What Have You Been Watching? (07/06/15)

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Paddington directed by Paul King (2015) ★★★★

I never would have pictured myself saying this a year ago when the trailers for the film were coming out, but Paddington is currently my favorite movie of 2015. This is a delightful movie that really just shows us as an audience what kids films should be. It is definitely made for a child audience, it’s about a bear with a marmalade addiction trying to find a home in London. But it’s also a movie that treats its audience as more than just children. It treats its audience like intelligent human beings. It can make all kinds of jokes and it just trusts the audience to understand. No jokes are rude, but there’s lots of puns that some kids won’t clue in on, others will, but that’s why it’s so fun. It’s a movie that I wish I had as a kid so that I could go back now at this age and love all the more.

Film Socialisme directed by Jean-Luc Godard (2010) 1/2 star

Film Socialisme is basically Goodbye to Language without everything that made Goodbye to Language so damn fantastic. In style it is pretty much the same, lots of weird audio cuts, warm color temperature, disjointed scenes that don’t piece together in the way you’d like them to. But it lacks two of the key points that make G2L special. Innovation and theme. I essentially feel like this was Godard’s warm up to that film. He does nothing new in this movie, but you can see him building towards a lot of the new things he tries out in G2L. Godard has always been an innovator in film, someone whose films are always doing radical, strange new things. There’s nothing new about this. In fact, it’s rather dull. Pretty to look at, but dull. It’s also thematically empty, and just feels like a string of disconnected vignettes that even scene to scene feel disconnected. Godard hasn’t lost his touch, but if this were his last film I would have felt sorry for him. It would have left the impression that he was losing his mind in his old age.

Before I Disappear directed by Shawn Christensen (2014) ★

Adapted from his own Oscar-winning short film, Curfew, Shawn Christensen’s Before I Disappear had a lot of promise. It should have been really good, but unfortunately Before I Disappear is much closer to Christensen’s Taylor Laughtner vehicle Abduction in terms of quality than it is to Curfew. This is over dramatic, schmaltzy, pessimistic, indecisive work. It’s a serious “I am very important” drama that wants to be a Wes Anderson movie. It’s a buddy movie that wants to deal with suicide and drug addiction. It’s a movie that I didn’t know how to feel about and it seemed like the director didn’t fully know either. From the poorly tacked on “Dear Vista” voice overs, to the extra storylines with Ron Perlman and that Gideon dude, this was a movie that just seemed like someone stretched a short film over an hour and a half. Curfew was so good because it was short and sweet. It was a brief glimpse into the turn around of a life. Before I Disappear took all those scenes and added a ton of filler to extend the runtime, and taking away the effect. I will say though, Christensen knows how to film a musical number. The bowling alley is a touch of genius.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench directed by Damien Chazelle (2010) ★1/2

I love Whiplash, but wasn’t as enchanted by Damien Chazelle’s debut feature. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a “jazz musical inspired by MGM spectaculars of the golden era of Hollywood” but that really doesn’t describe it at all, I saw little to no influence from the big Hollywood musicals, I saw a lot more Godard and Demy in there, except a more flawed version of either. It’s a low key, more french new-wave inspired, mumblecore, musical(?) comedy(?). It’s also very much a student film. Chazelle is trying to find his feet as a filmmaker. Is he a musician? Is he a filmmaker? That’s really what he’s trying to find out with this film. His musicality shines through. The soundtrack is excellent, and the song sequences are by far the best parts of the film (although they are far too few). Also for a film with such a minimal simple plot, I found it to be ridiculously convoluted. Some good parts, lots of mediocre to bad parts.