Cine Me

American Sniper

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/

http://www.americansnipermovie.com/

Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” is both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior’s skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery. The movie, set during the Iraq War, has the troubled ambivalence about violence that has shown up repeatedly in Eastwood’s work since the famous scene, midway through “Unforgiven,” in which the act of killing anguishes the killer. Eastwood, working with the screenwriter Jason Hall and with Bradley Cooper, who stars in the film, has adapted the 2012 best-selling autobiography by the Navy seal sharpshooter Chris Kyle (which was written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice). “American Sniper” is devoted to Kyle’s life as a son, a husband, a father, and, most of all, a decorated military man—one of the most lethal snipers in U.S. military history. Kyle, who made a hundred and sixty confirmed kills (and more than two hundred probable kills), is always sure that he’s defending American troops—and his country—against “savages.” Perched on a rooftop in Ramadi or in Sadr City, he’s methodical and imperturbable, and he rarely misses, even at great distance. He shoots insurgents, members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and, when he thinks it necessary, a woman and a child. He’s haunted by the thought of the Americans he hasn’t been able to save. Cooper is all beefed up—by beer as much as by iron, from the looks of it (it’s intentionally not a movie-star body)—and he gives a performance that’s vastly different from any that he’s given in the past. With fellow-seals in the field, he’s convivial, profane, and funny; at home with his loving wife (Sienna Miller, who’s excellent), he’s increasingly withdrawn and dead-eyed, enraptured only by the cinema of war playing in his mind.

Featuring an amazing performance by Bradley Cooper, “American Sniper” is Clint Eastwood’s return as an important filmmaker. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Eastwood’s take on “Jersey Boys” last summer but musicals are not his bread and butter. After years of “one for you” (a “Dirty Harry” flick) and “one for me” (“Honky Tonk Man,” “White Hunter, Black Heart”) with Warner Brothers, Eastwood created “Unforgiven,” winning his first directing Oscar along the way. He followed that film up with “Mystic River” (another Oscar nod) and “Million Dollar Baby” (another Oscar) as well as two very different films that looked at war through different eyes, “Flags of My Father” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.” A musical was probably a nice break but Eastwood is best when he’s looking at life and the moral questions it asks.

The film doesn't present a racist serial killer, nor an arrogant psychopath, and it probably portrays Kyle as more humble than he was, but as a clinical examination of how a great soldier (and in particular a Navy SEAL) is made, what a sniper does, how the door-to-door searches that made up so much of the Iraq War worked, and of the intricacies of what may be thought of as relatively mild PTSD (but strong enough to be dangerous and debilitating), the film is winning on all counts. Like 2014's Fury, it is more of a war film than an anti-war film; Kyle is our protagonist, we're meant to like him, and he takes out Iraqis, and sometimes when he does, we're kind of meant to cheer. Don't forget that Eastwood is a deep Republican, and the film has that sensibility - and yet it's neither insulting nor off-putting, and it's not racist. It's a serious story told with steely conviction, and if its politics are a little right of my comfort level, its obvious cinematic benefits are right in my wheelhouse.

Cooper is fantastic. His performance is totally precise. The gradations he and Eastwood have chosen to show - of Kyle's character, personality and disease - are perfectly graded. We really get a sense of a full man, and if that isn't exactly the man Chris Kyle was, it's certainly an indelible movie character. Sienna Miller provides strong support as his wife Taya; beyond her, there are a bunch of dudes playing soldiers, who all do fine, if predictable, work. Which is probably how it is: amongst a lot of guys who are all a little alike, Chris Kyle obviously stood out.

American Sniper is a puzzle. You wouldn’t think it: On the surface, Clint Eastwood has given us another straightforward story of a taciturn acolyte rising to meet high-pressure circumstances and finding cracks in their stoic facades. But despite a career-best performance from Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a sharpshooter whose military service leaves him struggling to connect back home, American Sniper seems not quite willing to commit. The action scenes are appropriately chaotic, and the washed-out sunlight of Iraq suggests the surety Kyle finds there. But Kyle’s home life is filmed as such an afterthought that it loses much of its pull, despite Sienna Miller’s best efforts with a paper-thin part. And the movie seems so determined to sympathize with the soldier without critiquing the war that diminishes its potential power both as a biopic and as a war movie.

Perhaps it’s inevitable Eastwood couldn’t apply the same coolly ambivalent hand to recent events that he did to the West in 1992’s Unforgiven. But in a film that supposedly deals with the price of war, not a single person Kyle encounters in Iraq is innocent—even children take up arms—and the film seems disinterested in the cycles of violence behind Kyle’s orders. American Sniper presents Kyle as a patriot, and Cooper keenly embodies how war disconnects him from home, but American Sniper never frames his story to make him question any of those choices. And it’s surprisingly coy about the violence it’s steeped in—even the closing title avoids the nature of Kyle’s death, as if afraid to suggest guns are anything but a righteous weapon against the enemy. It’s a surprisingly timid turn from Eastwood, a riveting performance from Cooper, and a movie that never quite knows how to say what it wants to.

Take a little time to hold yourself

If there's love just feel it.

I won't let you go.

Dont' tell me what's it all about

What do you get when you fall in love?
A guy with a pin to burst your bubble.

Monday,monday...

Cine Me

The Imitation Game

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/

http://theimitationgamemovie.com/

How odd that “The Imitation Game,” one of the more rousingly entertaining crowd-pleasers coming out this year—as endorsed by its People’s Choice Award at the Toronto film festival—also happens to be one of the most devastatingly sad. 

On one hand, this is a tense World War II thriller about a stellar team of Brits who cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code. The movie boasts its own inspirational rallying cry, repeated three times in case you miss it, which would be perfect for embossing on a holly-bedecked greeting card: “Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines.”

On the other hand, it is an examination of the tragic circumstances that befell Alan Turing, the film’s central hero, who brings victory to the Allies by inventing a revolutionary machine that would give birth to the computer age. He would later be publicly vilified and savagely punished for engaging in homosexual activity, which was criminalized in England at the time, before committing suicide in 1954.

Instead of being festooned with a chest full of medals, the closeted genius who saved countless lives by significantly shortening the war was cruelly subjected to chemically-induced castration in lieu of jail time. And, because much of the details were kept classified for 50 years, few knew of the extent of his wartime feats, even though he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services in 1945. He was officially pardoned of his offenses by Queen Elizabeth in 2013—a case of too little too late.

This atypical biopic about the brilliant, impossibly arrogant and socially awkward mathematician (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, impeccably perfect in every way) is a somewhat hard read at first. Most likely, it was the intent of screenwriter Graham Moore to make a puzzle out a film about puzzle solving. That is not necessarily a bad thing, however, once the pieces fall into in place. The fractured narrative starts off as a mystery in 1951 with a detective investigating a burglary at Turing’s home where, strangely, nothing was stolen. Eventually, the plot flashes back to 1928 and shifts into a heart-breaking love story as a teen Turing, a brutally bullied school-boy prodigy, chastely falls for a fellow classmate named Christopher.

But “The Imitation Game” is most on its game when it primarily sticks to being a John le Carre-lite espionage version of “Revenge of the Nerds,” beginning in 1939 as it introduces a battleground of the mind that relies on superior intellect rather than bombs to beat the enemy. Norwegian director Morten Tyldum in his English-language debut provides just enough science to explain what is at stake while escalating the beat-the-clock tension involved in the mission conducted by Turing and a handful of other high-IQ cohorts. Alexandre Desplat’s hauntingly propulsive score further enhances the suspense while capturing the gravity of the situation.

Matters turn slightly hokey as the final solution to Enigma code relies on several “By Jove, I’ve got it” revelations. But, by then, you will likely be fully invested in the outcome, no matter how out of left field it might seem. Some of Cumberbatch’s most affecting work is when the older and close-to-defeated Turing is at the end of his rope, unable to even focus on a crossword puzzle because of the drugs he has been given. But as I sit here typing away, I realize I have Turing to thank for being able to access a wealth of information with just a few key strokes and a click of a mouse.

Not only did Turing help save the world, he continues to influence it every day.

For decades, the name of Turing was familiar only to mathematicians and historians of computing, while that of Bletchley was overgrown; the brambles of official secrecy thrive especially well in Britain. Now we know almost too much. Bletchley, where the Allies deciphered enemy communications, has become a museum; you can tour the hut, recently restored, in which Turing and his colleagues toiled. His life has been probed onstage—Derek Jacobi played him in “Breaking the Code” (1986), in London and on Broadway—and subjected to the rummaging of biographers. When Barack Obama addressed Parliament, in 2011, the three British scientists he lauded were Newton, Darwin, and Turing, and the centenary of Turing’s birth, in 2012, ignited a year of celebrations. His head was on a stamp.  

“The Imitation Game” is directed by Morten Tyldum and adapted by Graham Moore from “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” Andrew Hodges’s detailed study from 1983. Hodges was neither the first nor the last to leap with glee upon that final word. Enigma was the name of the German cipher machine, which encoded messages dispatched to the armed forces. The breaking of those codes, widely considered impossible, was achieved in part—or, if you believe this movie, pretty much solely—by Turing, who designed his own machine, a thing of great beauty and ingenuity known as a Bombe, to quicken his task. Turing was also gay, at a time when homosexual acts were a criminal offense. After the war, in 1952, he was arrested for indecency, convicted, and offered “chemical castration” instead of prison. He took the former.

You could argue, rightly, that movies aren’t made for wonks. Still, it’s hard to justify the blank space where Turing’s end should be. He died of cyanide poisoning; a half-eaten apple was found beside his bed; and he had long been fascinated by “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” How could a movie director, of all people, not make something of that? Tyldum builds up to it, with scenes of Turing messing about with cyanide and handing out apples at work, but the payoff is missing. Here, in short, is a film about a highly intelligent homosexual mathematician that shows no homosexual behavior, almost no math, and a faltering faith in the intelligence of its viewers. So, what is there to tempt us?

What's with the fascination in 2014 about World War II? This is the best of three very good films and looks at the invention of the computer by an unusual cast of characters. 

Cumberbatch's performance is riveting, but Knightley deserves credit for doing it backwards and in heels, so to speak. In fact, Clarke probably deserves her own biopic as one of the few female practitioners of the code-breaking art.

Cine Me

Miss Julie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2667960/

August Strindberg felt that the entire world had gone crazy. The "norms" of class hierarchies and gender roles were starting to shatter, and he saw chaos pouring into that vacuum. His 1888 play "Miss Julie" is the prime example, although it's evident in all of his other disturbing, great modern works. "Miss Julie" plays in almost real-time, taking place in one setting over the course of a single evening, Midsummer Night's Eve, the one long night of the year when the classes blend together, when rich dance and drink with poor, when the boundaries have blurred. There are only three characters in the play, and it opens with Jean, an upwardly-striving valet remarking to his pal and sort-of girlfriend, the kitchen maid, that "Miss Julie is crazy!" Miss Julie is the daughter of the count in whose manor they both work. 

When Liv Ullmann's "Miss Julie" works best, it shows us that total emotional and social chaos, chaos that destroys not only the individual characters in the play, but the entire society in which they live. "Miss Julie" is a rather strange experience, with its consistently static medium shots of the three actors, as they roar their lines at one another. But it has an undeniable power. For Strindberg to work, one must feel the context of his time, and understand Miss Julie's immediate ruination by "falling" for the valet (the script is filled with images of rising and falling).

Ullmann's adaptation of Strindberg's script stays very close to the original; the main change being that it now takes place on an estate in Ireland. Ullmann opens up the action only slightly, with the reveling Midsummer Night's Eve crowds always offstage, heard but never seen. There are a couple of scenes in Jean's bedroom, and one outdoor scene when Jean and Miss Julie take a walk. Other than that, the action stays in the kitchen, suggesting how much Miss Julie is "lowering" herself by hanging out there. The claustrophobia of the kitchen is overwhelming in the film, and the shots of Miss Julie wandering through the manor by herself, her posture broken and stiff, her dress falling off her shoulder, give us a welcome (and yet rivetingly disturbing) change of scene.

As Miss Julie breaks down, Chastain is, quite frankly, extraordinary. She gathers her considerable powers and pours them into a role that is different from anything else she has ever done. It's a powerhouse performance, without any self-congratulatory or self-indulgent giveaways. Her agony is so palpable that one wonders how she will survive her own performance. Feeling that way is essential for "Miss Julie" to work, and from Chastain's unforgettable first entrance, sidling into the kitchen, looking like a wreck, the crack in her psyche is already clearly visible on her face.

Farrell is terrific as Jean, playing around with Miss Julie at first, following her seemingly heedless orders to kiss her shoe, despite what it might look like to others, and despite the fact that he is in a relationship with Kathleen. He warns her at one point that by flirting with him, she is playing with fire. He's not to be trifled with. He is a man trapped in his social station, although he is representative of the movement between the classes, a valet who has traveled the world with his Master, knows about good wines (although he steals a bottle on occasion), speaks other languages, and has an ease in the world that Miss Julie lacks. And yet when the Master rings the bell for him, his loyalty sways automatically towards the man he serves. He is in deep conflict, and the fact that Miss Julie falls so hard for him shows that she is just as "low" as he is. His lust turns to contempt in a devastating heartbeat. Farrell manages all of this gracefully and sensitively, as though he were born to play the role. It's a great fit.

Ullmann fills the score with mournful Schubert and Bach, familiar pieces of music that become thematic, as opposed to mere pretty background.

Reaction to the film will depend on how one feels about seeing three people stand around delivering lines at one another. But the acting is so good it creates its own mood, outside of anything cinematic that Ullmann could have chosen to add to it; it creates its own atmosphere of claustrophobia, hysteria, and self-loathing. Ullmann, a brilliant actress herself, hands the script over to her actors. It is theirs. 

It’s taken close to 15 years for her to return to the director’s chair, followed by months of speculation once news of production hit, but Liv Ullmann finally unveiled her new film at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Miss Julie,” the infamous play by August Strindberg, adapted for the screen and stage in multiple countries and languages, gets an Anglophone interpretation from the legendary Norwegian actress. This version is set in Ireland and stars a trio of familiar faces: Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton. The film has all the makings of a special occasion: the return of Ullmann, the continuation of the "Chastainaissance," Colin Farrell in a respectable film again. It’s no surprise that we were swept up in all the excitement .

It’s toxic, it’s hypnotic, and passionately translates Strindberg’s genius instinct for enlightening the multi-layered psychological spectrums of human desire for lust and power. 

It’s unforgettable in every sense of the word.

Anywhere I go you go,my dear

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

e.e. cummings

And I would still be on my feet

 

 

 

 

I remember that time you told me
"Love is touching souls"

Surely you touched mine
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
Taste so bitter and so sweet

Oh I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

Golden Globes 2015

 

One day, when the glory comes

It will be ours, it will be ours



Speak low when you speak, love

 

 

Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon

Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go
That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon

Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief

We're late, darling, we're late
The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief

We're late, darling, we're late
The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon
Speak low

Cine Me

 

Unbroken

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1809398/

 

 

http://www.unbrokenfilmintl.com/ww/

 

 

Academy Award® winner Angelina Jolie directs and produces UNBROKEN, an epic drama that follows the incredible life of olympian and war hero Louis "Louie" Zamperini (Jack O'Connell) who, along with two other crewmen, survived in a raft for 47 days after a near-fatal plane crash in WWII - only to be caught by the Japanese navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand's ("Seabiscuit: An American Legend") enormously popular book.

Films like “Unbroken,” and the Laura Hillenbrand book on which it’s based, capture something we all hope is true about ourselves—that we too are unbreakable. That when faced with horrendous, life-threatening situations, we would respond in similar fashion to Louis Zamperini, finding a new well of courage within ourselves and surviving the unimaginable. It is the resilience of the human spirit that has drawn us to films based on true stories again and again to experience pain and triumph in the relative comfort of a movie theater seat.

 

“Unbroken” opens with a powerfully staged and shot sequence of aerial combat that surprisingly defines the film's strengths and weaknesses over the next two-plus hours. The attention to detail as Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), Russell ‘Phil’ Phillips (Domhnall Gleeson) and Hugh ‘Cup’ Cuppernell (Jai Courtney) spin their plane around and take aim at the enemy feels accurate. There’s a weight to the gunfire and a fragility to the aircraft itself that conveys that these people were always a more-accurate gunsight away from tragedy. And yet there’s something wrong here too. The sunset on the horizon looks like a painting. The clouds are perfectly placed for visual impact. The little drop of blood on Zamperini’s forehead can’t hide his movie star looks or movie star make-up. Everything feels accurate in its staging, and yet also not quite genuine. It's Hollywood, old-fashioned movie accurate. And despite O’Connell’s instant charisma (the guy is going to be a MASSIVE star), this feeling never leaves “Unbroken”—the sense that we’re watching human suffering that looks too pretty and too refined to convey its intended impact.

 

Zamperini and two other men, including Phil, survive a plane crash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They barely make it long enough to board a raft, where the conditions of hunger, dehydration and heat exhaustion take their toll. These scenes are remarkably well-staged and executed by director Angelina Jolieand her team. They’re the best in the film, the moments in which we can feel Zamperini’s increasing desperation and likely death. They have a focus, fragility and purpose that the second half of the film lacks.

What makes some people more resilient than others ?

 

The resilience of people like Louis Zamperini in the face of extraordinary trauma, as depicted in the film Unbroken, has lessons for psychiatrists treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

 

 

Here's a stirring love letter from director Angelina Jolie to Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who found his courage sorely tested in a Japanese POW camp. Jack O'Connell as Louis and Miyavi as his sadistic guard are both superb, but it's Jolie who took a story Hollywood ignored for decades, got it done and made it resonate.



Unbroken is beautifully crafted even in its brutality. A sequence near war's end, when Louis and the POWs are herded to a river expecting to be murdered en masse, is memory-scarring. Jolie has an army of craftsmen in her corner, notably camera poet Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men). But it's her vision that gives Unbroken a spirit that soars. In honoring Louis' endurance, she does herself proud.



Cine Me

 

 

Mr. Turner

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2473794/

 

 

http://sonyclassics.com/mrturner/

 

 

 

 

 

Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere"—which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love—yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.

 

The film's title character is one of many such characters in "Mr. Turner." Timothy Spall plays the Cockney painter, who imbued often outwardly unremarkable panoramas with an intensely spiritual feeling that's intriguingly hard to match up with the man we see before us onscreen. Often described as the "painter of light," Turner was part of the Romantic school of painters, whose work eventually led, on visual art's slowly unfolding timeline, to the Impressionists. The film is appropriately fascinated by light and color and what it takes to create or re-create them. Turner, who's a stiff when it comes to talking about everything else in life, can go on forever about light. He listens closely when his Scottish polymath cousin Mary Somerville (Lesley Manville) schools him on the magnetic properties of violet, or when his father (Paul Jesson), who travels the world buying his son paint, warns him, "Ultramarine's going up a guinea a bladder."

 

That the performances are excellent will come as no surprise to Leigh fans. Spall, who's had a remarkably varied career, adds another fine portrait to his own actor's gallery with Turner, a character who's impossible to fully fathom (as if you'd want to!) and even more impossible to approve of. He can be high-handed, brusque, oblivious. But there's something immensely sad about him, and you can sense it most strongly during moments like the one pictured at the top of this page, when he's seen from a distance, from head to toe, moving through the sorts of landscapes that he himself might paint. These images, photographed by Leigh's regular cinematographer Dick Pope, express the essence of a phrase used by Manville, "the interconnectedness of all things."

 

 

A gorgeous, important film.

 

 

 

I want this year to be about

 

 

 being present and not bracing for what's to come.

Cine Me

 

 

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby:Her

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3729920/

 

 

Compelling drama, held by strong performances and mature screenplay from first timer Ned Benson.

 

With his unique vision, writer/director Ned Benson ambitiously captures a complete picture of a relationship in the beautifully relatable portrait of love, empathy and truth that is THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY. Once happily married, Conor (McAvoy) and Eleanor (Chastain) suddenly find themselves as strangers longing to understand each other in the wake of tragedy. The film explores the couple's story as they try to reclaim the life and love they once knew and pick up the pieces of a past that may be too far gone. Screened for the first time at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Benson's latest version of their story combines his previous two films - titled HIM and HER - uniting their perspectives and taking a further look into the subjectivity of relationships.

 

A delicate and ephemeral romance.

 

“Chastain: brilliant performance that could earn her another Oscar nomination.”

(Richard Roeper)

 

 

It’s the new year and I’m looking

 

for essentials.

 

 

P.S- It’s almost a new year, time to embrace change!


Well, subtle change. We’re not talking about a radical transformation that incites a revolution, just tiny things to make ourselves feel a little refreshed. There are so many small ways to make a change (walk to work, try a new hairstyle, etc) ...I’ve been brainstorming them here in  this week.

What small changes are you planning for the new year?