fields of subjects for fiction - and why? Because it deals with CLINICAL cases, which are individual by excellence; you need a huge deal of professional acumen and experience to make it reach the universal level, thus achieving that PARTICULAR quality that lays at the core of any artistic product. Unfortunately, experience is one thing that Gerald McMorrow sorely lacks - I mean, after barely one S.F. short movie? Get a life! Besides this basic fallacy, "Franklyn" suffers of a total failure at the storytelling level. It's slow-paced (paradoxically, although it purports to be springy and captivating) and narrated in a muddled way - reminding us again that there is an enormous difference between being "ambiguous" and "unclear", between "subtlety" and "messiness". One couldn't care the less about the motives that drove the characters to madness, when we can't even follow the narrative at an elementary level.

As such, it's no surprise that in the last quarter, when things seems to gather at least a bit of momentum, it's much too late to retrieve anything. The final showdown, far of being "tragic", is merely hysteric, and the last shot, with the two survivors in the street, falls definitely to the ludicrous level.

The only gain is the splendid atmosphere of Meanwhile city, the masterful sets of Laurence Dorman, superbly photographed by Ben Davis, and the pervasive schizophrenic feeling of the imaginary theocratic dystopia. Definitely, it would be worth to put all that into a movie. One day...