Caught
The Rover yesterday and enjoyed it more than I expected to. A very solid sophomore effort from David Michôd that resists easy classification. It's a ground level view of a dystopian future, a minimalist landscape film, an outback road movie, a modern day Western both more subtle and intriguing than many more obvious attempts at such and a quite literal
whose MacGuffin we almost forget about by the time it matters again. Guy Pearce injects a real humanity into the long silences between his ruthless actions and few words about them with a mannered performance that's clearly referencing icons like the Man With No Name. Robert Pattinson, as a halfwit, is a pretty great Lennie-esque sidekick without quite going
My favorite aspect of the whole, though, is the steadfast Western-ness of the narrative. In spite of the near future setting and total lack of horses, I haven't seen a film whose unfolding story feels this much like a Budd Boetticher Western since, well, I first saw all those great Boetticher films in the early aughts.
Thoroughly disliked
Night Moves, which in principle and concept I ought to love. The idea is great, the cast is great, especially Dakota Fanning, who delivers the best and most layered performance. But the writer/director's storytelling from moment to moment, the whys and the whats and the hows of the action are mostly just mindnumbingly dumb. At one point near the end, two of the main characters talking on the phone to each other remark, "You know, we really shouldn't be talking on the phone." You think? This is long after we see them tell us exactly how not to procure a certain item for their endeavors, only to turn around the next scene and do almost point for point precisely what they just told us no one should ever do. And this doesn't create suspense so much as head-scratching contempt for the characters who we wish would be clever and resourceful instead. Of the big moment the film is building toward:
I don't think I've ever seen a ticking bomb scene with such an absolute absence of the intended tension.
Even worse is the flailing late turn into
horror territory, wherein, I kid you not, Jesse Eisenberg becomes a deadly stalker.
The film ends with the same sloppy irresolution it has confused with ambiguity and subtlety all along. I heard the director on NPR talking about how, for her, this was an action movie, but that she was interested in the tiny, quiet actions, the little moments and in her characters' choices. Hmm. Okay, then, how about giving them smart, interesting, compelling things to do?
Really didn't like
Edge of Tomorrow, which I've seen on a few best-of lists around here. I wonder if it's because none of those fans of the film had read the much earlier better drafts of the script or the novel it was based on? Perhaps in spite of all the bad changes the director Doug Liman (in his best film since
Bourne, but that's not saying much) and star Tom Cruise wrought it was still good enough for you, as it was for the audience I saw it with -- at least for the first 45 minutes. After which the whole suffers from lame attempts to "open up" the story, a few weird second act dead ends (signaling rewrites/reshoots?) and a bloated overlong and unimaginative climax with the oddest location of all time --
our call sheet tomorrow says Louvre, parking garage... Paris, woo-hoo!
All the mumbo jumbo about what's happening and why seems even more torturous in this incarnation of the story. And the basic commitment to military scif-fi as a subgenre is lost in a palimpsest of hacky rewrites that try to shoehorn Cruise into the role of a "zero to hero" type who's supposed to start out a coward and end up a badass fighting machine. The best parts of the film are the early moments that have some lighter video-gamey fun with the reset premise. After that the narrative starts to feel as needlessly dingy and grim as the whole production palette.
