Thursday, 7 February 2008

CINEMA 2007 and Todd Haynes' fiasco

I saw very few films from 2007 but I loved

Paranoid Park - Gus Van Sant
Death Proof - Quentin Tarantino
Into the Wild - Sean Penn
Planet Terror - Roberto Rodriguez
Don't Touch the Axe - Jacques Rivette
Zodiac - David Fincher
Les Chansons D'amour - Christophe Honoré
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - Tsai Ming Liang
Superbad - Greg Mottola
No Country for Old Men - Coen Brothers
California Dreaming - Cristian Nemescu
Ratatouille - Brad Bird
Half Nelson - Ryan Fleck
This is England - Shane Meadow
Knocked Up - Judd Apatow
Hallam Foe - David Mackenzie
Superbad - Gregg Mottola


and I was disappointed by CONTROL (beautiful images but so empty and boring, what do we learn from Joy Divison? Nothing. Sam Riley is great but can't do the Ian Curtis dance. Ian Curtis looked scary on stage, Sam Riley is laughable. And Samantha Morton, a great great actress gives her worse performance (which is still better than 90 per cent of Occidental actresses on the circuit at the moment)

and especially by I'M NOT THERE, I adore Todd Haynes but what a big pile of crap! There's amazing performances by Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger but that couldn't save the film from being so awful. The project was a good idea but in the end too pretentious and incredibly stupid. Nothing really works and Bob Dylan is clearly not there. It just feels like "paraphrase" of Martin Scorcese's fantastic documentary on Dylan. The worse in I'M NOT THERE are the Richard Gere's part (the scene and his terrible performance) and Sam Neil is once more unwatchable.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS by Wong Kar Wai was alright but nowhere as good as in his previous films (note: Jude Law is always a bad cast for the good guy, he should only play what he is in real life: an asshole)

and a lot of old amazing films

Two-Lane Black Tops by Monte Hellman
Alice in the Cities and The American Friend from Wim Wenders
Au Hasard Balthazard and L'Argent from Robert Bresson
Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Kiss Me Deadly and The Killing Of Sister George.

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