Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Encounters with the Real

With all the history made yesterday, let's keep a theme alive and keep engaging with reality. Highly mediated and stage-managed versions of reality, not unlike an inaugural festivity, but reality nonetheless. As ever, some realities are better than others.

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posted by NicksFlickPicks at 9:00 AM Links

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3 Comments:

Blogger tim r said...

Hello!

Given that the insane awards-season work regime is almost certainly going to mean abandoning my own lists, I feel the urge to chime in all over the place, if that's OK. Only Man, Trouble and Taxi have made it over here, but the two 'T's would make my five -- I prefer The King of Kong (which I know made your list last year) and Of Time and the City to Man on Wire, and I prefer the fantastic French concept-doc Our Daily Bread to all of the above.

Man on Wire = good, but too Errol Morris, too much of the time. Discuss.

I've also been pondering the scarcity of your score picks. Two of mine would be from good films you've yet to see -- Rupert Wyatt's The Escapist, which has a tremendously clever score by Benjamin Wallfisch that actually contains plot clues, and Linha de passe, in which Gustavo Santaolalla does much grittier and more specific work than he's been peddling for bigger films lately, and creates this mournful urban-dirge sound which immerses you in the movie beautifully. I'll swap you Burwell's In Bruges score, with that lovely curling piano melody (which I find more ironic than maudlin) for the paranoid percussion in Burn After Reading, but both are good jobs, and I still think the man can do no wrong.

Otherwise, I'm just as stumped, though I did quite like The Dark Knight also.

11:16 AM, January 21, 2009  
Blogger tim r said...

PS. Just looked at what Elliot Goldenthal is working on -- where are the greats when you need them? -- and he's doing both Taymor's Tempest film and Michael Mann's Public Enemies this year. We may yet forgive him for Across the Universe, then...

11:21 AM, January 21, 2009  
Blogger Cal said...

Yeah, one of the few things I disliked about Man on Wire is how it's constantly trying to sell the concept even after we've been sold. Some of the commentary is annoying.

I'm totally in the Up the Yangtze camp (#2 in my 2007 Top Ten). Waltz With Bashir is very different as both an Animated Feature and a Documentary, although I don't think it achieves as much in either way as it promises to.

I've been contemplating whether to watch Trouble the Water online. It was hardly on any screens here and will probably land on DVD around April. It could be even longer for Chicago 10.

3:31 PM, January 21, 2009  

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