gbill-74877

"The difference between a movie and a memory is that movies are always false. One scene follows after another. But memories mix truth and lies. They appear and vanish before our eyes."

Some impressive visual and technical moments, but I didn't get much out of the story, so this ambitious effort from auteur Bi Gan fell a bit flat for me. The mix of a possibly unreliable narrator, shifting from past to future, and surreal dream events, all told with a painfully slow pace, made this feel more pretentious than profound. Even the 59(!) minute long take over the second half felt more like style than substance, artificially extended at times by following people up and down stairs, etc when cutting to a new scene would have made for a more enjoyable viewing experience, at least for me. On the other hand, there is an undeniable sense of being haunted by guilt over a friend's death and obsession over a lover that slipped away, so if you can switch your left brain off and not try to thoroughly decode the movie, you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.

"But I was thinking, maybe instead of houses we could live in tepees. Because it's better in many ways."

Both an homage to and a spoof of 1950's B-horror films, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks dials up the camp from the very beginning. There's obviously no attempt at having this make sense, I mean, who would believe that the violent species homo sapiens wouldn't approach an alien race with weapons fully drawn? The cast is incredibly deep, including Sylvia Sidney nearly seven decades after her debut film, and I liked how Burton gleefully killed some of them off. The effects are deliberately crude but there is enough playfulness here to make it not matter. What stopped me from loving it was that for me it got too cute with all of its various antics, and I would have preferred a satire that retained some elements of seriousness. The cast also almost becomes a liability because the subplots get spread mighty thin. Endearing in how silly it all is, but a little hollow for me.

I liked the Great Dane and how this film showed how dogs grieve the absence of an owner, but it wandered around in so many other ways that it felt all over the map, and the dialogue which was meant to be touching just felt shlocky to me. The pace is slow and many characters aren't fleshed out, but the most disappointing thing was how cheesy it was. The dog responding to the content of what's being read out loud, the ease with which the woman kept her apartment, the tortured confrontation scene between Naomi Watts and Bill Murray that takes place in her mind, the 'surprise' scene at the end, etc. Were all groaners. Murray has absolutely no charm either, making it hard to believe him in the role of a ladies man. This felt very much like a Hallmark movie, with a script that didn't live up to its emotional potential.