Rock'n'rolla

 

Guy Ritchie reshuffles a worn-out deck in “RocknRolla,” a return to the shady stylings that characterized his earlier flicks “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch.” The on-screen names have changed, and the edited rhythms have been somewhat slowed, but more or less everything else follows formula: pump up the volume, tilt the camera, flex the muscle, strut the stuff, bang bang, blah blah. 

There are the usual villains with funny names — a nice-and-easy Gerard Butler plays One Two, while the underdeployed Idris Elba plays his partner in London crime, Mumbles — committing the usual villainy while spouting the usual argot.

There’s the big, bad boss, Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), a thug in bespoke pinstripes who comes with an iron fist in a velvet glove called Archy (Mark Strong). There are drugs and a rock ’n’ roll druggie, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell). There’s the requisite femme fatale in stilettos, Stella (Thandie Newton), and the de rigueur scary, scarily rich Russian, Uri (Karel Roden). There are double-crosses and right hooks and ha-ha scenes of grim torture that come with throbbing musical accompaniment.


It isn’t all bad — many of the lads look lovely, and there’s a chase sequence that nicely devolves into an impressionistic blur of herky-jerky faces — but there isn’t much to chew on or mull over. The violence is idiotic and brutal (the story is just idiotic), but it’s also so noncommittal that it doesn’t offend. Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose. For Mr. Ritchie, a man who clearly appreciates fine tailoring (and kudos to the costume designer, Suzie Harman), a fist in the mouth or a bullet in the head is just a stylistic flourish, some flash to tart up the genre clichés he never seems to have bought in the first place.


But that’s the thing about genre clichés: you need to believe in them before you can twist, upend or abandon them. To judge from his crime flicks, Mr. Ritchie seems to have gravitated to the underworld primarily because of some misbegotten and vague sense of cool.

The history of real and imaginary British crime certainly gives him fodder, including the real East End criminals the Kray twins (who were put out of nasty business in 1968, the year Mr. Ritchie was born) and the nattily dressed, lethally armed Michael Caine in Mike Hodges’s vicious “Get Carter” (1971). American criminals have the bigger guns, but the Brits lock and load like dandies, a fact that, more than any other, seems to have shaped Mr. Ritchie’s oeuvre.

Garden State

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

Garden State isn’t just a regular movie. It’s an elaborate metaphor for life, and all of the characters/situations throughout represent different stages of our life. In this analysis, I am going to analyze the meaning behind some of the characters and events that take place in this excellent film (written and directed by Zach Braff).

We start off with Andrew Largeman (Braff) in a completely disillusioned part of his life. He is overly medicated for a problem that doesn’t even exist. He’s distant from his family, and he’s a stranger in his own life. He gets a phone call from his dad, with the news that his mother has drowned. Largeman immediately comes back to his hometown of the Garden State: New Jersey. What awaits Andrew is a journey of self discovery, through a woman he meets, and a reconnection with a friend.

When Andrew gets home, he is invited to a large party full of directionless youth. One of his old friends has made an invention: “Silent Velcro”, and sold the idea for a handsome profit. Andrew asks what he’s been doing with his life since then. To which he replies: “Nothing! I’m bored out of my mind!” These words, along with the party in general, are a message to society. Retirement is an illusion. As the old saying goes, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Once you stop attempting to improve humanity, boredom sinks in. And if you happen to be bored, then you probably aren’t living a purposeful life. This can be remedied by finding your passion (however obscure it may be) and going after it, even if only during your spare time.

Serendipity, as is the case for many of these types of romantic dramedies, brings Andrew together with Sam, who is a very quirky and likable personality played by Natalie Portman. As a whole, she represents the vital energy that can be found in eccentricity. And I believe eccentricity to be an essential quality to a great life. Think about it: Everyone has their own little quirks and ticks that make them unique. Without these quirks, how would we be able to tell one person apart from the other? We wouldn’t. Sam is also adventurous, and not afraid to speak her mind. The main message of her character: Embrace your uniqueness. “Be yourself, because everybody else is already taken.”

My favorite scene in the movie is when Andrew, Sam, and Andrew’s friend Mark, embark on an epic expedition. Towards the end of this expedition, our crew arrives in a seemingly desolate place, and enters the home of a man who lives in a desolate and worn-down boat that is suspended in the air.

Anyone would be a little bit freaked out. However, as Andrew and Sam talk to the man and his wife, who live in the boat, they make an interesting discovery. The man was hired to protect a quarry. He spends his days, in Sam’s words, as a “Guardian of an Infinite Abyss”. The man, Albert, mentions that he feels his job to be important. He feels he is doing something unique, no matter how strange or obscure it might seem to other people. This is the spirit that people need to have today! Too many people are disillusioned with their lives, floating from place to place with no definite aim or purpose.

 Here comes along a film like Garden State, with a clear message: You won’t get away with this aimless drifting around. It’s time to find what you love to do, and to do what you feel is important. No matter how seemingly insignificant it seems to be. “Good luck exploring the infinite abyss!”
It turns out that the whole expedition was done for a purpose. Mark, who is Adam Largeman’s friend, gives Andrew a necklace that Adam’s mom used to wear. Oh, how we can never underestimate the power of a good friend!

The movie concludes on an inspirational note, and a call to action. By not going back to L.A, Adam goes against the tide. He has the presence of mind to realize that he’s in love; and love takes precedence over everything else. It takes a lot of courage to adjust your plans. Make sure you have the right ones, but don’t be afraid to change them up as you go. And when you feel down, just remember this: You can never predict tomorrow. There could be hardships, but there could also be salvation. Be brave, be bold, and be daring. What do you have to lose?

Girl interrupted

Girl interrupted is about of girl named Suzanna who has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in the 1960s. She is committed to a mental hospital where she becomes friends with a sociopath and is roommates with a pathological liar. The main focus of this paper will be the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment that Suzanna goes through in the movie.

Borderline personality disorder is characterized by intense shifts in mood lasting only a few hours at a time. This is often accompanied by periods of intense aggression, substance abuse, and self-injurious behaviors such as cutting, casual sex or binge eating. People with borderline personality disorder will sometimes attempt suicide impulsively in periods of extreme depression or anger. Often times people with borderline personality disorder feel extremely bored, empty, mistreated and/or alone. Intense feelings of loneliness usually are followed by frantic efforts to avoid being alone (NIMH, 2008).

Suzanna is initially institutionalized for taking a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. She claims that she was not trying to kill herself, but only get rid of a headache. While in the hospital she had severe bruises on her hands and stated that she had no bones in her hand. People with borderline personality disorder often have suicide attempts and substance abuse in their history along with self-mutilation. Susannah claimed that she had no bones in her hand. This could be considered self-mutilation, but the "no bones in her hand" might suggest a delusional disorder and does not necessarily fall in line with borderline personality disorder. 

Suzanna often exhibits spontaneous damaging behavior that is mainly sexual. Dangerous sexual activity includes sex with a married man, sex with two people the same day, and with another individual. Other spontaneous behaviors include breaking out of the hospital, stealing her medical files, and not taking medication. She also aids in drugging a nurse and steals a guitar from the art room to help cheer up another patient. Spontaneous dangerous behavior is one of the major signs of borderline personality disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

Suzanna has grown up in an unstable environment and although physical abuse is observed the mother is highly unstable in mood shifting. The father is controlling and angry and inappropriately aggressive in many situations. There is not enough information to support a borderline diagnosis for either patient, but it is known that if someone has a guardian with borderline personality disorder is much more likely to develop it themselves (Mayo Clinic, 2008).

Suzanna has mystical beliefs about her symptoms and diagnosis, the major example being the bones in her hand disappearing and then reappearing. She often seeks to be alone. Shows many social anxieties around people and had a lack of close friends on outside of the hospital. These symptoms might point to a comorbid diagnosis with schizotypal personality disorder.

Contradictions to the possible schizotypal personality disorder would include that she is sometimes the "life of the party" which falls in line more with borderlines. She also desperately seeks male attention leading to her promiscuous sexual behavior that goes against the seeking of complete isolation often exhibited by others with scizotypal personality disorder. Her social anxieties are not clear in the movie and it is unclear whether they are a product of negative feelings about her or whether she has paranoid fears.

Despite the schizotypal possibility it is more likely that she has borderline personality disorder. This is because she clearly exhibits the majority of the signs of someone with borderline personality disorder including self destructive behavior, feelings of emptiness, intense shifts in mood lasting only a short period of time, consistent suicide ideation, feelings of "rejection and not fitting in." Even the schizotypal symptoms can be explained by borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personality disorder often have odd thinking, quasipsychosis, and unusual perceptions.

Psychologists often are reluctant to give borderline diagnosis because people with the disorder often encompass many symptoms from many axis 1 disorders in the DSM. A possible reason for this overlap is the ambiguity within the DSM low or unstable mood is not a specific term as well as, the quantifying of symptoms to arrive at a diagnosis that leads to borderline personality disorder leaving it too broad and open for interpretation to receive a clinical diagnosis (Paris, 2008).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

"Clementine has had Joel erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again."
 If you haven’t seen the film and plan to do so, it’s probably a bad idea to read this.

 It’s too hard to deal sometimes, you know? Memories stew in your head, nag at your brain, come back at the least opportune moments, torture you with regrets, second thoughts, “if only I had done it differently.” They make you curse being sentient, hate your mind for constantly churning. Sometimes you just want to stick a fork in your brain and be rid of it or, if you’re in a more fanciful mood, you might dream of a way to wipe your brain clean of the unpleasantness, the poison, the sickly goo that won’t wash off.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s dizzying allegory, imagines a way to erase unwanted memories without any medical side effects. “Technically, the procedure is brain damage,” says Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) to Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), when the latter inquires about the risks of the procedure. “It’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you’ll miss.” The doctor makes a “mental map” of the person or event to be eliminated; later, his technicians infiltrate the patient’s appartment while he sleeps and painstakingly remove every trace of the object from his brain. 

Joel is in this not just for comfort, but also for retaliation. He is informed that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet), who had become moody, erratic and withdrawn before abruptly breaking off contact, had the procedure performed with him as the target. Bewildered and unsure whether it is some sort of hoax or cruel joke (as an aside, I suspect that the film may have been even stronger had the medical technology in question already been assimilated into its world, thus eliminating that aspect of the plot entirely), Joel runs to Dr. Mierzwiak, who assures him that it is nothing of the sort. So he signs himself up, hoping that for him too, that painful relationship would soon cease to exist.

Charlie Kaufman, the phenom screenwriter whose bizarre meta-films (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) have attracted more attention than his less self-conscious stories (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Human Nature, the latter also directed by Michel Gondry), now tries combine the two, in a way. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind toys with space, time and existence in the same way Adaptation did, but is also a self-contained story, free of overt references to Hollywood and Kaufman himself. 

To call the story “self-contained” is not to imply that it is simple. Oh no. It swerves, doubles back on itself, crosses dimensions and travels through time. Much of the film is spent with the protagonist unconscious, and Dr. Mierzwiak’s technicians (Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo) making mincemeat of his brain. Though asleep, Joel decides that he doesn’t want to go through with the erasure and embarks on a quest to “hide” Clementine from the marauding brain-surgeons, the two of them tracking across the increasingly surreal landscape of Joel’s memory as it fades away before their eyes.

Michel Gondry is known as a stylist, and his visual take on this material is really something else, but his biggest accomplishment by far is how deftly he maneuvers through the seemingly impossible narrative. To take something as ostensibly “gimmicky” as this and to make it affecting, profound, real, is much more difficult than the most impressive camera stunt, and Gondry is the real deal on both fronts. Whether you choose to see the film as a science-fiction mind-trip, a neat literalization of the way human relationships progress, or both, all credit to the director for guiding us through this pitfall-ridden project unharmed, even if he does sometimes seem a bit enamored with his own virtuosity. 

People have begun making the idiotic distinction between the “goofy” and the “serious” Jim Carrey roles, and I suppose this would fall in the latter category. I’ll watch anything with Carrey (except maybe The Majestic a second time), and while the manic image that defines him may be an accurate depiction of his personality, it does not reflect the extent of his talents. Time and again he has proven his ability to handle real roles, and here we have what might be his least quintessential part to date. The character of Joel Barish didn’t need Jim Carrey, but Jim Carrey embodies him entirely. It’s great work.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind concludes with a decidedly hopeful affirmation of two people’s ability to talk to each other, to get beyond whatever silly situation they may find themselves in, look each other in the eyes and communicate on an intimate and elevated plane. In its clever dystopian conceit, the film hides an astute analysis of, to borrow a phrase from Mandy Moore, how we deal.

Into the wild

It was a movie that was ten years in the making; Director Sean Penn first encountering the story of Christopher McCandless in the 90's. Into The Wild is a mildly fictionalised account of a true story about a young man's rite of passage through America, finally heading for Alaska.

Christopher (Emile Hirsch) is a very talented young man, passing all his college exams with flying colours, events of the world around him (both home and away) suddenly and seemingly from nowhere takes Christopher off on an adventure. His journey begins with the disposal of his car, and the burning of his last remaining dollars; his life savings already donated to charity. The next part the forming of a new identity Christopher Candless died the day he turned his back on society and Alexander Supertramp was born. Into The Wild takes Alexander on a trip of America, he sees the good things in life, he sees the bad things; but what he does along the way is touch the hearts of everyone he meets.

I'm a little challenged by my thoughts on Into The Wild, visually its one of the most beautiful looking movies I have seen since Casino Royale, but rather like Casino Royale I was left a little less impressed with the movie than the average movie reviewer.

Into The Wild is one of those movies where my interest drifts in and out, one minute I'm fixated by the story, the next I'm wishing for a conclusion so I can get on to the next film. Any passing movie viewer may also be challenged by this movie, if only because they have lost the understanding of where the movie is. The film is told from four standpoints: The past when Christopher and his Sister were young, The near past in which Christopher reflects on his journey, The near past where his sister reflects on the story, and how her and her family feel about the disappearance of Christopher, the final strand is I guess the present, or as near to it as you can get with Alexander (formally Christopher) living in what is described as "The Magic Bus" in Alaska. The fault with these points is that except from the past aspect, it's quite difficult to understand where in the story things are, none of the divides are clear. I think a much more fluid storyline would have achieved this movie greater appreciation, although I accept that it was pretty well received by most who saw it.

 The story itself is an incredibly important one, ever had that feeling of wanting to abandon your existing life and living one closer to nature? Well this is certainly one of those movies that show you some places that you can fall foul early. It's the areas of bad times that appealed to me more so than the good, though I can't deny being touched by the relationships that Alexander makes on his travels. I'm haunted by images of Alexander desperately trying to get food in the Alaskan wilds, in particular his efforts with a moose, this is storytelling so good it could bring you to tears.

The relationships of the movie are poignant ones; Alexander makes himself a new family with a pair of Rubber Tramps (a term given to travellers by vehicle), Jan and Rainey played by Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker respectively have nothing, yet for the nothing they have it seems that the world is theirs. Vince Vaughan plays Wildman Wayne Westerberg, an individual filled with wild and crazy ideas. And then there is the lovely looking Tracy played by Kirsten Stewart, who finds love for the first time in her life with Alexander, this too has tearfully moving aspects to it.

I'm not convinced however as to the touching nature of Christopher/Alexander, I have had a great many encounters in my life but few I feel have really touched me, call me harsh I know! I find it difficult to believe that this one young man had such an effect on people that ultimately their lives were changed because of it; I feel quite safely I can point this stories aspect as being fiction, whether it is from the "Hollywood" perspective, or from the writing of the real life Christopher McCandless. Now I have no mean to disrespect the McCandless family in that statement, but there are aspects of this story that we will never be able to truly verify.

I was thrilled by an arrival three quarters of the way through the movie and this came in the form of Hal Holbrook as Ron Franz, and actor who I had assumed to be dead, his arrival proves to be the most touching of all the relationships that our young lead makes, and allows him a better chance than he would have, had the encounter not taken place, and it proves that Holbrook for a man nearly 100 years of age can still act every bit as well as he did 50 years prior.



Into The Wild starts as an epic journey, it's breath-taking to look out and will charm you to your very soul. But Into The Wild will not leave you with any happy thoughts, this is a terribly tragic tale, that regardless of its journey and the legitimacy of story aspects will leave you rendered speechless, and at best teary eyed.
Despite the fact that there were aspects of the movie that I was nearly driven to stop viewing, Into The Wild left me sobbing like a baby, I would go as far as to say uncontrollably so; thank God I saw this at home, alone rather than at a cinema.