The 13TH Hall of Fame

A friend of mine really liked this so i gave it a shot, it was alright. There was quite a bit of corny humour and bad dialogue that actually bothered me. I get what they were trying to do with Ben answering anything his kids ask truthfully without any sugar-coating but it mostly came across really awkward, and the whole little girl says things no one her age should know/understand thing got annoying quick. Certainly wasn't all bad though, it touched on some interesting themes, had some touching moments and Viggo Mortensen and Frank Langella were very good.

Overall a mostly enjoyable but mediocre film in my opinion.

Manchester By The Sea -

+

Great film. Top four of 2016 for me so far. I'm pretty tired right now so i don't have that much to say but anyway.

Casey was great he deserves the praise he's been getting. I thought the flashback structure was used to great effect, showing how happy and just genuinely lively Lee was before compared to his current day lifeless self was a good move. Everybody in Manchesters reaction to hearing about him "the Lee Chandler?", etc, really created genuine intrigue to finding out what happened and went well with the flashbacks. The film took a sharp turn when i found out what happened, up to that point the film had had a sombre tone but of course that heavily escalated it. The actual scene was great, the music and the cutting between the most horrible moment in his life and the present where he has to make this enormous decision which is even bigger here because it means he'll have to trust himself to have responsibility again, how it completely explained why he is the way he is now, the gun, etc, really excellent scene. Lucas Hedges was very good too, think he deserves his Oscar nom. I loved how through his constant prodding and his own problems he forced some life back into Lee. His breakdown scene at seeing the freezer for example, that was legitimately unsettling i thought at first he may have been having a heart attack; wasn't sure if his fathers disease was hereditary or not but that's definitely what went through my head at first, well acted by Hedges. He was a real smartass too, loved some of his interactions with Lee "what happened to your hand?" "I cut it." "Oh, for a moment there i didn't know what happened." .

Overall it had a great cast. Quite a few people popped up that i wasn't expecting; Matthew Broderick, Tate Donovan, Kara Hayward, etc. Got to be honest though, the one thing i don't completely agree with is the praise for Michelle Williams. She was fine i just didn't find anything special in her performance and i really don't understand why everyone else apparently did. That's not to say i didn't like their scenes together though; her apologizing scene was fantastic and practically everything after that was very powerful. Great film.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring -

+

Watched this earlier but didn't get a chance to write anything because i was going to a halloween party. If you haven't seen it don't read as there's spoiler here.

Oh, man this film was effective. For as simple as it was the Spring tied stones part at the beginning really got to me; the fish being dead was enough but the snake and then the kid crying! Think it was the being forced to confront your actions/mistakes thing makes you think of some silly stuff you may have done in your life that you never had to think about the consequences of (obviously not harming animals or even anything serious) because it was done you moved on; but this kid was actually forced to see what his actions resulted in. That and just the fact that the master could've stopped him as soon as he started doing it to the fish; obviously he was teaching him a lesson but he clearly let it go overnight because he knew chances were at least 1/3 would be dead or seriously harmed. And i'm not ruling out that sick maniac going out in the middle of the night to kill the snake himself !

Summer was good too, but pretty awkward. It wasn't easy watching him have to deal with sexual attraction at first, mainly because it was obviously something he had never really had to think about or deal with because he'd been alone with his master there since he was a kid, he was just so clueless and weirdly forceful at first that it was a bit cringey. There were some great things about this part though; particularly seeing him acting like a normal teenager or whatever age he was supposed to be like when he put the cricket on the girls shoulder and was messing around with her. The thing that annoyed me most about this part was their recklessness; there was no need for them to sneak into each others beds or out at night, i get that there had to be a way for them to get caught and the best way that suited the film was for his desire to be so strong, still was annoying though.

One thing i found funny about Fall was the fact that the master first heard about the murder from a newspaper. Such a minor thing but i kind of cracked up at the idea of a paperboy rowing through this river to deliver the paper . Obviously that doesn't have to be how he got it, but i still don't even see why it was needed at all; i mean 10 seconds later he arrived and clearly said he killed her, it's not important enough to bother me but i did find it funny. All of Fall was pretty weird; it included the oddest suicide attempt i've ever seen and the master finally showing some emotion by angrily beating him with a stick. Not to mention the omnious music playing. It was very good though. For how angry and emotional it started it ended on a very peaceful note even though it kind of broke me; the masters suicide was a beautiful scene.

Winter (and Spring) was just gorgeous. Throughout the other parts the weather seemed to be only changing slightly every time so the drastic change to snow/ice was so noticeable and welcome. That first shot of him walking across the frozen lake to the house was sublime. The actual story of Winter was good too. I thought it would just be a full part of him becoming the master which i was all for; when the woman come though i had no idea what was going on. I couldn't tell if her baby was sick or if it was her (possibly neither) i can't tell you how paranoid i was about her taking off her headscarf and having a really mangled face. From the moment she brought the kid there it was obvious that he'd take the new masters role as the student which was fine, got to admit though i wasn't a fan of the 'circle of life' look he's making the exact same mistakes ending; well they changed it from tying a rock to the back to putting a rock in the animals mouth but they even did it with a fish, frog and snake again.

Great film. It is a bit uneven but it isn't a big problem since it was always going to be with it basically being four (technically five but i don't really count And Spring because it was only a few minutes long and was basically a repeat of the first story) separate stories. I think it goes without saying that it was stunning; they picked one of the most picturesque places imaginable to film and with a very capable cinematographer it is greatly amplified. Very beautiful, soothing score as well that gels perfectly with most scenes.

Buffalo '66

From everything i've read about him and what he has said Vincent Gallo sounds like an awful person so i was half expecting to dislike this but i really loved it to my surprise. There's so many problems with it too; the events of the film aren't believable - Layla has multiple chances to escape early on all she knows him as is an aggressive ******* who kidnapped her and has just left prison, if the film had it as her being too scared to say drive away when he was peeing then fairenough but she is clearly not by her demeanor and attitude towards him, it's bad enough that she falls for him after he calms down a bitafter his pee but i felt the film was telling me she was attracted to him right away which isn't believable. Her falling for him at all is the most tough to swallow, he's aggresive and potentially dangerous and just acts completely terrible to her throughout; he softens up in the motel scene towards the end but before that he hasn't shown her any other side to him which makes her calling him "the most handsome", "too good for her", etc, throughout the film doesn't make much sense as well as her not leaving when she can after the scene with his parents. So yeah on paper this shouldn't have worked at all but for whatever reason i felt a connection/chemistry that i can't quite explain which made this work. Another thing that initially annoyed me but ended up a positive and possibly the explanation for their relationship working for me was the self-aggrandizing; Billy was a character in a movie of course so if it was pretty much anyone else other than Gallo who had written and was playing the character i wouldn't have thought anything of it but from the various comments i've read from Gallo including some related to this film he sounds arrogant and unpleasant so say the "it's just so huge" urinal scene felt like him stroking his own ego in some weird way to me. The first Lalya comments felt the same at first as well but then as we got more into i realized that Billy is a messed up loser and Layla is the only one that takes notice of him and says anything positive about him, it made it feel like they were in their own little world; every other character felt weirdly detached from Billy which worked to justify his existence being so terrible to him, Layla payed attention to and had a genuine interest in him, she noticed things that Billy had no reason to believe were there and maybe they weren't but i don't think it actually matters. I certainly think all of those problems i mentioned still stand but i think this goes some way to explain why the relationship worked for me despite them. Even the urinal part has a self-deprecating explanation that i wasn't expecting with his serious self-consciousness; doesn't want to be touched/watched. So yeah not sure if it will hold up but to my surprise i kinda loved this. Still don't like Gallo and while i really like his script (co-written so i'm not sure how much was his) and performance the film was certainly not his alone, Ricci was just as good as him and his comments about her were awful and Lance Acord's visuals played a massive part; again Gallo's comments about him were awful, don't believe for a second the visuals were Gallo's when you consider some of Acord's other credits: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette and Where The Wild Things Are.