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Went and saw this last night, it's still sort of sinking in but my response was positive. Admittedly, this is the first PTA movie I've seen in quite a while. I watched Magnolia shortly after The Master was released and I think that's the last time I saw one. I wanted to go into this movie with fresh eyes - seeing The Master right before Magnolia (for the first time) sort of colored my interpretation of Magnolia undesirably and I wanted to avoid that. Like most people I'd heard that this movie was a little hard to follow, so like Magic Hate Ball I tried to avoid getting too hung up on the plot and instead focused on the characters in the scenes and the action, which I think helped a lot. The movie looked great, although I felt like it was shot extremely intimately. Lots of scenes, especially at the beginning (that I noticed), were long zooms on one character or long close-ups. The one that sticks in my mind is at the pizza place, Doc is having a conversation with the narrator character (her name escapes me), and the whole scene just slowly zooms in on her. I thought the way the movie was shot was very effective, in that in most scenes it really served to draw your attention to the conversations happening and the dialogue is extremely important in this film. I get a little too cerebral when I watch PTA movies so I eventually just let this go and started enjoying the movie instead of thinking about the way it was shot. I won't try to make any grand statements about what I thought this movie was trying to say because I don't really know much about the politics of late 60s/early 70s counterculture or the death of that movement. Heroin really seems to have hosed everything up. I thought one of the funniest things about this movie was the portrayal of police. The scene where Doc is at Wolfmann's mansion and his wife is throwing the party, and there are cops wearing their loving CHIPS style helmets while swimming and grilling hot dogs was one of my favorites. The climax of the movie for me was when Shasta finally comes back. While it doesn't really have heavy influence on the Golden Fang plot, it's Doc's most personal and intense scene, and provides a lot of insight into Shasta, who Doc still loves. It was probably also my favorite scene in the movie. The monologue and long, long shot were extremely effective. I felt the same discomfort and frustration that Doc felt in that scene (well, almost) and I just thought it was great. I thought that scene, the dentist scene, and the rehab center scenes were all genius. Josh Brolin in this movie, holy gently caress he was great. I thought he stole every scene he was in - "MOLTO PANCAKU!" Overall I felt like I kept up with the plot well enough to know what was going on. I think there are a fair amount of details that would be more clear on a second watch, but there are some things that are bugging me: The links between Golden Fang, Puck Beaverton, and Adrian Prussia are still confusing to me. Was Adrian Prussia mentioned earlier in the movie and I just missed it? He seemed to show up super late. Who killed Glen Charlock and why?
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Jan 16, 2015 18:01
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:00 |
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