Jessica Chastain – Behind the Proscenium

August 31, 2012

Lawless [REVIEW]

Lawless

With Wit, Reviewed By Kimmo Mustonenen

Warning: This review was fueled by Kossu.

The shots were flowing into my stomach place, the sweet burn up into my brain stem, and then my brain thoughts shot out of the finger ends on the keyboard.

As it should be.

I went to the cinema with a fellow reviewer, Yves.

He is as much a foreign as I, but since he is French he is funny in America.

He would tell me over and again that in France Shia LaBeouf is really Shia “The Beef.”

I would say no, it is really Shia “The Douche.”

Yves laughed, then I laughed like a horse and the lovely Kossu shot straight from my mouth to out of my nostril area.

Pain. Delicious pain.

And I would tongue bathe the now salty Kossu (not good, do not try to shoot it out of the nasal) off of my upper lip and drink again.

Then one more shot. And again. I was wasted!

Plot? Yeah. Attention, be forewarned, “Lawless” is based on real events!

To contextualize the plot, narrator, protagonist of the story, informs you of immediately the rules – or rather the lack of rules – that takes place in Franklin County, Virginia in the early 1930s (wow, in “Lawless” the 30s sucked a giant wiener!).

Bondurant brothers are notorious bootleggers. The stakes are simple in a world without rules where the police are corrupt and justice sold, the three brothers “hold sway.”

Characterized without subtlety – the youngest is puny (“The Beef” is type-cast here – damn, another shot out of my nose) – the players will evolve gradually, as develops an adventure without surprise, to tend to be completely expected (and unsurprising).

Shia LaBeouf is absolutely not convincing in the role of the coward who becomes manly.

Tom Hardy (Bane! With a face to be seen!) and Jason Clarke embody their characters beyond the artificiality induced staging to be almost human.

Then they presents the majestic Jessica Chastain but is allowed to play nothing but a bore.

Why do women in movies like this only appear so that we want them to be naked? That would be great.

Note – Mia Wasikowska is the hotness. There should be more of the naked with her, too. In every movie that I ever have to see again.

God, make it so.

Not surprisingly, the female characters are hopelessly secondary and generate a dynamic of self-pity.

Why, why, why?

In short, John Hillcoat (director of the laugh riot fun fest “The Road”) book a gangster film with a pathetically inadequate story to the point of becoming ridiculous and women are for decoration.

Except for Mia Wasikowska. Decoration maybe, but I love her.

Lots of bang! Blood! Death!

People die for no reason. Characters never change.

Jessica Chastain takes her clothes off.

More bang (not guns)! More blood! More death!

This I learned of American History – in U.S.A.depression everything was brownish and dirty.

Everybody was on his body with a gun. And it was legal to shoot people.

Until Guy Pearce comes around and acts all weird.

Then there is MORE shooting. That is a lot of learning from one movie.

So, my smart thumb droops floor-ward.

My horny thumb thinks, “damn, this was good – put that Mia goddess in everything!” So that thumb strains for the ceiling (hubba hubba).

Should this be allowed to be seen by your eyes?

Do you have $10 to waste? Then go.

If there is anything else you can do with your limited time on Earth, do that instead.

Life is too fucking short.

Kimmo Mustonenen – (Kimmo On Kino) – Behind The Proscenium

P.S. College football has returned. I now feel like an American from toe to top with my new love of the game! This “tailgating” is my new love thing. Fried meats, booze, dip, chips, booze, etc. If this in Finland was to exist we would all have frozen happily to death outside in the first blizzards of September! Hooray for warm America! And hooray for college football! Except for Alabama – you can suck it.

January 20, 2012

Coriolanus [REVIEW]

Coriolanus

With Wit, Reviewed By Kimmo Mustonenen

What?

Not 100% CGI?

No robot alien things?

Am I high (yes, I am)?

Then soldiers. My brain screams – You are within the stuck times of “Battle: Los Angeles!”

The worst of fates that mine could be… to have.

But no.

Winter’s cold has made me for to shrivel (in my man place).

Summer is for the confrontation of the ear (and mind – or mindlessness).

Now is for brain flexing cinema.

Thanks, Odin.

Plot? Sure!

An angry crowd in a clean-rehearsed choreography calls for bread of the armed military men guarding a bread factory (which makes bread).

A squad of soldiers with heavy artillery and camouflage uniforms (sharp!) stormed a housing estate and speaks in blank verse.

Shakespeare meets Balkan war – Ralph Fiennes directorial debut “Coriolanus” (heh, anus) transports the Elizabethan drama in the time and now it is dead right.

Massive, violent and bloody, this film – and psychologically subtle and finely worked, not least thanks to the wonderful language of William Shakespeare (he speaks of English from his mouth-place worse than I – lucky for the press kit or in the wilderness my thoughts were straying).

Fiennes, who plays Coriolanus, the excellent and very nuanced itself, and especially Vanessa Redgrave as the mother of the hero know the language to use (English, but still not right – I still confuse my own thoughts) – but even the minor characters are occupied very solid.

How alive do these lines, the power and magic in the age-old phrases is, if only the right people interpret it (I pretend that it made sense to me – clever)!

In the past, some directors have transported Shakespeare to the present day (or yesterday – confusion remains) – and usually the result was at least interesting.

Fiennes has landed “Coriolanus” a really big throw. Yes – THROW!

The story is told quickly: the Romans wage war against the Volscians (but not the same Volscians from “Star Trek”) – Coriolanus (heh), the Roman commander gains a bloody victory and to be in gratitude for consul.

Unfortunately, this little man of war, civil fine sense (? – what the hell, I will stop drinking), the common people is repugnant to him (they should bathe more often). Thus arises as soon opposed his appointment and must Coriolanus into exile.

Here he teams up with former arch-enemy, the leader of the Volscians (Gerald Butler, not Leonard Nimoy – disappoint), and moves with him to Rome.

The insanity of war and the inability of a soldier to survive in peace, are the pillars of this tragic drama. But the dialectic of hatred and admiration to homoerotic (no judgment) undertones between the two antagonists provides an additional voltage level (electric!).

Conclusion: Two thumbs yelling “Yippee! I’m not in the childish shit wallowing!”

Warning – this will involve your thinking brain. And your hearing ears. It is not shit. This is for brain-flexing. Sweet, sweet relief!

Kimmo Mustonenen – (Kimmo On Kino) – Behind The Proscenium

P.S. Speaking of Star Trek Volscians, I must a joke:

How is the U.S.S. Enterprise like a wad of toilet paper?

They both wipe out Klingons around Uranus.

Or your Coriol-anus.

I laugh at this still.

August 26, 2011August 26, 2011

The Help [REVIEW]

“The Help”

With Wit, Reviewed By Kimmo Mustonenen

“The Help” is funny and touching (right in the heart chamber) adaptation of the novel of the same title published in 2009 by Kathryn Stockett.

How come it took so long to hang the book on the screen? I laugh at me.

Sockett’s book, a success in the Anglo market, makes a young American, “Skeeter” Phelan, whose relationship with two African-American women raised early sixties, a key cheerful and endearing, which was the movement Civil Rights in that country.

Was ever a more cheerful time?

With their impeccable debut film adaptation behind the camera to actor Tate Taylor, under whom works an excellent cast led by Emma Stone (“Easy A” – hubba!), Mike Vogel, Bryce Dallas Howard (she kicked my butt in “Terminator: Salvation”, even with red hair), Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney (CJ in “The West Wing” and voice in those annoying Kaiser-Permanente commercials – I don’t want to thrive, alright?!?).

Broadly speaking, the script preserves the essential novel by Kathryn Stockett and gets carried away by the personality of three unforgettable characters: Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), an African-American middle-aged white babysitter (white babies, Aibilieen is not white – this is important later), shattered by the loss of a son, Jackson Minny (Octavia Spencer), another black maid who dreams of a stable job (one that lasts awhile, not with horses), and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), the young graduate and aspiring writer who returns home and realizes that certain prejudices weigh like a millstone.

Except when you’re hot.

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, “The Help” portrays, through the comedy of manners and the intimate drama, the complicated emotional relationship plotted between white and black (no gray area here) communities throughout the sixties, just at that stage in which, happily, it all started to change.

Except for poor George Wallace. He wasn’t happy at all.

The success of this production will not surprise those who know the reputation that precedes the novel by Kathryn Stockett (if I write her name three times I get a free Kindle! Success!), a delightful book, which was rejected by sixty literary agents before they achieved the feat that is already on his lapel (contortionists – before you make letters, I know “feat” and “feet” are not the same. I’m from Finland, not Retardia.), selling five million copies and remain one hundred weeks on the bestseller list of The New York Times.

With Emma Stone and Viola Davis hired for the main roles, the rest of the casting was a relatively simple task. Throw a copy of the book down Sunset, hit an actor head-wise and “you’re in a movie!” Invented by Soderbergh. Genius.

And what about the atmosphere? This is another chapter in which the film succeeds completely (although it can’t really be seen – much like the air atmosphere we breath).

To preserve the spirit of the age and local color, the team moved to Greenwood, Mississippi.

Parts of the film also took place Jackson,Clarksdale and Greenville. Undoubtedly, all contribute to the feeling of breathing the whole truth. And being surrounded by hicks.

Kimmo Mustonenen – (Kimmo On Kino) – Behind The Proscenium

P.S. The Glee Project?!? WTF?!?! Lindsay, if you need comfort, contact me at Manka Bros. You have made Ginnifer Goodwin no longer exist on me. Forever.

May 23, 2011May 31, 2011

The Tree Of Life [REVIEW]

The Tree Of Life

With wit, reviewed by Kimmo Mustonenen

Sometimes a filmmaker’s own reputation also be fatal.

This applies even if one of the industry has such a legendary reputation as Terrence Malick.

With only two films in the 1970s (Badlands, 1973 and In the Days of Heaven, 1978), he became aware of and was regarded as a gifted poet of American cinema.

The myth was also fueled by his passion for philosophy and his mysterious withdrawals from the film industry, his now 40-year career in this ensured that Malick in time only four feature films has been realized as a whole.

No wonder that after this history, the expectations of Terrence Malick’s long-promised movie The Tree of Life were huge – maybe too huge.

At the press screening in Cannes film was the least quieter applause with clearly audible boos considered next.

What happened? Indeed.

On the surface, Malick tells of the struggle between two competing principles in the world whose existence and rivalry it represents the basis of a family. These lives during the late 1950s and early 1960s in Waco, Texas and consists of a sternly father (Brad Pitt) and a mild, often a little dreamy-acting, understanding and empathy capable mother (Jessica Chastain – much like Ginnifer Goodwin in Bigger Love, but less cute) and their three sons, of particularly ,among Jack (Hunter McCracken), is central, especially because he always gets together with his father.

What?

Than in a swimming accident, one of the other two brothers died (and it is for the later mysterious appearance and disappearance of this child are also numerous other interpretations), is the family, which is of choleric father out with a heavy hand, before a crucial test.

In later years, recalls Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adulterer) at this time and tried to work with his life by remembering to come to terms. However, there are many things in history that remains open, because a number is only suggested. And it could give almost every turn, a different explanation.

Malick, a great fondness for detailed descriptions of nature, that has, at least since his magical pictures from the 1970s, where wheat fields like a giant red sea in the wind sway known.

In The Tree of Life director dares even a twenty-minute excursion into the world of the elements and shows images of exquisite beauty, the sequence almost has a visual trip will leave the drug (just say “yes”).

Bizarrely shaped rock formations, underwater photographs, swaying fields of sunflowers, volcanic eruptions and other illustrations of the forces of nature are in sum probably the entire duration of the film for more picture to see it in about as the people whose story the film tells

What?

Also during the story, the basis for these excursions is the contemplative lives, mainly through the power of images and their uniqueness. There is hardly a setting that does not attract attention, detail, dynamic solution looking for (and find).

Constantly in motion, the camera hovers between people, cuts to the people, then jumps back in detail or extreme wide angle, the composed landscape shots are carefully removed from and thus forms a picture puzzle of lamenting elegance.

Above that is on the soundtrack is a mix of sparse dialogue, detailed off-narration, natural sounds and a lot of classical and sacred music, often with a chorus presented one that carried the tone of the narration strengthened – only to be softened later up.

The Tree of Life is a thoroughly ambiguous work, which at least partly, as fascinating as puzzles gives up (and at least two-three-seen four times or have to get used one way thicket of interpretations and possible interpretations has beaten the by). And even then, in discussions with others, resulting in conversation more and more signs and directions or as a model Martin Heidegger would say Malick, “Ways and blind alleys.”

Me, too.

A film for the exquisite viewfinder – and definitely in a double sense. Right?

Kimmo Mustonenen – Behind The Proscenium
Follow @KimmoMustonenen