In the Cut

Started by NEON MERCURY, October 09, 2003, 03:59:04 PM

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#30
November 21, 2003, 04:52:15 PM
sounds great!  cant believe i missed this one :roll:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Finn

#31
December 11, 2003, 04:30:12 PM
A Slight Redemption of "In the Cut"

I've been stressing the fact that In the Cut is a bad movie lately. Although I don't think it quite works, I have to say that this movie has stayed with me for a long, long time after seeing it. Campion has delivered probably the most haunting failure this year. There is a lot of brilliance to the film as far as the directing and performances are concerned although the screenplay doesn't really work. There are tons of images that have stayed with me after having seen it. Ultimately, maybe it's worth seeing because of it's strong points. I just can't get this Thumbs Down movie out of my head (not because of Meg Ryan).

And just for the record, I can't seem to get Que Sera Sera out of my head either.
Typical US Mother: "Remember what the MPAA says; Horrific, Deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words."

SHAFTR

#32
December 11, 2003, 10:10:33 PM
I want to see it only out of curiousity (what is so bad about it? meg ryan naked, etc)
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

godardian

#33
December 12, 2003, 12:37:12 AM
Amy Taubin makes a good (if equivocal) case for revisiting In the Cut in the new Film Comment (the one w/ Uma Thurman on the cover). Takes Hoberman to task for being so gleefully negative in his review.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

#34
March 01, 2004, 01:44:18 PM
Quote from: Fernando

Obsession. To say that Jane Campion herself is obsessed with the subject might be going a bit too far, although extreme emotions and psychological anxiety seem to consume not only the stories the Oscar-winning director finds worth telling, but also the ones she most admires by other directors. Born in New Zealand, Campion started out making short films before earning international critical acclaim with The Piano, about a man so intent on seducing his neighbor's mail-order bride that he buys her prized piano and offers it back to her one key at a time.

Such compulsive attachments also drive Campion's latest film, In the Cut, a thriller that feels anything but routine in this director's hands. Where the damsel in distress would normally be, Campion positions an assertive and sexually aggressive female writer (Meg Ryan) who knowingly puts herself in dangerous situations. Campion's independent heroine is entirely unphased by the fact that the police detective (Mark Ruffalo) she's intent on seducing may also be a serial killer. That decision alone has already polarized the critics, who seem unsure whether to embrace the idea of such a sexually assertive woman in an exploitation genre. Here, the director explains five films that obsess her and the way they shaped the attitude, realism and acting style of In the Cut.

The Conformist
(1970; dir: Bernardo Bertolucci, starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli)
The Conformist is one of my favorite films. It's an amazingly confident film by a young film director, so stylistically strong and radical and gutsy. At the time in Italian cinema, there was so much support for that kind of filmmaking. Sometimes you don't want to revisit your favorite films in case you kill them off, but it had been such a long time since I saw it that I thought it was time to take another look and maybe understand something different this time. What I took away from watching it again was that haunting quality, the way Bertolucci uses these images as a container for this whole poetic sensibility. It's basically like a poem. When you go to make your own movies, you think about the films that you loved and what influenced you, and you're thinking, 'Will this be an opportunity for me to express that back?' With In the Cut, one of the things I kept saying was, 'We're going to solve the mystery of the story. We're going to find out who did it, but we're also going to put these two characters in a position where they can perhaps start their love affair.' In a way, I wanted the apparent plot stories to be over, but I wanted there to be a sense of mystery and a haunting that comes from the film beyond that, an atmosphere, and I guess one of the expressions of that would be The Conformist.

Taxi Driver
(1976; dir: Martin Scorsese, starring: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd)
Taxi Driver is a seminal film for me. I really think that it's perfect. It's so amazing, so individual and so memorable on so many different levels: Travis Bickle, Harvey Keitel is amazing, the performance of Jodie Foster, and the humor, the city, the poetry of it. The characters are really present and flawed, and Scorsese himself takes on a really interesting cameo. He's obsessive, and [the movie is about] people with obsessions that are odd and strange. It's brilliant, the way he creates a hero who is in fact a madman. Interestingly enough, you always think of it as a very gritty film, but when you look at it again, the movie also uses these slow-motion shots of smoke coming up from the subways and the taxi drifting through the city like a shark. It was actually quite poetic in the way that Scorsese fetishized the taxi. With In the Cut, it's 100 percent shot in New York. We didn't create any of that. Our cinematographer, Dion Beebe, loves photography, and he's a real influence on how the movie looks. He's got a beautiful aesthetic, and I get it completely. I think he's the master and I'm the slave in this relationship. I also like it when you can sit back and moderately make decisions about what you're going to look at, but that wasn't what we chose for this film because I was adapting a book which was first person, so we told it from an intimate point of view.

The Godfather
(1972; dir: Francis Ford Coppola, starring: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino)
The Godfather was a huge influence for me on the acting style of the film. The Godfather is a film I revisit regularly because I really think it's a classic, and I'm bowing and worshipping at Coppola's throne. What I appreciate about the acting is the way you look at a character like Robert Duvall's and think, 'What's he doing? He's not doing anything.' But whatever he's doing, it comes from such a deep and focused place about his job with that family, it takes you way beyond the scene and puts roots down in the story. You see a tree standing up and you know there are roots down there, but you can't see them; it's like that. There's no indicating in the acting, and the movie is very graceful in the way it handles violence. On In the Cut, I said to everybody, 'There's no indicating in this film. Don't gasp and say, "I see the tattoo!" We'll do that for you.' The truth is, in life, if you see something and you don't want someone to know, they're not going to know. I want the audience to understand that we're dealing with people who can keep secrets, that you don't always know what people are thinking. You can have your assumptions about it, but you can be really wrong, the way Frannie was really wrong in the movie.

The French Connection
(1971, dir: William Friedkin, starring: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider)
I really like the way that [director] William Friedkin looked at the social aspect of the detectives compared to the crooks. The cops are [treated like] lower-class people. They get paid badly. They have to sit out in the freezing cold and eat a hamburger or a hot dog while the crooks they're trying to catch are having glamorous French cuisine. It's such a great portrait of cops, the individual quality of them, just the focus that Gene Hackman has. He's like an eye dog. He's obsessive, the way he goes into that mode where he won't let go. I love what [screenwriter] Susanna Moore did [when adapting her novel In the Cut] because she actually researched her cops. She drove around for a year with them, so the voices of those detectives is very authentic. If you go and ask real detectives, 'Do you talk like that in bars? Do you talk about women like that?' they'll tell you, 'Yes.'

Bad Timing
(1980, dir: Nicolas Roeg, starring: Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell)
You can't get it now, but I introduced a movie called Bad Timing to an audience in Toronto, and we had a group discussion about it. It's a Nicolas Roeg movie with Art Garfunkel. It's an amazing performance, absolutely incredible. I think Nicolas Roeg is one of the great unsung cinema heroes. He also directed Performance, which was a very revolutionary film. I saw it with my dad back when I had bobby socks on, and my eyes were on stalks. It made you feel like there was a world made of all sorts of illogical but fascinating observations and realities. Performance was very provocative to me even as a child growing up. Bad Timing followed about 10 years later, and it's a meditation on obsessive relationships. It's a story told backwards or in flashes, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal or something. It starts with Theresa Russell being rushed to the hospital from a suicide attempt and eventually reveals this relationship that so confounds the protagonists -- the Art Garfunkel character and Theresa Russell -- that is drives them crazy. (Also, Harvey Keitel's in that one, too.)

How did I miss this? Of all directors, SHE picks the coolest 5 films.

Also, I just heard a rumor re: In The Cut directors version dvd -- CU Meg Ryan cunny??!

Confirm/deny?

Just strikes me as odd, the actress who freaked out about her 2 second nipple shot in the Doors...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

#35
March 01, 2004, 01:57:32 PM
It just goes to show, though, that good influences do not equal a good film. This movie, along with Party Monster, were my most miserable failures of 2003.

However, if I were Meg Ryan, I'm sure I'd feel much more comfortable revealing my genitals for Jane Campion than for Oliver Stone.

Do people really find Ryan sexy? Too bubbly-little-girl for me; or in this case, too bubbly-little-girl-putting-on-a-serious-face. It is, um, not a great performance. Ruffalo wins the In the Cut sexiness contest, but nobody in the film really appeals on even that level.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

#36
March 01, 2004, 02:00:11 PM
I'm more interested in the fact that a safely A-list Hollywood star would do a hardcore shot (if it is in fact true).

Kinda reminds of that scene in Autofocus:

BOB: ...we could get Sandra Dee..

JOHN: D'ya think she'd do it?

BOB: Oh, she'd do it! She's an actress, Carpy.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

NEON MERCURY

#37
April 07, 2004, 01:41:35 PM
Quote from: SoNowThen.

Also, I just heard a rumor re: In The Cut directors version dvd -- CU Meg Ryan cunny??!

Confirm/deny?

no close up but you can she is fully nude and you see at one point head to toe...but its darkly lighted.......



as for the film.....an yes i feel a little compelled to defend my tread.......but as for "one of the worst films of the year"??... :bs:!!!.............

spoilers.........................................................

my reasons for liking this:

-beautifully shot.....phucking gorgeous...its lurid, dark, autumnesque, ..and the handheld was done right..like soderbergh.....i still can't get the look of the film out of my head......

-i actaully thought the "lilith fair" soundtrack worked for me......

-both mark and meg did fine jobs..

-bonus shot:..during the ice skating flashbacks there s a scene when some dude ice skates over some chick's legs and cuts right through them...reminded me of a sick lynch joke....and that gets bonus points...also, it would make a killer avatar for someone.....
-i liked how grisly the murders were..and when juxtaposed w/ the cinematography it got under my skin..anmd worked well...this may be a by-the-numbers thriller....but .it was fresh because of the atmosphere the film surrounds the viewer..like se7en...works brilliabntly from the look of the film....but still se7en is not a by th enumbers story for a thriller...but no one can deny that part of se7en's allure is its cinematography...

...so i would like to point out that this film (along w/ wonderland)...doesn't deserve the sh*t it got.....i suggest at least a rental.....fo rme its one of those films after watching that i immediately want to listen to the commentary track......
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