all the news that print will fit.
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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Sunday, February 01, 2004 np: blind melon - soup later today is the big day for all carolina football fans. here's hoping. i woke up this morning with a burning urge to listen to both dylan's blonde on blonde and public image ltd.'s second edition. how such disparate albums got in my head, i'm not sure. but needless to say, i exercised both demons. b- was absolutely stunned at how much the rapture really does sound like PIL. gee. guess all those DFL/PIL comparisons really do make sense. who knew? well, i did, but i'm not her. "4th time around," by the way, is a brilliant song. all of blonde on blonde is, but that song especially. b- and i also went and saw the recently re-released mystic river at the carousel. and i hate to steal any of jeremy's thunder by talking about movies, but this one left me with some thoughts i'd like to share. beware, spoilers might appear. first off, it made me even more irritated that big fish was left out of the major category nominations, especially best picture. if there was a single word i could think of to describe mystic river, it is 'overrated.' now, with that out of the way, i really liked this movie. be prepared that this is an actor's movie. this film is all about the performances of the main characters, and they are hellacious and incredible. tim robbins gives what i believe to be one of the absolute best (if not the best) performance of his career. coming from a person who repeatedly chalks up the shawshank redemption as one of his favourite films, that means a lot. his character is immediately sympathetic and bewildering. the audience's feelings regarding his character are likely to shift rapidly. at once you want to believe him, but at the same time you will become frightened of what precisely is behind his eyes. sean penn puts in yet another of his consistantly flawless performances. at this point, commenting about the depth and incredible nature of penn's acting is cliche. it goes without saying that he is an actor without many peers. the only surprise would be if he ever didn't come through in that manner. kevin bacon, laurence fishburne and others all turn in stellar performances. my problem with this film lies in the shakey and at times perplexing story. at the top of my list is the absolutely unnecessary and befuddling relationship between bacon and his wife. this element of the story seems almost added after-the-fact to cobble together the idea of a connection between robbins, penn and bacon's characters in some sort of collection of misfit lives. it doesn't work and if anything makes bacon's character seem disjointed from the rest of the film whenever he interacts with his wife. i can forsee a criticism of the film being the seemingly un-reasonable murder of penn's daughter. especially when you find out the actual cause of her demise. critics might say this is a weak tying together of plot, but i found this idea to be in touch with the idea of the fragility and randomness of existence that is put forth from the very opening with the abduction and subsequent molestation of robbin's character as a young boy. nobody in this movie seems to have any control over the events of their own life, and as such, the futility of their scrapping through existence hits home. especially in the almost unbelievably overbearing, egotistical and uncaring final dialogue between laura linney (penn's character's wife) and penn. that dialogue especially seems to come out of nowhere, in very little way reflecting the characterizations we've seen thus far. i came away absolutely loathing that family. the pacing of this film is excellent and the plot (and details of how the murder occurs) are revealed at a steady pace that keeps you very much interested in what's going on for the entire two and a quarter hours. the acting is terrific. it's just the story that seems to hold glaring and jarring moments that leave you walking away shaking your head more at the story itself than the life of the characters. in that, it seems the movie ultimately fails in connecting you to the characters for that very reason. and too bad. otherwise it would be a monsterously emotional and gripping film. posted by J. Neas | 2/01/2004 12:25:00 AM
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