Having worked with stone a lot over the last 7 years, I knew right off when he was trying to chip away at the boulder from the bottom that anything he was doing there --- and with a dull multi-tool, it wasn't much --- would just make the boulder jam even tighter. But I guess we'll try anything when there is a possible alternative to what Aron eventually has to do to get free.
The camcorder messages that Aron records, knowing that he is probably going to die in the canyon is very touching and I wonder if they used the actual words from that tape, or whether it was written up to a great extent. I suspect that Hollywood put its touches in, but the fact that I'm asking this question means that the dialogue was very believable. Otherwise, the narrative spins around some of the relationship choices Aron has made, mostly regarding a nameless love interest and his family from which he keeps a certain distance. The poetic bits are not lost, then, that it took Aron cutting off his arm to stop cutting himself off from others and keeping his loved ones at arms' length.
This film invites a comparison to another based-on-real-life story, "Into the Wild," which features Emile Hirsh as a young man who rejects much of society and his family, going through a sort of breakdown after learning that his father had another family (or rather, that his own family was the "other" family). In isolation, the characters each come to realize the mistakes they've made in their approach to family relationships. I really thought Hirsh deserved more recognition than he got for hid acting range and the physical devotion he had to put into that role. There have been several basically one-actor movies in the past several years (which seemed to start with "Cast Away" exploring the theme of alienation even as our society becomes ever more electronically connected) and Franco holds his own with any of them. With a setting and storyline that could easily have started to drag on a viewer, Franco kept it moving.
One question I had: when Aron was rewinding the camcorder to the part where he's canyon-diving with the two girls, and he paused on Kate Mara's chest.... What was that exactly? It was debatable to me whether he was shivering or engaging in some... shall we say, extracurricular activity.
All told, the most important thing to take from this film is the last line. Always leave a note or make sure someone knows where you're going, especially if you're doing something with the potential of danger.
● "Toy Story 3" is ostensibly a last goodbye in this series about a group of toys and their owner's path to maturity. Andy is headed to college, and the toys are facing an unknown future. Will they be relegated to the attic, the garbage or donation? As the previous animations showed, toys can be an obsessive lot --- always worrying about being damaged, misplaced, unloved or outgrown by their owners. Again, we're treated to the gang's adventures while figuring out their loyalties to Andy and to each other. My only gripe, and a small one at that, was in the furnace scene late in the movie. It lost a lot of its potential poignancy with the up-tempo music choice. It took a few moments before I got that they were all resigned to burning and after all the arguing, decided to go out holding their friends' hands. A slower Michael Giacchino-type score would have worked much better there. The ending was a great way to send out this franchise.
● I've been a fan of Arron Sorkin's script-writing since "The American President" and "The West Wing," even though I don't agree with very much of his political ideology. In "The Social Network" Sorkin and director David Fincher portray a fictionalized account of the beginnings of Facebook.com, the social networking Web site that has changed everything from retail marketing, to the course of human relationships, and across the Middle East in the past months, political revolutions.
The script borrowed heavily from details of the legal proceedings in lawsuits over the business side of the origins of Facebook. The film is necessarily bogged down with scenes of sworn testimony to flesh out the Winklevoss twins' portion for having the bud of the idea for the site, and how the buddy relationship between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) turned sour after they became business partners and outside elements started to exert their influence. I cannot say that "The Social Network" was very entertaining, so much as it simply tried to tell the story of a service that a lot of people use. Much of time, it was like reading a long, though well-written, Wall Street Journal column. As much as Zuckerberg facilitated virtual friendships around the globe, the film's basic intimation is that he is not at all good at facilitating his own friendships in the real world --- highlighting the closing shot where he is pathetically clicking the refresh button on his ex-girlfriend's Facebook page over and over. Eisenberg plays his part with a quiet, terse, social awkwardness that really invites a viewer to place Zuckerberg somewhere on the autism spectrum. A lot of people have him pegged as their favorite for Best Actor. I remain unconvinced that playing a pretentious, arguably back-stabbing prick is that hard of an acting job.
● "Winter's Bone" caught me very off guard with its brutal treatment of a girl forced to keep her family afloat amid the scourge of methamphetamine and its consequences in America's heartland. It was relatively shorter than most of the other films in contention, but nevertheless I'm still ruminating on it. The ending was left wide open as to who killed Ree's father --- her uncle, played by John Hawkes, says at the end that he knows who did it --- but as a simple vignette piece, it has the richness of a Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen Crane short story. Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for Best Actress and I can't disagree on that score. The downward spiral of meth is an all-too-real life for way too many people in this country.
It was a fairly good showing and I think Rush as the formally-untrained speech therapist will remain the most memorable part, especially that scene where he does the opening lines of "Richard III" for his children. I have an inclination to not like Ms. Carter --- I can't really explain it, but there it is. Colin Firth was very good, just as he's been in many roles (he is the best Mr. Darcy ever captured on celluloid in the 1995 version of "Pride & Prejudice"). Certainly two thumbs up, but it loses points with me over how reductive it was with the story, and how it put Rush's speech therapist at the heart of the political intrigue of the time. It conjoined those elements for the sake of time, but it did a great disservice to the reality of what happened. It also wrongly attributes the cause of and cure to stuttering as a purely psychological trauma.
As I wrote above, I'm not sure it broke much new ground from "Bertie and Elizabeth." And that film was able to go a little deeper into the succession crisis. "The King's Speech" placed a lot of the narrative on Rush's character to both egg on and shoot down the notion of any "vaulting ambition" on Bertie's part. And the politics of Edward VIII's abdication was much more complex than what they papered over in this new treatment, while also showing the progression through the war until George VI's death and Elizabeth II's coronation. James Wilby really personalized Bertie much more than I got the sense of from Firth. There is something to casting a lesser-known actor in a biographical film, as a viewer can stay behind a thicker veil of ignorance and isn't distracted by a well-known actor's face. All I saw here was Firth and Bonham-Carter. I'm sorry, I just don't need star power to be wowed.
All right, that's five of the Best Picture nominees reviewed right there. That's half of them! Add in the ones I wrote about in my last post... [carry the two, add four, divide by one]... and I only have "The Kids Are All Right," "Inception" and "The Fighter" left to recap. I'll try to get to them before Sunday's award broadcast.
(Images are © of their respective films. I have used official movie posters or publicity stills used elsewhere in the mass media)
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