Change Your Image
andymjay
Reviews
The Whale (2022)
How to Squander a Great Performance in a Cinematic Failure
The performance of Mr. Fraser as Charlie was masterful and deserving of an award with the other performances average at best. The special effects were first class. Beyond these 2 elements which were clear from the beginning there was no reason to sit through this grotesque portrait of the slow and ugly suicide of a human being. The reason is because I felt nothing for him or for his family. I did not detect a shred of anything in his character as revealed on the screen that prompted an emotional response other than disgust.
I am totally perplexed as to why this pretentious film was made and ask the director and writer what were they trying to achieve other than provide the opportunity for Mr. Fraser to win an Oscar. On this point I suspect the worst and it concerns the possibility that this is some kind of weird effort to normalize ugly mediocrity in the extreme...in itself not such an unusual thing in today's distorted world where pursuit of excellence and nobility is openly discouraged.
Let's consider some of the ludicrous themes perhaps intended as redemptive. Firstly, Charlie is an incognito online writing instructor whose greatest wisdom is to utter...you gotta write what you really feel ....big deal... there is nothing interesting about this man. Secondly, he is trying to reconnect with his daughter Ellie, promising her money all the while with a kind of absurd, smirking optimism, subjecting this young person to watching his disgusting protracted suicide. Had he instead offed himself quickly and efficiently leaving his family the money after writing a heartfelt apology, I just may have felt something for him. Thirdly, he struggles to move his body mass into the bedroom shrine of his gay relationship which destroyed his family... this along with with the white light deification at the end and the Contact like other worldly beach scene is sheer nonsense. Lastly, the annoying whale metaphor referencing Melville's great classical work of Moby Dick serves only as a contrast with the failed writing behind this film.
The side plots in the film including the inexplicable behavior of his medical helper who for some time has been complicit in his suicide, the young man Thomas who achieves reconnection with his family in some perverse way due to Charlie's daughter pursuit of "truth"...and of course the poor suffering wife who at the end falls into his hulking mass....all of these including the ever present unnecessary gay sex intonations do nothing to remedy the central flaws of this film.
If all of this is about the evils of shaming and how this man achieves a religious epiphany at the end, I suggest the real truth is that what he is and what he is doing is in fact largely disgusting and shameful and any hope of redemption for him can only come, if there is reincarnation, in the next life.
At an early point in the film I wondered if suddenly Charlie will really see the light and at least try to live by getting serious medical attention as a first step.... he could still die at the end but with a last gasp of do the right thing. After all, there are actual cases where his amount of weight has been substantially reduced. Alas, such a truly redemptive plot is not in the mind of the writer. Instead, the torture continued with my increasing regret in coming to the theatre on a rainy night to watch this debacle.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
No Magic
On the deepest level, Blade Runner (the original) magically reduced the most daunting questions of our existence
what are we
.who or what created us
what is consciousness, memory, identity, empathy, love
..to characters and relationships on screen, mainly Rachel and Deckard. Their moments together were beyond precious. The stars had to align for this to work. No such thing happened for this sequel. It is a good film and I will see it again but the two should not be confused.
It's interesting that in 35 years the visual effects could not be appreciably improved
..probably because we've passed the point of diminishing returns in hitek digital slambam. What is left is the story and acting and both did not overly impress. The death scene on the steps is an unoriginal mimicking of what is for me one of the greatest scenes ever
.a soaked dying Rutger Hauer on the roof with the white dove. The music likewise was a poor wannabe of the original Vangelis.
To have your heart, soul, and mind be touched deeply, powerfully and increasingly with each viewing by a film is an unforgettable experience, and when a film operates on 2 levels simultaneously, as a great action film (for most viewers)
and as a spiritual experience for some, it becomes transcendent, a very rare thing for films. Such is Blade Runner for me. An example of another film of another genre which operates for me the same way is Somewhere in Time. For most, just a deceptively beautiful, schmaltzy love story. I've seen it countless times as I have Blade Runner. It triggers the same profound reflections on our being.
Truth (2015)
Much Ado About Nothing .......but just maybe ?
Just saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival. It was warmly received and was most entertaining for those cerebral enough to appreciate its exploration of the details of a deceptively controversial event in American journalism
.However, any film with the ambitious title TRUTH should aspire towards some kind of truth beyond the trivial. To this extent the film fails miserably. On a technical level however, the screenplay being what it is, is wonderfully executed by all concerned and does provide some interesting insights into the personae of Mary Mapes and Dan Rather with the skilled performances of Cate Blanchette and Robert Redford. Any number of non trivial important questions that journalism should have covered could have been the subject of this film, where of course, 60 Minutes would never go. For example how 2 planes brought down 3 buildings and how at least 50% of Americans didn't even know there was a WTC7. Instead, the story is about whether George W avoided Vietnam through an arranged sojourn with the Texas National Guard as a pilot. Let's get real, the "surprising" fact that George W (who by 2004 was regarded as a village idiot by much of the world's media) skipped Vietnam, is a triviality tossup with Monica doing Bill, the latter of course being the subject of a greater and more expensive investigation than that of 911. For 60 Minutes. this was a most controversial subject because mainstream journalism asking hard questions by this time is long dead. After all it was Dan Rather who had a starring role in the destruction of truth and the engineered mass hypnosis following the JFK palace coup when he failed to report what he saw in the Zapruder film. What we see here on the screen is the apparent death of merely an illusion of journalism and a preoccupation with technical detail such as handwriting analysis and memo minutiae. Upon further reflection there is an outside possibility that the film on a deeper level is a sly and witty satire showing that pursuit of any kind if truth in the US is an absurd notion where so much angst and energy goes into a losing effort to disclose next to nothing.