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  • Gets Better The Older I Get

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    Walkabout  (1971)

    I first saw this story of culture clash at an early age.  Back then I understood it as a tale of desert survival.  As I get older, I realize more and more that it is a film about what gets lost in the drive towards modernization.   While a lot of the "symbollism" is quite obvious and overblown, and the use of zoom is almost laughably dated, the film is on the whole so quiet and contemplative that it has survived its datedness to be one of my all time favorite films.   It is one of the rare films that gets more interesting each time I rewatch it.


  • Wooden Dialogue Offends the Most

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    There were so many things that were supposed to offend me about this movie.  What I did not expect was to be most offended by the poorly written dialogue.  Apparently, I am in the minority, because it seems to be accepted wisdom that this film features some of the world's greatest writing.

    Yes, the premise is quite interesting and I appreciate the investigation into the darker realms of humanity.  But I cannot be the only person who feels that the dialogue was EXTREMELY unnatural and wooden.

    The discussions were so overloaded with exposition that they no longer sounded like two people talking to each other, but rather sounded like the screenwriter giving us a lecture about his ideas.  Maybe this would have made a good book, but as a movie it fell flat for me.

    I never accepted the two main characters as anything but a mouthpiece for Labute to express some ideas.  They never became living and breathing characters to me, and for that reason the film failed me.

    I realize that other people love this film, but whatever other people saw in it, I did not. 


  • Unflinching Portrait of Neuroses

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    This film totally captivated me.  I was expecting it to be very self indulgent and quirky for the sake of being quirky.  What I did not expect to see was a portrait of a man, Stephane, trying to make it in the world despite having a nearly debilitating inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.  

    He also has a very difficult time relating to other people and I liked how the movie gave us a fully rounded portrait of both his good and bad points as he struggles with his feelings for his next door neighbor Stephanie.  Charlotte Gainsbourg does a great job showing us how hard it is for Stephanie to decide what to do about a guy who is so interesting, but also clearly a neurotic handful. 


  • Thought Provoking

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    Little Children  (2006)

    The greatest thing about this film is that every character in this film has good and bad qualities.  Even the convicted sex offender managed to evoke a little bit of sypathy from me. 

    More interesting to me, however, were the two lead characters played by Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson.  Although they were the romantic leads in the film, we were by no means meant to view them as guiltless lovers escaping bad marriages.  In a somewhat surprising twist, both their spouses actually seemed to be halfway decent people.  At least, they didn't ultimately seem any worse than the lead characters.  The bad marriages weren't the result of a terrible spouse, but just the result of an unfortunately pairing of incompatible people. 

    This type of moral ambiguity made the film really interesting to watch and think about later on.  Without any easy answers, or easy judgements, Little Children is a far more interesting film than other films which cover the same subject matter.


 

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