4 posts categorized "minimalist"

May 28, 2016

PATERSON — CANNES 2016

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ColeSmithey.comCannes, France —Jim Jarmusch has grown as a filmmaker over the course of his rich and studied career. “Paterson” is his finest film to date. Everything about it resonates with a distinctly human scale. Every emotional expression carries the weight of patience. If there’s one thing Jim Jarmusch understands, it is poetry.

Visual poetry. Filmic poetry. Poetry of thought. Poetry of intention. The list of ways that the auteur explores his subject’s sublime mundane reality, expands.

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Adam Driver plays Paterson, a city bus driver from (where else?) Paterson, N.J. Paterson lives with his ingenious pixie of a wife Laura (Golashifteh Farahani). A Luddite sensibility provides the audience with a welcome escape from technology overload. Paterson doesn't even own a cellphone. Laura works solely in black and white, painting on textiles to create curtains, dresses, hats, and whatever strikes her fancy. She dreams of becoming a country singer. Perhaps a "harlequin" guitar by "Estoban" can help her dream come true. 

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The compatible couple live in a just-so single lot cottage-style house with her dog Marvin. We know it’s Laura’s dog because Paterson never talks to Marvin; Laura does all of the people/animal communication. Still, Paterson takes Marvin for his nightly walk to a neighborhood bar populated by mostly black patrons. Paterson brings in a newspaper clipping about Iggy Pop being voted sexiest man alive after a gig in Patterson back in the late ‘60s.

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The joint’s kindly owner/bartender Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) adds the document to the Paterson Wall of Fame, which he keeps as a shrine over the cash register. It’s a poetic moment in a film gushing with emotional resonance. The ever-evolving filmmaker uses onscreen handwriting graphics to show Paterson’s beautiful poems flow from his hand.

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“Paterson” is the kind of movie that you walk out of the cinema a changed person as a result of having seen it. The movie purifies the viewer in a gentle and loving way. It reminds us that we are all poets if we invest a little of our experiences into words. Welcome to Paterson.

Not Rated. 113 mins. 

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

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September 06, 2012

FOR ELLEN

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ColeSmithey.com Minimalist filmmaking goes amiss in the immature hands of South Korean auteur So Yong Kim. Ostensibly a character study, “For Ellen” sees Paul Dano playing Joby Taylor, a rudderless singer in a nondescript pro rock band who drives to the snowy Midwest to tie up overdue divorce papers with his estranged wife Claire (Margarita Leveiva), and spend a couple of quality hours with his six-year-old daughter Ellen for the first time ever.

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A circular character arch prevents the film from achieving any lasting effect. Dano gives a convincing performance as the twentysomething rocker who wears his ego on his black-polished-nails, but the movie is a wash.

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“For Ellen” is the kind of indie effort that critics like Variety’s Robert Khoehler bend over backwards to praise when the film’s actual dramatic consequence akin to a tub of cottage cheese. It’s clumpy, white, and bland. Personally, I never want to see another film by So Yong Kim. Ever.

Not Rated. 99 mins.

2 Stars

Cozy Cole

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April 09, 2011

MEEK'S CUTOFF

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.comKelly Reichardt's minimalist cinema-of-the-inane hits a painfully low ebb with an anti-western lacking any sign of a narrative arc. Michelle Williams returns to working with Reichardt since leading the filmmaker's last film "Wendy and Lucy."

Here Williams plays Emily Tetherow, an independent-minded young woman — read feminist icon — traveling near the desolate Oregon Trail with three families in 1845.

The group of thirsty emigrants hires a gregarious mountain man named Stephen Meek to guide them on a journey across the Cascade Mountains. He promises riches; they need water. Even with Meek's guidance, the group is lost on a misbegotten journey.

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Bruce Greenwood is unrecognizable as the manipulative codger Meek, whose raspy voice and quick delivery of sexist and racist ideals briefly masks his ignorance about the frontier he pretends to master. Greenwood's fully-rounded characterization comes as a much-needed perk. Kelly Reichardt's regular script collaborator Jon Raymond provides a series of falsely dramatic episodes that lead nowhere. For example, it's a big deal when a stagecoach rolls unattended down an hill and crashes. A gun-stand-off is the highest dramatic pitch the story ever hits. The characters remain inaccessible.

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The film's main dramatic grist comes from a Native American Indian (wonderfully played by Rod Rondeaux) who the group take as their prisoner. Mr. Meek is only too happy to brutalize the Native American. Emily, on the other hand, does what she can to win the man's trust. She stitches up his moccasins. The downtrodden prisoner, who doesn't speak English, affords Emily an opportunity to express her unpopular sense of justice. She effectively upstages Meek's racist ideas that he is want to impose on the entire group.

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Reichardt's decision to shoot the film in 4:3 aspect ratio gives it a televisual feel. There are plenty of arty landscape shots and center-dominant compositions, each ineffectual in its own way. Kelly Reichardt references Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" as an influence on "Meek's Cutoff." Comparison between the films does not favor "Meek's Cutoff." Altman's film is a thousand times more modern. It is rich with texture and breathes with romantic tension. Different from Reichardt's film, Altman's movie is a character-driven story built of solid form. It doesn't hurt that its casting includes Julie Christie opposite Warren Beatty.

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"Meek's Cuttoff" shows a young filmmaker attempting to create an illusion of narrative rigor hooked into a fairly bland allusion regarding the United States current personality crisis. Neither the director or screenwriter have any idea what they want to say. Everything is vague. They have a skeletal narrative structure and no need for any budget-busting luxuries like stage sets. There isn't a fully developed storyline, and there aren't enough ideas in a movie that film snobs will congratulate themselves for adoring.

Pshaw.

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Rated PG. 104 mins.

2 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

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