So yes it has been a long while. I had things to do. Get over it/Welcome back.
Recently, I watched two movies that were very different. "Boyhood" and "Into the Woods". One was bad. One was about as good as you could make a movie based on the material.
Both dealt with moments.
The first was Boyhood. Let me start by saying I love the director Richard Linklater. I love the Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy and also am a big fan of Waking Life and Dazed and Confused. So I was very primed to see this. It had gotten rave reviews and is the presumptive favorite to win the Oscar for best picture. So it was the good one right?
It was horrible.
The only thing it had going for it was the fact that it was shot over like 15 years so we get to see the young boy and his sister age before our eyes. The problem was there was no story to go along with it. Okay I know what you are thinking. The point was that you got to see little moments of the life of the boy growing up and get a sense of who he is.
But you didn't. I didn't feel I knew the character at all. In fact the moments were so clichéd it was ridiculous. Alcoholic father throwing glasses. Check. Family moving around. Check. Kid struggling against authority and being told what to do. Check. There was a scene where the kid literally sit and stared at a dead sparrow. Are you fucking kidding me?
There is one scene in the movie is so ridiculously pathetic that it defies description (but I am going to try anyways). At one point the mother needs a septic line replaced. The worker who is Mexican is digging up the pipe and is nice and good at his job. There is this pause in everything going on and the mother says he should consider going to community college and that he is smart and this is something he could do to make his life better. Like the true Checkov's gun that this was, years later at just the right time when the mother is giving her kids advice guess who shows up as the manager at a restaurant, after having worked his way through community college and having had his whole life turned around by this one casual conversation. You guessed it. It was ridiculous and truly unreal.
Also, the "boy" couldn't act. This is to be expected when you cast a 4 year old and hope for the best. But he just wasn't any good. But everyone is so enamored with the fact that this took 15 years to film that they neglect that what was filmed is not that good. The film had no point. It had no message. In the end it literally ends by saying life is a series of moments and pans up into the sky.
This lead me to think of the other movie I watched over the Christmas Break - Into the Woods. I love this musical. It is Stephen Sondheim at his lyrical best.
However, I thought that the movie would be horrible (see my thoughts on Les Miz in another column). I cringed at Johnny Depp and Meryl Strep being cast. I wondered if Disney would let the film be as dark as it is and allow the wolf to seriously be the child predator he needs to be when stalking little red riding hood.
I shouldn't have been worried. While it wasn't perfect it was about as good as you could do with the material in a non-live setting. It was remarkably restrained in a way Les Miz was not. The acting was terrific, the singing was good and there is one scene (where two princes try to out do each other) which was about as perfectly cast and staged as it could have been.
However, Richard Linklater should have listened to one of the songs in Into the Woods. At one point in the movie near the end one of the character notes that:
"Oh. If life were made of moments,
Even now and then a bad one!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one."
That was the problem with Boyhood. It was only moments. It wasn't story. It wasn't life.
