L Is For Loss

Hello everybody! Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge will be brief because I just put together a massive project that took me hours to complete so I'm not feeling incredibly alive at the moment. But, then again, neither is Colin Firth's lover in A Single Man and the whole movie is pretty much about him.

Year: 2009

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The latest in Sergio's attempts to make me a deeply enriched person was A Single Man, the Colin Firth movie that I never got around to seeing a couple years ago. And you know what? I rather wish that I had, especially considering that any review at this point is coming pretty late in the game.

But I watched it, so review it I shall. 

Nothing could stop me n- ooh look at his hair.

A Single Man is somewhat of a passion project for first-time director and most-of-the-time fashion designer Tom Ford. Starring Colin Firth as George Falconer, an English professor in 1960's Los Angeles who, even one year later, is still reeling from the death of his partner of 16 years (Matthew Goode). Although his body mechanically continues along its daily routine, his mind has shut everything out.

He keeps this up for some time, mostly ignoring his best friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a delightfully effervescent personality who can tell that something is wrong but is powerless to help. But a series of small events over the course of several days begin to turn things around for George, starting with an interaction of mutual admiration with a student (Nicholas Hoult).

George has several small encounters with people who share their perspectives on life with him. Some of them directly, some of them accidentally. But each person he meets drags him irrevocably back into the world of the living, where passion and color reign even under the looming fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis (somebody call the X-Men).

Sepia man to the rescue!

Tom Ford is a green director and it shows, especially in the pacing of many early sequences (take out the slow motion photography and the entire first act would be about six minutes long), but sometimes it takes a person who is totally unfamiliar with the art form to shake it up and make a statement. And Ford's use of color and light do exactly that, showcasing his true strengths as a visual artist.

Whenever George comes across another life that shines brightly through the grey fog of his waking nightmare, the lighting literally reflects this. It might sound a little too on the nose, but trust me. Seeing Colin Firth's face literally light up when he pets a dog is a marvelous achievement in cinematography.

Not since Hitchcock has a film been so integrated with a designer's mentality. Every color and every splash of light in every frame is there for a reason, and as the story progresses, the visuals only deepen and become more wonderful. And Colin Firth's performance is a knockout, but Julianne Moore steals the show as his opposite counterpart - a vibrant and alive woman who takes every knock she gets in life in stride. Julianne Moore is an unsung treasure of cinema. Somebody should correct that.

The biggest achievement of A Single Man, at least on a personal level, is that it is a gay film without the Gay. Many films depicting homosexual men feel the need to be "about" something, whether it be coming out, the AIDS crisis, or intolerance in society. And that's great. We need those films. Those subjects are all very important and continue to be massively relevant.

But at a certain point, one wishes for a movie that just tells a story instead of being a PSA. Brokeback Mountain did that pretty well. Weekend was a great one. But those kinds of films are few and far between. The triumph of A Single Man is that it tells a tale that is marvelously human, rather than just being "gay". 

The story itself is perhaps not entirely to my tastes (far too few machetes were involved), but that is through no fault of its own. But any man who can consistently make Nicholas Hoult look like the beautiful angel he was meant to be deserves some credit, and Tom Ford has proven himself as nothing more than a master of lighting and design with this simple yet richly realized film.

Warm Bodies can go suck a toad.

TL;DR: A Single Man is an interesting and fresh film produced by someone who speaks the language of art, color, and design, but not of cinema.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 787

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In't

Year: 2013

Director: Chan-wook Park

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

"To become adult is to become free."

So begins Stoker, the first English language film from acclaimed South Korean director Chan-wook Park. What follows is a winding tale of intrigue, lust, murder, lust, betrayal, and lust set to the tune of the coming of age of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), a girl who can hear and see things beyond the abilities of your feeble eyes and ears.

On her 18th birthday, India's life is turned upside down when her father dies in a mysterious accident and her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man she never even knew existed has come to stay with her and her mother (Nicole Kidman). Mrs. Stoker doesn't seem to be too cut up about her husband's death, not with his sibling around to comfort her.

What a sweet body - I mean - brother.

The Hamlet parallels don't stop there as the film dives more or less immediately into more incestuous undertones than your average episode of Arrested Development. As India begins to suspect foul play, Charlie's attentions turn to her and their two journeys intertwine in a symphony of violence and sensuality, beginning with the porniest piano duet in human history.

And possibly monkey history.

For you see, Charlie isn't your typical uncle. If somebody threaten's India's well-being, they're not going to be well for much longer. 

There's also a lot of business with India dealing with teenage hoodlums at her high school and investigating family secrets, but Stoker is a film that's much more impressed with its atmosphere than the story it's telling, something that it and I have in common. A modern thriller mystery incest romance dressed up in Victorian trappings, Stoker is one of the (if not the) most aesthetically complex films of 2013.

This is one of those films that allows me to use terms like symbolism and mise-en-scène without a trace of irony, for every single element of the film works together to create a beautiful and singularly creepy world. 

The camera dances an intricate ballet of light and shadow one image fading into the next with grace, the infinitely complex sound design explores the world of a girl who can hear even the tiniest crack of an egg, the editing joins the game to provide a pulsing, freewheeling rhythm, and the art design reigns supreme, full of rich, dark colors, and symbols out the wazoo that are there in spades for those who wish to analyze them but aren't so obvious as to be distracting.

You see shears, I see a phallus. The life of a film major.

Phallic and Yonic imagery abound throughout, capturing the central theme of burgeoning sexuality and coming of age and compounding it with the darker tang of bodily violence.

You thought slasher movies had the monopoly on "sex = death" philosophy? You're dead wrong. Stoker has sharp penetrative weapons, rhythmic pounding violence, unbelting preceding murder, womb  imagery to represent rebirth, and a bloody act that marks India's emergence into womanhood (a metaphor for getting her period).

Womb.

Vagina.

Penis.

Sex.

I think I'm getting my point across.

It's quite a shame the plot isn't really that great.

Because that's what we're here for, isn't it?

The film drags for quite a bit in its middle half and never really achieves a sense of closure, largely because it never felt like it ever truly opened in the first place. The film is so enchanted by its own decadence that it falls prey to the arthouse mentality of presenting a film as a sequence of beautiful paintings rather than a coherent story.

It's no surprise Stoker alienated audiences and failed to be the smash hit it so easily could have been if the dialogue or events matched the intelligence and fervor of the film's more artistic elements. This disparity largely seems to be due to the veteran film director Chan-wook Park bringing his masterful film aesthetic to the rather green and clumsy first screenplay of Prison Break's Wentworth Miller.

Stoker is a visual treat for the critics and the filmmakers, but a drowsy bore for the rest.

Oh well.

You win some, you lose some.

You spin around on some.

Also, a shout-out for Sergio for correctly identifying a hunting cooler. He rocks.

TL;DR: Stoker has a stunningly beautiful aesthetic in service of a bum narrative with just enough intrigue to keep the film afloat.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 756