Exercise Review

Suture: 67

This is an exercise in juxtaposition between what is plainly evident on the screen and what is evident via the plot. The whole film revolves around the idea that a black man is being mistaken for a white man - and further more, the whole film is shot and black and white and given a mistaken identity vibe headily reminiscent of Hitchcock. Everything about the film is expertly executed - crunchy dialogue, fine, plain-faced acting, and jsut a gorgeous noir take on the Southwestern U.S. The overt absurdity is very effective throughout and makes this a highly enjoyable film to watch, but it is hard not to notice that what you are watching is really an exercise piece, as though you had caught a snippet of a maters studies or their resultant palette rather than a finished product. In othe rwords, it's a little bit style for style's sake, which while highly entertaining and fascinating to watch, keeps this gem from making its way into great movie categories.

Stranger Than Fiction: 30

This flick, on the other hand, was an exercise in attempted absurdity that failed. Actually, two spectacular things about this movie - one, the intro, for two minutes, was spot on, tightly constructed and promised a huge picture (which did not deliver). The second is that Will Ferrel playing the punk song "Whole Wide World" and having Saggy Gyllenhaal knock him over to make out with him was pretty much the textbook romantic comedy turn scene and was perfectly executed within its own stupid universe (egged on by the fact that WWW is a TWO CHORD SONG). That said, even that perfect moment occurred in a sea of stupidity - Maggie's character had no business falling for him other than the convenience of a subplot, and her character in general was a complete waste of time; though she did ti well, you get the feeling someone asked "a couple million dollars for a weekend of work?" and she said " Sure!" Dustin Hoffman's character was worse, and worse still was that this insipid story could be construed by any stretch to be "great literature." The author (Emma Thomson) was raving caricatured moron and Queen Latifah's presence seemed like an effort at target-marketing. The whole "watch" subplot was aimless and dumb and Ferrell's math visions, while pulled off excellently in that intro, wandered about aimlessly and showed up inconsistently for the rest of the movie. For me, this was just an embarrassing film - one that tried to use a gimmick and failed miserably through a complete lack of effort. Cliche-ridden, and clichely bad. But, it did have...