Croupier is a cool neo-noir crime drama about an aspiring writer, Jack (Clive Owens), with a murky past and few prospects who takes a job as a croupier in a gambling hall.  Watching gamblers win and lose before his eyes proves fascinating, even inspiring him to write a novel, but the job also drives a wedge between he and his live-in girlfriend.  Soon Jack is caught inside an underworld from which any escape is impossible.

Rarely does Hodges try to wow us with his visual style, opting instead for a mature and subtle slow-burn feel.  Screens, mirrors, and facades reveal the increasing compartmentalization of Jack’s life, as well as the illusionistic, fatalistic nature of gambling.  His voiceover narrative further cements the noir feel and distanced attitude from the proceedings, even if it is a bit overused.  For the most part Owens is effective, though I sometimes found him too physical for a role defined by a removal.  Nonetheless, he does a solid job of suggesting a darkness brimming in Jack’s interior, which makes the shifts in the character more believable.

In the end, Croupier offers a plot twist that is par for the course in noir.  While come might find it contrived, I thought it was an effective reflection of the theme (at times too blatantly stated in the voiceover).  By belying expectations, it lives up to expectations and is all the better for doing so.

A couple of months ago a friend invited me over to watch Amores Perros, a film I had been meaning to see for a while and had been hanging around my Netflix queue for several months.  The story actually contains three stories, connected together by a pivotal car crash that changes the lives of each of the three main characters.  Each of the stories is related to love and the extremes to which people go to secure and sustain it, despite the pain it inevitably causes.

The film confirmed for me that some of the most vital films produced in the last decade have been of Hispanic origin.  Inarritu tells an emotionally resonant and inventive story that focuses more on characters than action, with a rich visual sensibility and beautifully rhythmic editing.  All the of the performances feel authentic.  If there is one flaw in the movie, it is that story is too long and sprawling, at times unwieldy.  But it’s certainly not boring.  Even if the third story about the professor-turned-assassin might strike some as over-the-top, it’s certainly interesting and treated with the same level of depth as the other portions.

I went into the film knowing very little about it, which is perhaps the ideal way to approach most films.  I left quite impressed and moved and looking forward to seeing more of Inarritu’s work.

Aditi of Blotting Paper awarded this meme to me over 3 weeks ago, but I’ve yet to take up the offer.  Of course, I’m behind on entries as well, so it’s hardly a surprise.  Since I’m not posting new entries as I should, I may as well follow through.  The idea is to list 7 things I love.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Coffee or tea.  I often don’t realize how much I love my daily dose of coffee until days like today, when I am sans coffee maker and can barely concentrate on a single task.  Mind you, I am far less addicted than some people I know and limit myself to a mug a day.  Years spent in coffee shops has given me a taste for robust, rich French roasts with lots of cream and sugar.  Tea, of course, has fewer of the same benefits, but I enjoy a cuppa here and there–often with some cream or soy milk added, which here in the States is considered weird.  I like herbal teas as well, especially while reading or right before bad.
2. My boyfriend’s dry, dark, and often very odd sense of humor.  It’s a cliche to say that you want someone to make you laugh, but you should probably love someone who doesn’t bore you after the initial giddy phase wears off.
3. My garden.  As much as it has on occassion infuriated me, I love walking through it daily and tending to it.
4. Getting lost in the elaborate internal realities I’ve created.  It’s better when I produce art and stories as a result, but sometimes I’m still a little girl caught daydreaming.
5. Music.  Even though it’s not quite the dominate force it was 10-15 years ago, even though I sometimes forget how important it is to me, it still matters and has the power to move me.
6. And for that matter, literature, visual art, cinema.
7. The ineffable sense of beauty and wonder that is somehow always present in this world, despite the sometimes overwhelming ugliness and confusion of reality and existence.

*     *     *

As is my usual habit, I bestow this award/meme to whomever wishes to fulfill the task.

What if it works?

Shot on a shoestring budget, Primer proves that a science fiction film can be intelligent and engaging without relying heavily on action or even the use of special effects.  Two engineers, Aaron and Abe, accidentally build a time machine in Abe’s garage and conspire to use it for their own gain by predicting outcomes in the stock market.  Inevitably, they are unable to control the inherent paradoxes of time travel and get lost inside their own webs of deceit.  What makes Primer so fascinating is the fly-on-the-wall approach to plot development.  We see Aaron, Abe, and their friends in the garage, discussing future projects and drinking beer in the kitchen.  We see the two engineers scrounge together parts in order to build a compact superconductor and, with the few subtle special effects found in the film, marvel when it works.  This is a case in which the roughness of the filmmaking enhances the experience and draws the viewer further in.

Once Abe and Aaron are caught inside the endless time loops, the film becomes more and more confusing and hard to follow.  While I consider myself a fairly astute reader of plots, at several point I became lost and uncertain precisely what was going on.  It is clear that both characters break from the intended plan and begin using the time machines in order to alter past events, and then each deceives the other in an attempt to stop or to continue the cycle.  Carruth seems to be pondering the tendency of humans to misuse new technology to unethical ends–or the general tendency of humans to behave unethically until consequences compound on them.

Primer tells a story of technological discovery rarely told in cinema.  The scientists talk like real scientists and behave like real people.  In a genre often defined by action, special effects, and broad strokes, it’s an interesting little gem.

I’ve been procrastinating and neglecting to write about the films I’ve seen in the last month or two., so this will be the first of several brief entries on each one.

When Soderbergh’s adaptation of Solaris came out in 2002, I recall being somewhat interested.  I consider myself a fan of science/speculative fiction, after all.  Considering that it’s based on Stanislav Lem’s classic science fiction, it is not technically a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but that’s what I was told at the time.  I was intrigued; Tarkovsky’s film is regarded by many as a classic, despite flaws later noted by Tarkovsky and Lem’s frustration at the perceived mistranslation of his themes.  Finally, in 2005  or early 2006, I saw it and was highly impressed.  Minus a few notable flaws (in particular the lengthy city scene early in the film), I’d now regard it as my favorite film.  Tarkovsky makes the kind of movies I adore, the kind rich in imagery and evocative of dream and memory states.  It also appealed the possibilities of the science/speculative fiction genre often richly explored in literature but often used as flimsy excuses for action or horror in cinema.

So it was with some hesitation that I saw Soderbergh’s adaptation.  Much to my surprise I discovered that it is not an entirely awful movie.  While I am certain that it is a lesser film, it has some interesting elements and offers a slowburn, mysterious mood missing in more recent science fiction films.  Indeed, the approach to the story makes Soderbergh’s films a bit of a throwback to classics like Kubrick’s 2001 and Scott’s Blade Runner; it’s also a bit redundant in context of Tarkosvky’s previous achievement.  On the other hand, Soderbergh details further attempts to rid the ship orbiting Solaris of the human fascimiles and delves more deeply into Kelvin’s relationship with his wife.  Of course, one misses Tarkovsky’s ambiguous treatment of their relationship, an approach that seems more philosophical and less like melodrama.  Even though Soderbergh seems to be playing up the technological/scientific aspects I assume are more pronounced in the novel, his film seems even more about the love story, which is further cemented by his choice of resolution.

As I watched the film it was difficult to put Tarkosvky’s film out of my mind and just enjoy Soderbergh’s interesting, if flawed rendition.  While visually intriguing (if too dimly lit) and full of elements not full explored in the previous adaptation, the whole thing felt to me like an interesting but ultimately pointless exercise, even more “Love in Outer Space” than before.