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Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810158179/video/19440043)
Release Date: September 1st, 2010 (limited)
Starring: George Clooney, Bruce Altman, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, Violante Placido
Directed by: Anton Corbijn
Premise: Alone among assassins, Jack is a master craftsman. When a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, he vows to his contact Larry that his next assignment will be his last.
Best title ever.
yeah the title seems to take itself as seriously as the movie, and that's VERY.
what that trailer needs is a good dose of humour, it would be awesome if at the end of the trailer when the title comes up and the somber music just kinda trails off, if they would hold on the title and cut straight to this song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wavpWRK6IX8#t=0m48s) - and it would just go on like that until the song ends. i guarantee EVERYONE would see this movie. also if after every time clooney says something serious, for example after he says "i don't think God is interested in me" it would cut straight to that song.
that would be so awesome. it's like this idea i had with cine (whoever that is) about how much better The Passion of the Christ would have been if at some point near the end of the movie, like right after satan screams into the sky or whatever, they would cut to a static shot of papa smurf..
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.. except of him sort of in mid-action like about to open a door. and just held on that for 20 seconds.
all this thinking about how to make ultra-serious movies better led of course to the final piece in the last official edition of cine and P's drawing corner: Smurf, Interrupted (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9093.msg230944#msg230944) (scroll down a bit, and beware you are entering a xixax BLAST FROM THE PAST!)..
A million film ideas, a million ideas, and this is what Corbijn wants to do? A fucking sniper flick? Fuck that.
Existential sniper flick. It looks very European.
Are you saying those adjs. elevate the concept? Because while I agree they're favorable qualities for some films sometimes to possess, I mean Leon > Shooter, it doesn't automatically redeem a base concept, and I'd still prefer something else from Corbijn.
It reminds me of Jean Pierre Melville homage. If there is a bit of humor hidden in the story, the film will likely bleed into an homage of the Conformist as well. Stylistic filmmakers go through these motions and if a filmmaker today can do a really good rendering of Melville (mixed in with today's elements), I am nothing but excited. Melville's films are candy and still entertaining today. It's a timeless template to base a story on.
Why would 'timeless' be applied to films which have lingered for a stretch of forty years? Relevant, sure, enduring, okay, but timeless? That's not criticism, that's soothsaying. I also don't agree that all stylistic filmmakers need 'go through these motions,' I hate these motions, I hate that filmmakers can become trapped in them for commercial reasons, and that this is what they have to make to put people in the seats, and I hate the passive way they're received. 'It's an existential sniper flick,' oh it's a 'Jean Pierre Melville homage,' I mean these are formulas and conventions. It's idea recycling in Hollywood, it's idea recycling when it's Corbijn too.
Maybe it'll rise above. I haven't even watched the trailer (is he serious? I'm serious). Maybe Martin Booth did some shit for genre like Jonathan Lethem is doing for genre. If it's the year's best movie, so be it. Just imagine a year in which the best of the year is a movie with a premise 'Alone among assassins, Jack is a master craftsman. When a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, he vows to his contact Larry that his next assignment will be his last.'
This is why we're better off judging a book by its cover than trying to judge a movie by its log line. GT's right; even the great directors deal in pastiche all the time, and Corbijn's new enough to directing features that he might still be experimenting, pulling bits and pieces from his influences and laying them over a familiar story as he tries to discover his vision.
I don't see any problem with a director retreading an over-used plot if he brings something new to it. It's that "if" that's the key, and there's simply no way of knowing for sure from the description or from the trailer.
Quote from: Captain of Industry on May 04, 2010, 01:37:31 PM
Why would 'timeless' be applied to films which have lingered for a stretch of forty years? Relevant, sure, enduring, okay, but timeless? That's not criticism, that's soothsaying. I also don't agree that all stylistic filmmakers need 'go through these motions,' I hate these motions, I hate that filmmakers can become trapped in them for commercial reasons, and that this is what they have to make to put people in the seats, and I hate the passive way they're received. 'It's an existential sniper flick,' oh it's a 'Jean Pierre Melville homage,' I mean these are formulas and conventions. It's idea recycling in Hollywood, it's idea recycling when it's Corbijn too.
Maybe it'll rise above. I haven't even watched the trailer (is he serious? I'm serious). Maybe Martin Booth did some shit for genre like Jonathan Lethem is doing for genre. If it's the year's best movie, so be it. Just imagine a year in which the best of the year is a movie with a premise 'Alone among assassins, Jack is a master craftsman. When a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, he vows to his contact Larry that his next assignment will be his last.'
That doesn't make any sense. The purpose of a stylistic filmmaker is to be able to look back and put their spin on various styles from earlier periods. It's almost impossible to name a stylistic filmmaker who doesn't invest in homage of some kind. Even the major filmmakers of the 30/40s or 60s who based their films on new editing styles were still doing homages to others. Hollywood convention throwbacks are about looking back to old styles (which have some merit) but they are also about short cutting a story for convention's sake to be more entertaining and mass consuming. Those elements I dislike more, but taking from filmmakers who challenged audience expectations is another thing.
Your reply mainly sounds like a disagreement with Jean Pierre Melville and if you do want talk about him, I would be all for it.
Quote from: Gold Trumpet on May 04, 2010, 01:56:46 PM
Quote from: Captain of Industry on May 04, 2010, 01:37:31 PM
Why would 'timeless' be applied to films which have lingered for a stretch of forty years? Relevant, sure, enduring, okay, but timeless? That's not criticism, that's soothsaying. I also don't agree that all stylistic filmmakers need 'go through these motions,' I hate these motions, I hate that filmmakers can become trapped in them for commercial reasons, and that this is what they have to make to put people in the seats, and I hate the passive way they're received. 'It's an existential sniper flick,' oh it's a 'Jean Pierre Melville homage,' I mean these are formulas and conventions. It's idea recycling in Hollywood, it's idea recycling when it's Corbijn too.
Maybe it'll rise above. I haven't even watched the trailer (is he serious? I'm serious). Maybe Martin Booth did some shit for genre like Jonathan Lethem is doing for genre. If it's the year's best movie, so be it. Just imagine a year in which the best of the year is a movie with a premise 'Alone among assassins, Jack is a master craftsman. When a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, he vows to his contact Larry that his next assignment will be his last.'
That doesn't make any sense. The purpose of a stylistic filmmaker is to be able to look back and put their spin on various styles from earlier periods. It's almost impossible to name a stylistic filmmaker who doesn't invest in homage of some kind. Even the major filmmakers of the 30/40s or 60s who based their films on new editing styles were still doing homages to others. Hollywood convention throwbacks are about looking back to old styles (which have some merit) but they are also about short cutting a story for convention's sake to be more entertaining and mass consuming. Those elements I dislike more, but taking from filmmakers who challenged audience expectations is another thing.
Your reply mainly sounds like a disagreement with Jean Pierre Melville and if you do want talk about him, I would be all for it.
Well you're replying to material not present in my post, but which I perhaps unintentionally invoked. It's not style I have a problem with, nor am discussing (or even mentioned for that matter), it's thematic content. Existential sniper film and Jean Pierre Melville homage both represent qualifications for dull thematic material in my mind.
And if I am engaging in pessimism against the posters in this thread it's simply because I don't believe there's a lot of mileage to be gained out of a lone wild horse sniper narrative. But I could be wrong, dead wrong.
I looked at your post again and I am replying to what you talked about. You say Corbijn making a Melville homage film is no different than a Hollywood recycling. I dealt with how homage is essential and Hollywood recycling is ultimately different so if Corbijn was doing a Melville homage, it would be different than something generally found in Hollywood. As far as Melville is concerned, the style is the content so both go together. When I see shots of Clooney alone and exercising in isolation, I see something right up Melville's alley.
But I also like Melville and I think we're talking about personal tastes here. There are other European styles that people like and I don't but my personal taste says nothing to how relevant the style is.
i get the sense this is just a poorly edited trailer.
I'm so happy with George Clooney's picks for films since 1998. He's getting smarter and smarter with his choices. Even his "failures" are interesting.
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Awesome.
From my blog:
Too slight for awards but a jarring change of pace from the summer blockbusters The American is the perfect movie to usher in Fall movie season. Iconic photographer Anton Corbijn's sophomore effort is a European anti-thriller starring George Clooney as an aging assassin. Corbijn's first film, the Joy Division biopic Control, was half a great film. Beautifully shot, I remember a long sequence where the camera follows a teenaged Ian Curtis down the street presumably on his way to band practice, as he turns the corner his jacket reads "HATE", I laughed out loud. The next cut reveals him at work at a grocery store. As the band ascended to fame the film seemed to resemble more standard rock bios but I always remember being struck by the beginning.
I was reminded of this during The American, which features many shots of Clooney walking down narrow Italian streets. As if the only way to give the audience the subjective experience of the character is to literally place the camera behind him, since we're given almost no details about his past. His character is a loner, and mostly silent through the film until he falls in love with a prostitute. He plans to get away after one last job, and if you can't see where the movie is going from there you've probably never seen a movie before. For what seems to be a coldly emotional and deliberately paced film, I was never bored. The film is beautifully shot, and Clooney, playing against type (and suppressing his smile), made it interesting to watch.
spoilerish?
it's gerry meets bourne..y. it works really well as a demystification of the assassin/spy movie, and i loved the visuals and overall tone.. the sheer monotony of building a gun, and living a life of looking over your shoulder. it is definitely the kind of movie that asks you to step forward and draw your own meaning from its depths, as well as fill in the extended silences with your own wandering thoughts. it's also very good at feeding you information subtly without you even knowing it in some cases. for the most part i think it's a very good movie, but it does have several gaping flaws:
1. the relationship with the prostitute is woefully underdeveloped. we know her for about 2 minutes before she becomes, like, the answer to everything in clooney's life. it's pretty unbelievable, but worse than that, it's not compelling.
!spoils!
2. the ending is very disappointing and blah. nothing new, and doesn't take advantage of the rest of the movie.
3. that cg moth is ridiculous. why did it have to flap its wings like that? ruined the moment.
The prostitute is really hot and Gerry was the worst movie ever.
Every positive review I read for this movie is like someone trying to come up with excuses why it's it's not boring. Taut gets thrown around, which is never a good thing. Taut and emotional means boring and lifeless.
it's boring and lifeless for a reason though. like as a counter to other spy movies. and i genuinely found that interesting. gerry's boring and lifeless too because it's a realistic portrayal of being stalked by death in the wilderness.. unintentional boringness, eg. green zone, is what sucks.
I liked this a lot and didn't find it boring at all. I think that's cause I prepared myself for it's boringness and when it wasn't, I found it action fucking packed. It's slow, but it has to be. The gorgeous cinematography helps you move along.
Holy crap, the prostitute was hot. I mean, she was almost too pretty. You couldn't even look at her. Something that was very believable about the film is that a gorgeous Italian prostitute falls in love with George Clooney. If there is a girl who doesn't know what love is, it would probably be an Italian prostitute and if there was a man to show her it, it would probably be Clooney. Very believable plotline.
I liked the ending. I wasn't expecting it and it worked for me.
See it if only for the hot prostitute.
Quote from: picolas on September 04, 2010, 10:28:53 PM
spoilerish?
it's gerry meets bourne..
close to a quote I read:
"If Terrence Malick were to put his gloss on Jason Bourne, the result might be something like The American."
I found that last week while seaching for malick news, only that this was said at chritianitytoday.com :yabbse-undecided:
anyway, with your reviews my expectations went through the roof.
Local paper called this "Bourne meets Antonioni." I like that and that's kinda what I felt watching it.
this movie is awful. i'm curious as to what meaning you drew from its depths, picolas, because i found it to be shallow and vapid. a melville movie it is not. the prostitute is the best part.
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i would've assumed "The Fat American"
or "The American't"
lol chris tucker is the too hot to look at prostitute.
You know how Descartes said "I think therefore I am"... well really he should've said I think I'm great therefore I am.
It's not a bad film per se, but god damn the pretention. Also, too many plot holes, again. That lady assassin was definitely the worst assassin ever (she goes to the toilet to load her gun, really?) and the car chase between the little motorbike vs the car is very lol. They go at like 25-30mph AT BEST. Melville it pretends to be, Melville it is not!
Slow, methodical, and yet piercingly engaging this existential drama about a hit man shivered my soul. Shades of Malick and Antonioni come to the surface throughout this flick and maybe the director did that on purpose.
I can't complain all that much about this film which seems to embody everything including an empty soul. I was sad I ultimately didn't connect with any of the characters... I wasn't expected to do so but I was hoping against hope that I could. Often like I hope to connect with people on here but more often than not all I get is viciousness obnoxiousness and complete indifference. Anyway, George's character is very good at what he does but he doesn't seem to enjoy it. Any of it. I guess he's embodying the stereotypical hit man persona to anyone he interacts with because a: thats what people expect him to be and B: like one character says if you make friends in this business it can often badly. The only people he doesn't do this with are the prostitutes where we see fleeting glances of compassion.
Really beautiful cinematography but I wasn't expecting horrendous after watching that trailer. It makes me want to go to these exotic places. I loved how they used the color red during the sex scenes. It seemed appropriate-like anguish thrown upon us from the screen unto the audience.
It reminded me of Antonioni's film 'The Passenger' for some reason and not just because both of them are slow and have a American Actor living/working abroad. At first it was tough to realize Clooney as this character just like it was hard to picture Tom Hanks in 'Road To Perdition' but he pulled it off. I am going to encourage more people to see this picture who don't live on this message board. Hopefully they will embrace this side of colony and it will get them to go see more meditative films.
Definitely was trying to be something in the vein of The Passenger. I really wanted to like it, but in the end it pales in comparison to Antonioni's movie without really offering anything new...and comes off more as that movie's ghost than a worthy successor. This is the problem with filmmakers attempting to create merely updated versions of a past success. The shooting style of The American is sparse and cold, but clearly through the eyes of someone not creating the reality of the movie as they personally see it, but shooting in attempt to capture the vision of a filmmaker who isn't them. Ultimately Corbjin's movie feels like a clinical exercise rather than something genuine and this is where I feel it fails. In contrast, a movie like Black Swan synthesizes past tropes to create something of a mutation that hasn't been seen before, even if its ideas can be found in other movies, and so feels fresh. I can't knock Corbjin for trying and Clooney is a good cast in the role but at the end of the day it wasn't really special.
It's a shame anything nice is ever said about Antonioni's The Passenger. I still resent that movie for how much it simplified a great style and I resent the comments which lump it with every other great Antonioni movie like they are all one and the same.
I like The Passenger a lot, maybe mostly for its photography, but also for its suggestion of crime movie elements in a story largely not about that. It's also fun to see a foreign filmmaker doing his thing with a major American actor and seeing how he attempts to communicate his ideas in a slightly more mainstream way. It's no La Notte but trying to compare those two is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.
Regardless of being "major" or "minor" Antonioni, it's still 'real' Antonioni in the sense that it came straight from his brain and wasn't an attempt to emulate someone else's style, which is the important thing in the context of what I was trying to say.
Well, I don't know what "real" Antonioni means. Even if he loved the film, the filmmaking is very subpar shooting for him. When he transitioned out of Italy and made his first film in England with Blow Up, he showed his style did not have to be measured back to film a story outside of his Italian themed subject of soullessness in modern society. I understand Antonioni maybe wanting to change and switch up his filmmaking, but throughout his career (Passenger included), he been attracted to stories about modern lifelessness. Why deaden his filmmaking focus by doing something which was so basic for him? All the stylistic choices in the film just imitate his old style. It's not good.
The shame is that the end moments in the Passenger prove he was still capable of great filmmaking. The film completely reverses to a shot out of his older films and it's masterful, but it's just the last shot. It felt like an obligatory call back to his great style to remind his fans he could still do it if he wanted to, but he just chose not to. There are defenders of this style change, but I wonder, how does it improve upon the film more than his previous style? Even if it would have been a continuation, focusing on the old style would have made for a better film.
I can't argue with your preference for his movies that were trying to reach bounds he hadn't explored before over than the ones that were treading familiar territory. By 'real Antonioni' I mean exactly what I said above, in that The Passenger was shot with the intention of communicating the personal (original) worldview of the filmmaker who made it, rather than being an attempt to copy someone else's style and thereby losing the soul of that style in the process. You may still think The Passenger lacks soul compared to Antonioni's other works, but in relation to The American it has a hell of a lot more.
Soul isn't even the right word. Right this second I can't think of a better one.
Fair points. There are filmmakers I know who lessened their degrees of filmmaking but even their lesser work looked like great stuff compared to what was being made after. Objective arguments can hang in the balance of subjective viewing of other stuff. Definitely happens.
I love when conversations like this are happening. I don't have the intellect or the know about it to ever engage in a talk about film like this, but I always enjoy it when reading others do it. :bravo:
Hahaha same feeling here Stefen
---
i think a lot about The American these days, how it totally failed at being great while being always so near at all times. Often when a movie doesn't work it's pretty easy to know the problem but here, no idea. There's one, but i can't see it.
I finally finished watching this last night (it took me three nights over the course of a week). Except for the immediate reaction of being bored, I went back and forth on how I felt about it. It does feature really pretty cinematography, and that ridiculously beautiful woman (who was unfortunately used in what is probably the most cliched role in storytelling history). I realized after a while that everything I liked about it was the kind of stuff that you can see in car commercials.
I wasn't bored because of the slow pace. I actually liked the pacing of it; I just didn't care about anything that was going on. One reason might be because I don't really care for westerns and this movie was basically just a western in sleek clothing. Everything was incredibly obvious. The fact that the story has Clooney's only two meaningful human interactions be with a PRIEST and a HOOKER shows how on the nose it all is, while carrying this weird pretense of subtlety that I couldn't take seriously.
Comparisons to Antonioni/The Passenger are superficial, and the word "existential" does not accurately apply to any aspect of this film. I only mention those two things because they're being used in a lot of reviews of this film, and I can't help but feel like people are seeing things in the movie that are just not there.
And it's not that there's nothing there. It's not a meaningless movie. It's just that most of what's there is trite and obvious. Hollow. The film wears its themes on its sleeve, but kind of holds onto them for the sake of a sense of weight or profundity, without ever really being interested in actually delving into any of it.
I think there were some criticisms of the movie saying that there wasn't enough action or enough stuff going on, but I completely disagree. I think there was way too much going on, which killed the "meditative" quality of the movie for me. Every time I got close to any sort of meditative state, the movie got sucked into the worst of the genre's conventions and handled them with total mediocrity. The villain also really sucked--everything he said was copied and pasted from another movie.
And "Mister Butterfly?" WHAT!
This is one of those movies that I like less the more I think about it.