Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
This one got lost in the shuffle last week, but thankfully, I got him to resubmit it. Check this out:
"Ray" tells the story of Ray Charles. It should be very illuminating to most of us who know very little about his personal life. Beautifully and smartly directed by Taylor Hackford, it stars Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx does an excellent job channeling Ray Charles voice and physicality and giving us a strong sense of the man and his demons. The one, unfair, element that might prevent him from getting the recognition he deserves is that naturally he for most of he movie is deprived of using his eyes to draw you into his performance. The one time, in a dream sequence, we do see his eyes, it is a heartbreaker, but then I also thought, he looks like Jamie Foxx now, not Ray Charles. I know, that is completely unfair to say, and I hope audiences and critics will appreciate how deeply Jamie Foxx does manage to take us into Ray Charles' experience without the use of an actor's most potent tool of expression.
"Ray" is like many biopic films, long and without the typical cinematic build to a big climax. Still, when it was over, it left me wanting more, as well as deeply moved. It does so without whitewashing the unseemly aspects of Ray's life. his heroin addiction and destructive womanizing, his friendships and business relationships tarnished by betrayals don't necessarily make for a pretty picture. For much of the film Ray Charles is very much the antihero of his life, and credit should go to the real Ray Charles who I have read supported the making of this movie which doesn't pull any punches dealing with its subject.
I know of Ray Charles' music, and the movie highlights most of the big hits, but does so in a way that makes their achievement seem even more remarkable and brilliant. I went in liking his music, I came out loving it. The music scenes are superb in this movie, they really show what makes Ray Charles great.
The acting generally is superb too. There are at least 4 very strong female supporting turns in this film, from the women playing his mother, his wife, his first and second mistress. But the whole cast is uniformly excellent. As is the cinematography and art direction -the film looks gorgeous - and the editing. A very good, solid effort. The audience in the screening seemed very appreciative.
This next screening was for a film of whose story I had heard absolutely nothing going in, which is a suspenseful pleasure one almost never gets going to the movies nowadays. The film started promising, superb even, but over time devolved into something inexplicable and then just despicable.
Anyway, the film I saw is called "Enduring Love", which is to open late October, supposedly, and so far has gotten very little advance buzz (I looked it up in the NYTimes Fall movie preview section where it gets a short mention). I went because the cast was promising: Daniel Craig (from Sylvia and Road to Perdition), Samantha Morton (Minority Report, In America), Rhys Ifans (Vanity Fair, Notting Hill) and in a cameo, although I didn't know this going in, Vanessa's brother Corin Redgrave. The film is based on a novel by Ian McEwan (Amsterdam, Atonement). The director is Roger Michell.
"Enduring Love" starts promising, a couple (Craig and Morton) have their idyllic country picnic interrupted by an out of control Hot Air Balloon: young boy inside, Grandfather helplessly trying to keep the wayward balloon from flying away. Craig and several others who happen to be in the vicinity, including Rhys Ifans, try to help get the balloon under control. The rescue mission goes horribly wrong with one of the would-be rescuers dead. This scene is surprising, horribly believably filmed and perhaps by itself worth the ticket. However is it worth sitting through what follows?
After this stunning beginning I was extremely curious where the movie would take us next. It was clear that we were watching a film that had no intention of taking us down a much trod road. The scenes following the dramatic beginning promised an adult meditation on the nature of fate, love, guilt, perhaps even God. And for most of the film Daniel Craig's character, a philosophy professor whose views on Human Nature and emotion are definitely more Darwinistic than romantic or moralistic, is struggling with feelings of guilt regarding the death of the co-rescuer and with the trauma of what he has been part of. His feelings are prodded open and exasperated by the Rhys Ifans character, who keeps showing up wanting something from Craig, but when Craig asks him why (before trying to give him the brush off), Ifans just says "you know" the first three or so times. Meanwhile Samantha Morton's character becomes impatient with Craig's increasingly troubled character.
So far so good. And the cinematography is gorgeous and the mise-en-scene and editing very evocative. But the trouble is, beyond the striking visuals, the film just couldn't figure out what it wanted to say. The philosophical questions are never fully discussed in a satisfactory way, and the Rhys Ifans character turns out to be stalking Craig because he is in love with him. What that has to do with the balloon incident, except that is where the two met, is beyond me, a thematic connection is never made. But worse, first introduced as a weird but sweet and docile fruitcake, the Rhys Ifans turns out to be a dangerous stalker and we end up with scenes straight out an ersatz-b-movie stalker film. My screening neighbor decried the movie at this point as horribly homophobic, and the Rhys Ifans character certainly does morph into the kind of crazed stalker cliche that is as repugnant as it is ludicrous.
Add misogynistic to homophobic. Because Samantha Morton's character, who at first seems so caring and warm (hey, it's Samantha Morton, she's got to be wonderful, right?) turns colder and more unsympathetic the more the Craig character struggles with his demons and the fact that he is being stalked; the worse things get for him the less inclined she is to listen to him. When she is faced with having to choose between who is being truthful, her longterm boyfriend Craig or Rhys Ifans' character (who walked into her home in a bathrobe and has just uttered dialog that PROVES he is a nutcase stalker) she inexplicably chooses Ifans over Craig. Of course she is made to suffer horribly for her betrayal by the filmmakers. And then the crazy gay stalker is dealt with in a matter that made "Cruising" look subtle in its evocation of equating the hero's homosexual panic with extreme violence. The gay guy is a murderous lunatic and the woman is a dumb bitch who's made to suffer for betraying the hero. It was like a hateful late sixties "gritty" exploitation thriller had suddenly invaded a hightoned british literary adaptation.
So finally in the end Craig and Morton are back in the country where it all began. It is Autumn now, we are older and supposedly wiser. Craig wants to say something, express himself to Morton, perhaps give the audience some clue as to why we sat through this horrid, horrid exercise in venality dressed up in pretension, and Mortons's character keeps interrupting him: Don't, don't...until he finally shuts up and we are all none the wiser but terribly, terribly frustrated.
"Enduring Love" as a title is meant to have several meanings. None of which are satisfyingly explored by the movie. Instead we are left with some truly offensive digressions. Unendurable actually.
Best,
Julius.
Thanks, man. I’m very curious about ENDURING LOVE. It seems to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it films that divides audiences hotly.
"Moriarty" out.
