Month: April 2014

STORIES WE TELL (2012)

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Todo sobre mi Madre.

Memories are funny things, not always reliable in their truth but more often than not, emotional snapshots warped and changed by time.

Sarah Polley has created an incredibly sensitive documentary about the nature of memory and stories being told by different players in said stories.
Here, she directs her family (they say work with what or who you know) to investigate various points in their lives and their inter-connectedness.

Someone once pointed out that if you get 5 (or some such number) people to go into a room and then come out and describe the room you will have 5 different versions of that one room.
Perspective, individual truths, experiential truths, and emotional responses-these all play a big part in this incredible experiment that manages to dissect the nature of life and family and walks the line between dispassion and emotionally affecting delicately with dexterity.

Give me this type of doc over ‘Who do you think you are?’ any day of the week. It doesn’t shy away from emotional exposure and the camera captures all the reactions beautifully and objectively.
This is Polley’s biggest strength, the fact that she is so enmeshed in the story but never gets in the way of allowing everyone to speak their own truths.
This, although it could be seen to be an emotional cop out on her part, actually reveals much more about her than if she was front and centre all the time. She doesn’t get in the way of the art. This is the feminine energy beautifully at play.
Hats off.

The less I say about the content, the better. Watch it and go on your own individual journey; unaffected and without judgement.
An important story told with delicacy and awareness about family and their various involvements in incidents past.

3.9/5

BUY IT ON BLU-RAY DVD HERE

DOWNLOAD THE FILM ON iTUNES HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytq4VZ2Nyxg

THE RULES OF ATTRACTION (2002)

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Having just finished reading the book it seemed like as good a time as any to have another look at this adaptation.

Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) adapts and directs Bret Easton Ellis’ brilliant second book with his usual disjointed style. Some would say that it works well as a translation of the book but it turned out to be boring which the book definitely wasn’t.
The rhythms in the writing didn’t translate easily onto screen, the nihilistic nature of these mainly unlikeable characters and the tone of the book come across but the poetry of the language in the book was lost in translation.

The main problem could have been the fact that it was made under the studio system.
Had it been made today the transfer from word to image may have been more honest and daring.  It felt like the film was a series of scenes from the book as opposed to a full adaptation.

The execs must have been squeamish about Dawson experimenting with gay, especially when James Van Der Beek was still playing him at the time, so they made the affair between Sean and Paul a figment of Paul’s imagination. It could be argued that, as the chapters in the book are all told from different character’s POV’s it may reside in their imaginations but by doing this you lose a great deal of story, character and suggestion.

The film didn’t work for several reasons; it did not gel, was too disconnected as a piece of film and the subtleties in the book were given big flags in the film thus rendering them much less effective.

Special mentions must go to the Victor (Kip Pardue) European trip told with quick cuts and spanning several countries in the space of about 10 minutes, it has been copied countless times since throughout the media, Lost’s Ian Somerhalder played Paul Denton with the right amount of insecurity and ennui and finally, this was one of Shannyn Sossamon’s first films and she is great in it, the camera (and audience) loves this ex model.
Why isn’t she in more films?

2.5/5

BUY IT ON BLU-RAY DVD HERE

DOWNLOAD THE FILM ON iTUNES HERE