M's Musings on NEVER LET ME GO

Never Let Me Go.  Dir. Mark Romanek.  Screenplay by Alex Garland.  Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishigiro.  Ft. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley.  Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.

Never Let Me Go was pretty much the only book I read for pleasure in the entire 2009-10 school year.  I read it in November during a very difficult and emotional time in my life.  I knew it was going to have a large impact on me, and I was looking to gain some much needed perspective to help get me out of a bit of a funk.  Contemporary dystopic fiction is my very favourite genre, particularly when it is written by such a fine author.  Kazuo Ishigiro is just awesome, and I looked forward to a few hours alone with this book for at least two years before I finally let myself read it.

I loved the slow-paced journey the story took me on.  So many pages of knowing and not knowing the fate of this story.  So much waiting for it to get better for the characters.  So many frustrated expectations, dashed dreams and misguided hopes.  Even more slowly knowing, but also coming to grips with the idea that I wasn't going to get the release I deserved in the form of a happy ending.  I experienced real catharsis after reading this book.  I like dealing with the possibility that you can't escape your fate, and that sometimes there is no going back and saving the past through redemption in the present.

This book made me ache.  I half-hated Kathy from the first page.  She was never going to be the plucky, independent heroine.  She was going to passively let her love fade away from her.  She was going to hold onto objects and stories for years after they ended, nostalgically re-living a childhood past without real happiness.  Everything just hurt.  It was based on false information.  It was based in deception and hope that wasn't grounded in reality.

How could they possibly capture all this emotion in a film adaptation, particularly one with a pretty small movie budget?

When I saw that Alex Garland, another excellent author, wrote the screenplay for this movie, my overall hopes were very high.  As I sat down in the Oxford in Halifax after a wonderful meal with the love of my life and best friend T, I knew that no matter what this movie threw at me, I was going to have an excellent cinematic experience.

The film really capture the pacing of the book, which, is agonizingly slow.  As the various layers are slowly revealed, you constantly are going through a process of reinterpreting the past action in light of the new information.  By the time you discover that the characters are clones, that the gallery was to prove the children had souls, that Kathy was looking for her Original in the porn magazines, and that Kathy was going to start her first treatment... it is always too late.  These moments constantly frustrate the reader, demanding that we too take on this perspective of grasping at straws and re-writing history in order to deal with all the various knowledge we gain as we go through a process of maturation and growth.

By the time Kathy gets to start her relationship with Tommy, all the passion and emotion from their childhoods is long gone.  The sex she has waited so long for is difficult, and often ends in a more domestic cuddling.  The love they need to prove is jaded by the years of separation, and the emotional and physical loss of their bodies.  The idea that parts of their bodies are physically taken from them to keep other people healthy is fascinating.  The fact that morality becomes a non-issue when mortality is on the line make it even more fascinating.  When you look deep into the recesses of society and see the darkness you fear... it is a very powerful literary moment.

Keira Knightly was a great choice for Ruth, though her big name kind of took away from the lead actors.  Interestingly, I would argue that this was also a good choice, because it makes it harder to connect with Kathy.  I thought that Ruth's death scene, and her confession at the boat, were both bang-on.  I was really, really happy with how her character came together.

My only complaint was that I felt the ending wasn't hard hitting enough.  When Ruth is laid open on the surgeon table in that long, slow scene, the detachment with which the doctors pillage her body and then leave her splayed open and dead was really moving.  Watching Tommy's last moments of life was positive, but without that connection to the reality of the death, it really didn't hit the same way.

The fact that Kathy is about to start her first treatment is supposed to shake you to your core.  You are supposed to be so caught up in her own reliving of the past that you also are looking for Tommy over the hill.  I feel like those last scenes went through the motions of the text, but they just weren't able to bring me back to the emotional space of the book.  I think its just because the attachment isn't the same in a two hour movie.  You just don't invest as much into the film as you do in a book.

I am interested to see what T says about this one, and what the critical feedback looks like.  I am not sure if I would have had the same experience if I couldn't map my experience of the book onto the film.

I am really glad I got to see this film.

M's Musings on THE TOWN

The Town.  Dir.  Ben Affleck.  Screenplay by Peter Craig, Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard.  Based on the novel by Chuck Hogan.  Ft.  Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively.  Warner Bros, 2010.

T. and I thought we'd celebrate Thanksgiving by going to the movies last night.  When we arrived at the theatre, we realized we didn't know what any of the movies were.  Strangely, there were no posters, and no real advertisements, so we ended up piecing together what each of the movies were about in a haphazard way.  We asked a group of stoned teenagers.  This was their recommendation.

When chatting with them, we realized we knew exactly what movie this was.  In fact, T. mentioned that he had been waiting for this movie for months.  Who knew!  I came in with no expectations, beyond the fact that this was a "heist film".

I was pleasantly shocked at how much I enjoyed this film.  Ben Affleck was bang on, stealing my heart while still making me want to avoid him.  I loved how "all in the family" this story was.  Each of the crew members were tied to each other by family, sex, money and drugs.  As a result, the individual actions or desires of one member are subject to the interpretation and punishment by the group.

For the bank manager, I thought that she was kind of sympathetic, but very quick to fall for Ben.  The tatooed dream boat with an honest blue collar job, is a thrill for the "toonie" yuppie who otherwise spends all her free time helping the innocent and gardening for the community.  The extremes between the idyllic woman and the criminal with a heart of gold were perhaps a little too extreme.  If they developed her character a bit more, gave her something besides her "sunny days", I think she would have been more likeable.

I found the search for the water very moving.  I felt completely caught up with her steps as she relived it. I can only imagine how the trauma of such an experience could affect a person longterm.

T. taught me about the "death by cop" suicide attempts of the various crew members, which I thought made sense.  If you only have two options, life in a maximum security prison or death, I think I would make a last stand, too.

I found it did really validate the crew's actions and emphasize their humanity.  That, mixed with an unsympathetic cop who also went home to "nuke his dinner" really disrupted the binary of good/evil which made the movie more interesting.   The bad guys were "punished", but the system itself was put into question.  I liked that.

Overall, I did find that the movie was too violent.  I found it occasionally shocking, but that probably was mostly to do with the fact that the characters were relatively well developed before they were killed. This wasn't a random massacre, but a carefully executed game of cat and mouse by men on both sides of the law.

It was also interesting that they chose to throw in a sister/lover character to act as a foil to the bank manager.  She was disregarded by Ben Affleck, but at the same time, they did make a point of showing the two of them having some kind of weird pity fuck earlier in the film.

I thought this was an interesting, fun and powerful film.  Usually heist films have way less heart.  Good job, Ben Affleck.  I think we may need to consider expanding our repertoire to include more of your films.

M's Musings on HOWL

Howl.  Written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.  Based on the poem by Allen Ginsberg.  Ft. James Franco.  Werc Werk Works, 2010.

T. and I checked out the Atlantic Film Festival on Friday night, only managing to make it to one show during the whole week plus of festival.  We may have only been here for a month, but seriously... We should have tried a little harder.  If this film was a testament to the excellent, high-calibre films being featured over the last week, then we really missed out.  

This film, which was equal parts obscenity trial, staged interview, poetry reading and computer generated artistic rendering, was a fun and interesting way to connect to Allen Ginsberg and his poetry.  While I would argue that some of these sequences were better than others, I liked the pastiche approach and the various interpretations it allowed the poem to operate within simultaneously.

Each of the four parts was shot in a different way, and from a cinematic perspective, I must say I was most drawn to the "documentary style" of the interview with Ginsberg.  James Franco managed to support an entire movie where he was the only central, consistent figure.  Pretty bad ass, if you ask me.  I completely bought that Allen Ginsberg was griping to a journalist in the wake of the obscenity trial he was not a part of.

While I liked the poetry reading sections in black and white, the audience reactions seemed really forced.  Would this have been shocking?  Ho-hum?  Something in between.  The clapping and laughter occasionally made me think more of a comedy club then a poetry reading.  I felt like the audience of hipsters was titillated, but not truly engaged.  Maybe I am just reading too much into it.

In the court room, which was filmed just like any court-type drama, we have very eloquent lawyers giving speeches and attempting to answer bizarre questions.  What makes a piece of work literature?  What is artistic merit, and how do we determine it?  Questions for all the ages, to be sure.  I thought the feel-good style of pitting the "bad lawyer" with the prudish witnesses against the "likeable, cares about literature lawyer" with the deep, more thought provoking witnesses almost seemed too extreme.  That said, if the reactions really were that polarized, it makes sense.  That is the nature of a court case, I would assume.

Also, for the record, I bet those beautiful speeches weren't just from the heart.  I bet they had copious notes, if not a full speech for their final statement.  Seriously.  You can't just pull that kind of thing out of the air.

The visualizations were very interesting, tumbling and bizarre.  I found it of note, in a film that frankly deals with issues of "deviant" notions of sexuality for the time period, that the majority of the sexuality being portrayed was so vanilla.  Homosexuality was dealt with frankly by parts of the film, but shirked it in other moments, which I thought kind of muddled the message.  

For example, here are two photos of Allen with his partner...  Only one of these moments is recreated in the film.   I bet you can guess which one.

I thought they could have pushed the envelope even further.  But then, the visualizations were entirely interpretive, so really, they could have been whatever the CG guys wanted them to be.  One thing I know for certain:  the flaccid penises were of a generous size.

I liked that the images were constantly in motion, moving and changing shape and scope as the poem was being read.  I didn't always know what to do with what I saw, but that didn't invalidate it for me in any way.

Why does an animal howl?  Is it an expression of pain or triumph?  In titling his poem Howl, I think the answer needs to be somewhere in between.  And that's kind of what I thought about this movie.  It wasn't universally celebratory, but I'm glad I saw it.