steve-266-903132

Well ... It's a very well made film, with a great cast, lead and supporting; it does have a few less than believable aspects to the plot I must say. But the first part is sort of the car racing + heist film you were promised.

Anyway, yeah, the first part is fine - plenty of chemistry between Gigi and Bibi, lots of action, it looks like it's going somewhere ... and then where it goes is rather dark. And then from there, it turns utterly bleak. Forlorn, sad, depressing; you name it. I felt like there was a dark cloud hanging over me afterwards, and I'm surprised my dreams that night weren't darker than they were. I generally like noir, but this was a bit much for me. Some people have a higher tolerance for that sort of thing than I do though. C'est la vie.

All I can add to the various other 1 or 2 star reviews is that Colin Farrell was in fact NOT particularly good in this film. The amateur actor / flat affect gimmick is just stupid. A good actor pretending to be a lousy actor = lousy acting. The same goes for the rest of the cast. All are obviously capable of doing excellent work, it is just irritating to watch a film that is bad on purpose. It isn't arty or clever or anything, it's just bad. Some members of the crew appear to have accidentally done their jobs well, the film is often beautiful; it just isn't worth watching.

And it isn't 'dystopian' either (enough of that already!) It's just a bad imitation of a Peter Greenaway film. Or something. Yecch.

I do not have any idea why so many critics did not love this film. It had my full attention from the beginning of the first shot.

I quickly realized that the film was going to use 3D to (dare I say it) add depth to the cinematography. There are no 3D gimmicks used here, nothing flying at your head or giving you a headache - the 3D effect simply makes the imagery that much richer, much as the careful selection of lenses or film stock or any number of other a cinematographer's tools can do. Every aspect of the camera-work is fantastic (says me with a BA and an MFA in photography).

I really found it to be engrossing. There are a lot of individual vignettes that are shown separately, without any real transition between some of them but those are intended to be seen as parallel to one another. Other parts transition chronologically; the whole thing (I thought) flowed beautifully in large part because there were so many threads running through and between the various parts of the film. It's very linear, and yet it sometimes isn't.

And - James Franco did not annoy me. (I know, that's terrible of me to say) He often does, but this was a solid, mature performance. All of the performances were quite good, really; and they were built on a very good script. And you can tell that the person who put it all together has seeming effortless mastery of his craft. It's a film that's going to unfold in my head for a while yet. See it big if you can.