laraemeadows Blog

The slip and slide of cinema

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

Morning Light (2008)

What happens if you put fifteen young, good looking adults in the same place, and make them compete to join a team that will participate in one of the most elite races in sailing? As it turns out, nothing but sailing in the documentary Morning Light.

Roy Disney wanted to get young sailors in the TransPac race so he bought the Morning Light, and set off to get the best to man it. Fifteen of the mostly obscenely rich, mostly white, all good looking, young sailors, Chris Branning, Grahm Brant-Zawadzki, Chris Clark, Charlie Enright, Jesse Fielding, Robbie Kane, Steve Manson Chris Schubert, Kate Theisen, Mark Towill, Genny Tulloch, Pieter van Os, Chris Welsh, Kit Will and Jeremy Wilmont are chosen to vie for eleven spots on the Morning Light. They go sailing, talk about sailing and look at sail boats.

A reasonable person would venture a guess that a bunch of young virile men in a competitive situation trapped in a small space with a couple of women might bring some sexual tension. It would be expected that directly competing to participate in one of the most elite races in sailing, the TransPac, would cause outbursts or the occasional jockeying for attention or recognition. The powerful part of competitive reality TV…er movies… is the strong emotional connection between the people on the screen.

Watching Morning Light is like trying to swim on a slip and slide. While it is wet and you can move across it swiftly on your stomach, you can’t drown in the story because the water is only there to lube you up. Nothing that would make the audience submerge into the depths of the people or circumstances even grace the screen.

Morning Light has the emotional depth of a sociopath. We might as well be watching, “How to sail: A Step by Step Guide for the Rich and Moronic,” because it offers equal levels of emotional expressiveness. They did not make me wonder or care about who would be selected to make the team, if they won the race or how they got along. Instead of asking myself questions of wonder during the movie, I often asked myself, “Who cares?”

On the plus side, I do know far more about sailing than I ever did before, maybe enough to encourage me to buy a sail boat – if I could afford one. Until then, I hope Disney leaves Morning Light out at sea.

Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 2:57 AM by laraemeadows | with 0 comments

Brothers Bloom is the Archer Fish of Cinema

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]

Under discussion:

The Brothers Bloom (2009)

The Brothers Bloom unwinds the story of two confidence men, an Asian sidekick and their rich but isolated mark. The Brothers Bloom is a charming off kilter dramedy about love.

Bloom (Adrien Brody) and his brother Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) work as confidence men with their explosive sidekick Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi). Tired of the life, Bloom tells his brother he’s done. His brother talks him into one final con against Penelope Stamp (Rachael Weisz.) Penelope is a rich, excentric shut-in who has yet to live. They take advantage of her loneliness in a scam meant to satisfy her need for adventure.

Rian Johnson sees the world in The Brothers Bloom the way an archer fish sees bugs. The archer fish hunts bugs above the water’s surface by shooting water at the bug from below the water line. When looking up from underneath everything looks like it is one place but actually is in a slightly different place because water refracts light, changing the view for the submerged. The archer fish has to see things slightly cockeyed in order to get the archery right. Rian Johnson took a slightly crooked approach to get the cinematic physics just right.

Penelope Stamp is the Robin Hood of cinematic archer fish. Everything about her life, her development, and her emotions are delightfully off balance. She isn’t brilliant but she had dedicated herself to learning how to do many strange and obscure things. It wasn’t good enough for Rian Johnson to make Penelope interested in pinhole cameras (a camera made by putting a piece of photo paper in a light-tight container and poking a pin hole in it to expose the paper), it had to be a pin hole camera made of a watermelon. Johnson made sure Penelope is beautiful, but by casting Weisz, made her an interesting beauty.

It isn’t just the nature of the characters, but also how they talk. Johnson commits so fully to this strange-ified world, that dialogue that would warrant a call to the loony bin in real life, seems natural in the world created in The Brothers Bloom.

The downside to making the characters fit so naturally in their world is jokes or emotions that might resonate deeply in our world sometimes fall a little flat in The Brothers Bloom. There are no gut busting jokes but occasionally the audience finds themselves chuckling. Cheeks will not be soaked in tears, but occasionally a frog may find way into the throats of the viewers.

The Brothers Bloom is an endearing quirk-filled film sure to whisk the audience away on a flying crime filled love carpet.

If you liked this review, please visit my page.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/65207/larae_meadows.html

Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 2:35 AM by laraemeadows | with 0 comments