Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
Michael Clayton
April 12th, 2009 | 
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Great performances, great script, well directed, but best picture? I’m not so sure.
Tom Wilkinson stole the show with his great performance as a disturbed corporate attorney. Clooney was very good. But maybe Wilkinson’s character would have been more interesting to follow.
Tilda Swinton was good, but her part didn’t give her all that much to do. She had some heavy moments, but not a lot to connect them up and give them more weight. She did the equivalent of a good performance in a dark and moody music video. So it’s no fault of her own that her role wasn’t meatier.
Scene by scene the film is very well scripted. But the ending wasn’t entirely satisfying. We hear about the things Michael Clayton can cover up, but we don’t really get to see it. The one glimpse we get of him doing so he just passes off to another attourney, already too far down his own dramatic road to let the audience catch up with him. If we had started earlier in his personal arc we could have seen this dramatic motion more.
Posted in Movies | 
Tags: drama, george clooney, legal, mystery, thriller, tilda swinton, tom wilkinson, tony gilroy | 
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The Punisher: War Zone
I’m probably the only person who will say that “The Punisher: War Zone reminded me of Coleson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.”
But it did.
The reason is that both of them made me think that if I had been 12 years old when I discovered them I would have enjoyed them much more.
Punisher: War Zone deserves some credit for being faithful to the comics. It manages to do so on the surface at least. It has plenty of gore, and the characters’ stories aren’t terribly bastardized. But maybe it’s most faithful to the mediocre issues. There was something of the charm and subtelty of the better comics that was missing.
If I were 12 I would have been entertained by all the makeup effects to show horrific deaths. None of them have the impact of more subtle screen deaths, or even nearly as splashy ones in Robocop. That’s because each one is shown and then forgotten about. There isn’t any real anticipation or consequence.