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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Bourne Identity's love interest (Franca Potente) added so much depth to the first in the trilogy. Bourne had someone else, someone vulnerable to protect from evil.
I got the feeling The Bourne Supremacy producers must have listened to a focus group of NASCAR meatheads and replaced the tender interludes with long, repetitive car chases. As soon as the next predictable race-the-streets-of-Europe sequence begins, if you are sick of the cliche car chase genre, it's a great time for a rest room break and some fresh popcorn, knowing that the next six minutes of screen time will be nothing but 1/4 second jump cuts and lots of screeching tires and crunching metal.
I'm looking forward to the Ultimatum, even the ridiculous and obligatory car chase. That's a good time to take a pee and get some popcorn.
I hate action films, especially action sequences. Normally, they are ineptly made, random fragments stuck together with little concern about continuity.
This film is exactly the opposite. The cuts are lightning quick, so quick you can't even fully process the images you see, but that's no impediment. You just grab onto a distinctive sound or shape or color and take the ride. Everything is so meticulously crafted that everything is crystal clear. You never, not once, give up on a scene because you can't follow what's occuring.
These sequences are masterpieces and most assuredly find themselves placed along the great scenes of all time and dissected in film classes for years to come. They are nothing less than brilliant.
Matt Damon is a tremendous actor (especially in Ripley.) And the direction is phenomenal -- never a dull moment. But at least in Live Free or Die Hard they made it clear that tongue was firmly in cheek and so when Bruce Willis survives every explosion/fall from a building/fight and is just a little slowed down, you smile and go with it. Here, the hand-held cameras make the action seem so realistic that when Bourne manages to just get up time after time, it just makes you laugh at the movie and not with it.
Are there some excellent chases? Sure. But that's matched by the incredible amount of exposition being dropped left and right.
(SPOILER: The CIA chief says on the phone... "Remember why we brought her on this case. So we can blame it all on her when the time comes." Sheesh. It was like one of those bad sitcom pilots where a guy walks in and the female character says "Little brother, there you are." to explain the relationship between the characters for the audience. No one would say these things. Especially not a CIA chief trying to not get caught.)
Every time they went back to the CIA war-room or whatever you would call it (the Exposition Room?), it was all to explain what was happening, but in a cliched way.
Not a bad movie, but certainly a disappointment given the first two. (And didn't the second one end with Bourne in NYC? Does that mean we only get to that scene halfway through this one?)
I'll have you know, 'anonymous' (if that's your real name!) that our Serbo Croatian film festival next to the Salon office was a smashing success, all dozen of us attended! Our special guest speaker, Goran Visnjic, couldn't make it as he was being swabbed for DNA by a supposed baby-mama, but no matter! Oh, and the five hour movie that won the golden palm? Pure, pure genius! Only it was goat-herders, not dairy farmers! Roger Ebert: "I want to see this epic about Hungarian goat-herders again and again" circa 1963. It's on his list of Great Films!
I'm bored watching both techniques. They're done to death. And please, can we have a funeral for the obligatory Car Chase?
I get the feeling that studios have a committee meeting where they focus group the 12 year-olds and cut the movie just for them. Plot? Motivation? We don't need no stinking plot or motivation, just keep the old fox and hound chase going for 160 minutes and we're outta here.
Funny thing is, Robert Ludlum wrote rich characters so that a smaller amount of action was necessary to keep you engaged and worried about them when danger threatens. But if the character is one-dimensional and simply another prop, then you've got to rely on one eye-popping stunt after another to hold interest.
The Bourne Identity had a delicious noir feel to it. I liked the overcast skies and cold European streets, mysterious and mesmerizing in itself. But New York? I don't know, maybe they should put the next Bourne Franchise in Las Vegas and car-chase through the casinos. And after that, they can have American cities bid on which one will host the next Bourne street race. Miami? Chicago?
Please Matt, make this your last one. Kill this thing now, before it gets as ridiculous as Rocky.
Stephanie Zacharek lost me completely when she gave a free pass to that abominable, empty turd "Ocean's 13" but nitpicked "Sicko," an accessible and well-done film on an extremely important subject.
Like one of the previous posters, I can't tell which way she comes down on this movie either. I must have missed the days when her reviews were more critical; the reviews on Salon have always seemed bland and far too forgiving for my taste. Roger Ebert is more critical!
In case you are interested, that's the title of the song that starts the credit roll at the end of the Bourne Identity and the Bourne Supremacy.
It opens with the shrieking notes of synthesized violins rising like sirens, followed by a kick drum, bass and electric piano that takes you by surprise and sends you home from the theater in a weird groove.
If they do it again for "Ultimatum" it's going to get as familiar as the James Bond theme.
I hardly fit the demographic for this type of film, at least on the surface. For those who like action films that explode with fights and chases and car crashes, these films heartily satisfy better than most. But that's only context. The text is a person on a quest to figure out just who he really is and who he serves--and it's this deep text that connects the Bourne films to many of its viewers, the search for identity, community, purpose.
The brilliance of the Bourne films is in the craftmanship--nothing is ever totally explained. There really is no spoiler to reveal here because--and this is why there could actually be another Bourne film--while Bourne finally remembers, we, the audience, won't share in that entire memory.
Bourne is a different man in the Ultimatum--he is grieving the loss of Marie, still fresh in his memory. (Pay attention to the time sequence in this movie.) He's lost the innocence his amnesia provided him for a time, and which was also refreshed by Marie's love for him. He remembers enough to weigh him with guilt, sin, and remorse and, of course, he's been forced to kill against his will & repeatedly to survive. He's an outcast, hunted by his former family and unable to reform new relationships without endangering them. There's a mechanicalness about him.
There's a sequence of scenes with Julia Stiles (reprising her role as Nicky Parsons) that recalls Bourne's association with Marie. They talk in a off-highway restaurant--as Bourne & Marie once did on the way to Paris. Boyish Bourne has given way to unemotional Bourne--his eyes look off-center & they keep glancing about. Later, Bourne won't be cutting Julia's hair, or dying it. Bourne runs alone.
Of the three, Ultimatum won't be my favorite & it may be because Bourne's earnestness, his hopefulness, has been replaced with such weariness...and resignation. And it also felt transitional; it felt like a set up for another Bourne film. But the first half of this movie is as brilliant as any of the 3 movies and you definitely want to be there for the very start.
Some viewers complain about Greengrass's shaky camera style of shooting, but I find it an authentic representation of just how fast these encounters go between top fighters. The mano a mano between Bourne and an assasin will thrill you--in some ways, it reminded me of a scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, when Paul Newman, in an agonizingly endless scene, and with a little help from a woman, had to kill a German assigned to follow him. Hitchcock's purpose in that nevenending scene was to show just how hard it is to kill a person, and Greengrass achieves the same thing here.
Finally, the technology--the kind Bush wants to employ in his so-called Patriot Act--is absolutely frightening. We are all potentially under surveillance. We can so easily be the wrong man or woman in the wrong place at the wrong time and have our worlds turned upside down. Mention certain words on your cell phone, and you, too, might have to hit the road.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
