Recent Viewing Part IV

... Well, I suppose you're not wrong about the music.

2012 on the other hand was ridiculous, goofy, outrageous fun.

Indeed so. Really enjoyed it. Godzilla and 10,000 BC were not in that category for me though.

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"2012" was crap spruced up with polish.

Quite the contrary, it's a celebration of film as an audiovisual medium with some fantastic setpieces and ideas, however unlikely. There isn't much in terms of complexity, but that's not what Emmerich is about (there are subversive elements, though which he almost always does well -- like Joe Dante).

You can. Look at Kanye or Cyrus.

I saw "Counselor" yesterday. I thought "What the hell? Cruz, Bardem, Pitt, Diaz, Fassbender and it's a Scott film!" I still cry for the money I gave for the ticket. Ok, there's the pool scene which my boyfriend ( ) and every other male in the cinema liked but apart from that... such a pity!

I prefer not to look at Cyrus; no point in losing the lunch I just ate.

His music for this year's season 2 is much much better.

I've been following that show since its beginning. It's fairly good, although the kiddie/PC aspect makes it a little less appealing than more adult fare in the same genre. However, there are some pretty good story arcs ahead of you that should keep the interest going.

12 Years a Slave

Saw a pre-premiere showing during a weekend of movies from the Polish Camerimage festival in Bydgoszcz. Every year they take the best movies to a cinema in Warsaw.

The movie is harrowing, brutal, unflinching and brilliant, but it's not just an exposition of slavery in America. Steve McQueen wanted to tell a story about a man being captured into slavery in America and it took them years to find the story of Solomon Northup, who wrote a memoir about his life in slavery.

I think this was a smart choice, because it just goes beyond a depiction of "how slavery looks like" and becomes a story of dehumanization and trying to retain dignity in such (very) dire circumstances. People are whipped, hanged, maimed. Treated as property. The owners can be psychopathic (Michael Fassbender's brilliant and nuanced performance as Epps makes the character utterly scared), they can be also genuinely good people (Benedict Cumberbatch's Ford), but stilll deep into the thinking that a human being can actually be property.

In his genius, I think, the director went as back as to late 19th Century movement, naturalism. I assume that the writers are well-known and well-read on this board. The program of naturalism, most famously defined by Emile Zola, was to bring the Darwinian concepts (then very fresh) into literature and making a novel a sort of piece of experimental (the program essay of Zola is called "The Experimental Novel") research into basic, primordial instincts. So the very modern theme of being dignified and trying to maintain humanity (as presented by very clearly established personalities) is put at odds with the animalistic treatment of the slaves and showing them in an action-reaction way, trying to maintain basic survival (though Northup says "I don't want to survive, I want to live", the opposition of survival and living is a central theme to the story). The naturalistic approach clashes with the humanistic one and that, I think, brings the most moving, painful, emotional core of the movie. Brilliant stuff.

Hans' score plays with that very well. Yes, the main theme is basically The Thin Red Line/Inception in terms of development, though the undercurrent melody is quite similar to the main theme... from Gravity (also a movie exploring extremes, interestingly), I don't think there was mutual inspiration at hand, because the session dates might have been very different and I think Hans recorded it earlier. On the other hand there is a very primal soundscape for the most scary scenes (the slavery-ship-from-hell sequence, look how McQueen NEVER shows the ship in its entirety, it's filmed as a living beast from hell, is scored through primal percussion combined with a low droning sound, not unlike the Inception chord, but achieved through unison and played by 4 basssoons). It's another clash in the story.

Piece of trivia, the only additional composer on the score (I am not counting the additional credit for the guy who wrote the spirituals the slaves sing during work) is Dario Marianelli's orchestrator and conductor - no one other than Benjamin Wallfisch.

The movie is heavily recommended, but not for the faintest of hearts. It's harrowing and brutal.

Saving Mr. Banks

A touching, if lightweight, telling of the life of P. L. Travers as she recalls her childhood when negotiating the deal for the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins.

Emma Thompson owns the character, she's nuanced, brilliant, playing mostly through little and subtle gestures, facial changes and she's great. Tom Hanks, in a somehow smaller role, is also quite good (though not as great as he is in Captain Phillips, where the final scenes are just devastating). There is a lot of humor and a lot of poignancy in the flashback scenes of the movie, with a very good turn from Colin Farrell as her loving and very troubled father.

Thomas Newman's score is great, combining a slightly quirky approach for the "present-day" (aka negotiation) scenes, where it's actually used quite sparsely to a very classical (for his standards, of course) scoring of the flashback scenes. The themes are beautiful and take note of a prolonged scene with a very dramatic cue, some really desperate and amazing string writing there.

All in all, good movie. I'm glad I could see them both thanks to a friend and thanks to the Warsaw cinema who brought these movies from a festival just to give a showing of them 2 months before they premiere in my country.

Well, they go with the original source, though the script changes Northup's second owner into an overseer for the first one.

Ford is presented as a very sensitive man, who is mindful of his slaves, there is another short-timed owner (the psychotic Epps gives his slaves away, because he thinks his crops are bad because of them being against God's will, I kid you not) and again, it's a time where the slaves are respected. Epps is shown as the total psychopath. There are owners who treat their slaves very well, but, if anything, they have bad overseers.

There's also Mr. Bass, who is a Canadian against slavery. The attitude of Ford is presented as "I am so sorry for you, you're a great guy, but I bought you andI have a debt. Don't tell me to set you free! I have money to pay off!".

I have to say that I think McQueen goes a bit beyond political debate, because from the beginning when he got the idea of making a movie about slavery, he was reportedly very adamant to tell a story about a free man who gets captured into slavery and it took them years to dig out Northup's memoir, which they decided to, eventually, do.

So rather than exploring what slavery is like, he tells a story that combines between a fight for dignity and being resorted to a property, often in terms of exploring the extremes of humanity. Frankly, this is my first movie by Steve McQueen that I have seen, I'd like to watch both Shame and Hunger now, because I might find thematic similarities there, maybe (maybe Michael would elaborate on that, I surely hope so).

While hanging, rape, whipping is present in the movie... It was compared to Schindler's List, but at the end of the day, actually I would say that McQueen's movie isn't as graphic, except maybe one scene. It's more of an atmosphere that something might be happening any time to you that is more harrowing than the depiction of graphic violence itself (whipping, beating happens on screen, but rarely the immediate effects on the body, except that scene, or rather take, etc.).

So I would say that while a story like this always has obvious political undertones, the film itself is more about the universal human condition in its extremes than discussing a certain period in time.

An interesting question would be, and you seem to be knowledgeable here, if there were actually white slaves during that period.

Robert Carlyle is the best part of the show, for sure!

They do tap into quite a bit of other fairytale figures later on, not only those adapted by Disney (but yeah -- the Disney stamp is felt throughout).