“The Ghost Writer”

in my own words…”…taken from my Heart”

I don’t think I am a film buff. I have seen a lot of films, but I hardly qualify for a person who knows all that much about films, film industry, this and that director.  The knowledge must be very expansive and I don’t have it.

I did indulge in watching movies simply because it was my way of escaping from life.  And lately I do not watch movies for a few fairly simple reasons.  I barely have the time, I have no money and I am too immersed in doing something else.  I indulge more in reading about self-development.  Whether I can show much result for the latter, I am not quite sure, but I certainly seem to have developed more tolerance and patience and open-mindedness.

So, coming from these new heights of being improved me (LOL)…  I wouldn’t have the opportunity to go and see “The Ghost Writer”, but I was lucky enough to make a new friend and she invited me to see a movie to celebrate the fact that she had recently found a job.  The choice of a film we made together, but I still have the feeling that I influenced her choice more than she influenced mine.  The reason I am saying this is purely that our choices don’t seem to be so spontaneous as we sometimes tend to think.

And the opinions we had about “The Ghost Writer” at the end were quite different.  I enjoyed the film immensely despite the fact that thinking back about the story itself I found that it was hardly realistic.  But I abandoned the idea that films should be realistic long time ago.  But everything else gave me pleasure.  The scenes by themselves.  Open and dark and gloomy sea, winds, sand, cold atmosphere, the house with glass walls.  I dare say, the plot did not interest me all that much; I was submerged in something all-encompassing.  What it was exactly, I don’t even know.  But when I found a picture in the review, it struck me again – it was precisely “IT”.  It was my gut reaction to the visual beauty.  It did strike something in my heart, in my mind, it was so much on the emotional level.  Maybe the film very much reflected my own mood indeed.  Quite possible.  I liked Ewan McGregor, he felt so genuine in his role.  And the best thing that he said was “…take it from your Heart”.  Maybe it was not exactly what he said, but I think it was the essence.  I felt it and kept this feeling throughout the film.  I was more in the character of the writer, than the whole political scene that never interested me.  The appeal of Ewan McGregor’s character is that he seems to be open, innocent, naïve, very touching person with whom it was easy for me to identify.  It felt like I could be him, our hearts beating in unison – I go through life making the most ridiculous mistakes.  And his death at the end of the film seems so pointless yet so profound.  In my opinion, of course.

Source: http://www.cinematical.com/2010/02/27/review-the-ghost-writer/

Review: The Ghost Writer

by Dawn Taylor Feb 27th 2010 // 1:03PM

 Roman Polanski’s latest thriller, The Ghost Writer, is a fascinating mash-up of homages, cinematic in-jokes and self-references, the sort of film that tends to either delight or irritate film buffs — sometimes inspiring both reactions silmutaneously — while leaving more casual viewers a bit flummoxed. Surely Polanski couldn’t have meant for his green-screen backgrounds to be so patently false! And oh, the performances are stiff and self-conscious! Almost immediately, the arguments begin in one’s own head as to whether this movie is deliberately, stylishly melodramatic, or a tad clunky by accident.

As good as The Ghost Writer is — and it really is quite good — the film itself doesn’t seem to know, either. Part of the problem may lie in the road it took to the screen, what with the director finishing the film while under house arrest in Switzerland, and additional studio meddling which resulted in a painful number of overdubbed line-readings turning effing F-words into “soddings” and “buggers” in order to acquire a PG-13 rating. What’s left is the feeling that this could have been one of the director’s great films, in the same league as Chinatown or Knife in the Water, but the distractions of Polanski’s personal life, and other forces behind the scenes, kept it from reaching masterwork status.

The plot, adapted from Robert Harris’ novel The Ghost, is a clever bit of nouveau noir: A professional ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is offered a truckload of money to complete the memoir of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after the original ghost dies under suspicious circumstances. Isolated at Lang’s coldly modern beach house and warned by Lang’s assistant (Kim Cattrall) that the manuscript must be kept under lock and key, the ghost slowly pieces together a puzzle that connects the memoir, Lang’s involvement in a CIA torture scandal, and his predecessor’s death. McGregor’s wide-eyed, “who me?” demeanor brings the right note of dewy dimness to the role, playing as he is a man who should have heard klaxon horns as soon as he was offered $250,000 for a month’s work.

The heaviest handed of Polanski’s homages comes with the way he fashions his picture as a modern-day Hitchcock film, with Cattrall standing in for Hitch’s signature icy blonde (and doing a fine job, despite an accent that veers wildly from upper-crust British to mid-Atlantic and back again) while Olivia Williams, as Lang’s wife, fills out the darker side of the neurotic-noir-gal quotient. A propulsive, orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat evokes Bernard Herrmann’s music for North by Northwest without being nearly as memorable. Polanski is at his Hitchcockiest in scenes that involve driving (a long set piece that has McGregor following the directions on a car’s GPS recalls James Stewart tailing Kim Novak in Vertigo) and an almost-final sequence that follows a note, passed hand-to-hand through a party, that goes on for about six hands further than it should.

The Ghost Writer also suffers a bit from overall tone, in that Polanski’s best films have had an intimate, close-in, almost claustrophobic quality to them, while here the action takes place in a glass-and-concrete mansion and outdoors on windswept winter beaches. All this chilly expanse is intended to create a sense of isolation, but unfortunately it also fails to draw us into McGregor’s increasing peril, as does Polanski’s insistence on presenting a couple of key plot turns via characters watching the news on enormous plasma-screen televisions — it keeps us at a distance, where the Hitchcock films on which Polanski is obviously basing this picture all become tighter framed, more entangled and tense as the story gallops toward conclusion. Despite a lot of wonderful imagery and a smart screenplay, the film is just too visually expansive and laconic to inspire an overwhelming sense of dread.

It’s interesting to note that one of the better references in The Ghost Writer is to Polanski’s own work. As McGregor’s writer unravels the unsavory facts about his new job and his employer, we return two or three times to shots of Lang’s groundsman, a middle-aged Asian man, attempting to sweep off the deck outdoors next the beach. The wind whipping around him, he keeps adding detritus to a wheelbarrow only to have the wind blow it all back out onto the deck again. It’s a clever visual metaphor, and also recalls the Japanese gardener in Chinatown, who provided a key clue when he told Jake Gittes that his employer’s salt-water pond was “bad for glass.”

Almost any film by a master director offers moments that delight and illuminate, even when the movies themselves are minor offerings in the director’s oeuvre (see as well: Scorsese’s Shutter Island). The pace of The Ghost Writer is deliberate and assured; the performances by the actors are wisely considered. It’s a good-looking film that feels as if it could have used a bit of tightening up, as well as an R rating to avoid the unfortunate overdubbings — but there are moments of brilliance that make it more than worth tolerating the missteps.

 http://www.exclaim.ca/motionreviews/generalreview.aspx?csid1=115&csid2=808&fid1=27797

Alexandra

Directed by Alexander Sokurov

By Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Alexander Sokurov is the kind of master who amazes and infuriates in equal measure — there’s no denying his artistry or his seriousness but his grandiose sweep of the arm can sometimes lapse into arrogance. But no matter what political assumptions he makes during the short running time of Alexandra, the sensitivity he brings to the material forgives all sins.

 

The Alexandra of the title is an elderly woman visiting Chechnya for the sake of her soldier son; she’s taken into his encampment and witnesses the boys as they play with their guns, gobble down her gifts of food and blithely accept the fact that they’ve been sent off to die. Our heroine is stunned at this, as is Sokurov, and as she wanders out of the camp and back to it we see her desire to live differently.

 

The movie is a nuanced and sensuous portrait of military life like nothing since Claire Denis’s Beau Travail. Though it sadly evades a proper position on the Chechnya conflict, its evocation of a normalised war culture and the lack of resistance surrounding it are better than most films can even imagine. So to are the director’s typically gorgeous golden hues and fluid, enveloping environment.

 

Cinematic critics of the Iraq war could learn a lot from this movie: its approach, which makes human what is usually idealised or demonised, might help break the deadlock between moralism and sympathy, which plagues the debate, as well as replacing the mushy rhetoric that vulgarises the discourse.

 

I’m not exactly sure that this is an anti-war movie but Sokurov’s beautiful plunge into the cosmic unfairness of it all was enough to lodge the movie in my brain and let it grow in significance with each passing day. (Proline/Rezo)

Surprisingly enough, I saw “Beau Travail”.  I even liked it.  With “Alexandra”, I had no idea what is was about when my mother and I started watching it.  I simply relied on my father’s opinion when he said “oh, it is a good movie, watch it.”  We did.  We kept watching it waiting and waiting when the “good” part will come.  It never did.  The film was dark and gloomy and it was absolutely and totally boring.  We watched the whole film and then I was so mad at my father.  “How possibly could you recommend something like that?”  I vowed not to listen to his opinion ever again.  Maybe I was angry for him for a month.

But now, when a few months have passed after I watched the film and I came across this review, so beautifully written, I made me think.  Why was I so mad?  This film is not a piece of entertainment.  It is a vision and it is a piece of art.  I should be more open-minded.  Maybe my anger was a direct result of my expectations not being met.  At that moment I was not ready to think about anything.  I was suffering.  But I am in this never-ending suffering mode.  I have to find a way to live, not just suffer.  What is a definition of a good movie anyways?  Is there such a thing?  When I watched “Bruno” and I loved it, majority of people did not share my enthusiasm.  “Oh, it is gross, it is too much.”  Too much of what?  Entertainment?

In my opinion, the film “Chinatown” is very well done visually to support the “noir” outlook. Roman Polanski used the colour contrasts very skillfully: the sunny streets of Los Angeles are contrasted with dim lit indoors (Chief Engineer’s office, the Hall of Records, the Cafe where Jake and Evelyn meet, the house where Katherine is almost imprisoned). Even the plot supports the shadows premise; Jake is a private investigator and he is lurking in the figurative shadows of the dark environment of human nature. Characters are very exquisite in their dressing styles, especially the main ones: Jake Gittes and Evelyn, as if for manifestation of their sef-consciousness and fragility. I found that the decision to cut Jack’s nostril almost at the beginning of the film and let him go through the film with a bandage on his nose was particularly effective. I think it is a great metaphor, “nosy fellows lose their noses”. The nose is the central part on the face and it is very obtrusive; we are constantly reminded of Jake’s predicament, as well as his determination to pursue his goal. In addition, it instills the sense of danger for the whole film.

The motive of entrapment is present in most of the scenes. We can see it in the beginning of the film when Jake started his investigation; he sat in the car and tried to be unnoticed by Hollis Mulwray. The investigation process suggests that we trying to see something and it is never clear, there is always something blocking the view: car interior, trees, other people etc. I found the scene when Jake first came to Mulwray’s mansion and stood in front of the closed door so closely that he could probably touch it by his nose, particularly effective, as if the character was imprisoned and blocked by something insurmountable. The motifs of Orange Orchids valleys, the aisles of the Hall of Records, the Water Works canals also support the theme of entrapment; their repetition throughout the film only enforces the impression.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that the film “Chinatown” belongs to the “film noir” genre by both its subject matter and visual techniques. It was done so skillfully and thoughtfully that I simply believe that it is a masterpiece in both “film noir” genre and the whole history of cinema.

Often the settings are locations of transience, like grubby rented rooms, piers, bus terminals, and railroad yards. The images are rich in sensuous textures, like neon-lit streets, windshields streaked with mud, and shafts of light streaming through windows of lonely rooms.

Characters are imprisoned behind ornate lattices, grillwork, drifting fog and smoke. Visual designs emphasize harsh lighting contrasts, jagged shapes, and violated surfaces, the tone of film noir is fatalistic and paranoid. It’s suffused with pessimism, emphasizing the darker aspects of the human condition. Its themes characteristically revolve around violence, lust, greed, betrayal, and depravity. (Taken from DeVRy Literature Course, author unknown)