Revolutionary Road

[cinemanarchist]

I guess you're right...but even my Mom couldn't make that dialogue palatable.

"-I'll bet you're really good at it...
-At what?
-Reading"

Sorry...didn't mean to sully the Revolutionary Road thread with this The Reader nonsense.

[Stefen]

I'd still, ya know, even with the beard. I'd find her a very handsome woman.

[cinemanarchist]

Agreed. I love how she was supposed to be ugly in Little Children. Oh, how I love "movie" ugly.

[Stefen]

Little Children is where she was the hottest. She's a little thicker and really dumpy. Plus she's a huge slut in that flick.

[Fernando]

Kate Winslet is one of the most beautiful women in the history of film. I'd just like to say that.

yes and

Little Children is where she was the hottest.

yes.

Just wanted to say that. Actually no. I'm looking forward to this and The Reader; she was yesterday with Leno and my god is she beautiful, she looks way better now than in her titanic days.


Actually, wasn't here yesterday a post from Mac??? something about the reader thread not having posts or something, anyway, maybe mac should merge this with the reader. The Revolutionary Reader.

[Stefen]

Let's just nuke both threads and create a thread titled, "My god, this Kate Winslet is beautiful"

Actually, I want to see this movie. I just sometimes find it very difficult to take Leo seriously as a respectable adult.

[MacGuffin]

Let's just nuke both threads and create a thread titled, "My god, this Kate Winslet is beautiful"

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=5779.0

[Gamblour.]

Ok, I wish I had more time, and I will write more later, but as the first person who apparently has seen this film and written about here, I will say this:

This was mindblowing, brutal. I was in awe of Sam Mendes. This is his masterpiece. There was one sequence in the film that was so gutsy and visceral, so confident in cinema, that I started to cry out of joy and sadness. I haven't seen something like this since There Will Be Blood. Fucking gut level. That I haven't heard more about this film getting nominated is a travesty. Leo fucking delivers. I mean, he really goes somewhere else. His rage is bloodcurdling. Kate is her usual amazing.

See this movie.

[Kal]

Whoever said something bad about Sam Mendes in the past is a fucking moron. This film is brilliant in every possible way, especially when it comes to directing. Leonardo DiCaprio continues to be my favorite actor, and Kate Winslet is as amazing and beautiful as everyone else here has been saying, and as she's always been.

[©brad]

i don't know, i didn't love it. maybe i'm just on fuck suburbia overload (cities don't have all the answers either you know) but while watching this all i could think about was how mad men does everything this is trying to do, but better. mad men feels real and authentic to the period while still contemporary and relevant. this felt kind of outdated and tired. and the dialogue, so ridden with subtext and exposition, was a little hard to stomach. i liked how theatrical it was (hell it might have made a better play) and leo and kate, while a little over the top at times, definitely bring it. there are some beautiful moments and some wonderfully haunting imagery, particularly the shot of leo standing idly amongst the other suited ants in grand central station, but by and large i kept wanting to just watch mad men instead..

[modage]

i agree totally with cbrad.

[picolas]

semi-spoils

me too. it's a cut above perdition/jarhead which i really disliked, and it looks technically great most of the time, and the performances are quite good for the most part, and there are even a few great moments.. but i didn't love this at all. the choice to make everything so perfect, so pronounced, gave it an overall inhuman quality.. and not in a a good, theme-developing, trapped in a loveless marriage kind of way. i can see the book being much better because the motivations are so thought-driven/internal. i felt awful for leo/kate, but i didn't get the sense they were victims of suburbia or even that their problems were that complicated. i just felt like they weren't honest with each other over and over and obviously it tore them apart. it also didn't help that we barely saw a shred of their happy time together. and something about the score bugged me.. it felt really.. unsympathetic. like "this is what happens. this is what happens. it was bound to happen. the end." sam mendes has yet to come close to american beauty. i think all his films since then have suffered from this same relentless perfection. it plays against real drama, real stakes, real characters, etc.

[bonanzataz]

well, i really liked it. little slow in the beginning, but then when you get to the halfway point, it moves. probably also took a while for me to get into it because i was not used the such theatricality in modern film, especially in the performances. they DID act like they were in a play, but this was not necessarily a bad thing. very classy actually. loved how they used colors, especially green.

sort of spoilers
as far as not digging the suburbia sucks premise, people have problems in cities too, yeah, who knows if the marriage would have worked in paris, but that wasn't the point. it wasn't about just leaving to go to a city, it was about getting out of a routine. living in suburbia is a certain type of boring repetition, but paris would have been new and afforded them a life they could not have had in america, even if there was a new kind of repetition involved. emotionally, the story carried weight for me. but then, i've never seen madmen.

major spoilers
i didn't want kate winslet to die, but i guess she had to. pffft. also, i think the movie could've ended with the neighbor being like "i don't want to talk about the whatelys anymore." those last two scenes seemed superfluous, but that last one made the audience laugh (but they laughed at the WEIRDEST shit).

[Gamblour.]

Did you mean to write something under "major spoilers"?

minor spoilers
I've only seen the pilot to Mad Men, so I can't fully defend against a comparison to the show. But what I found refreshing about this was that we're not just being presented with 50s speak and taboos, I mean we're never being nudged when we see Kate Winselt drinking and smoking like a chimney even though we know she's pregnant. The consequence of all that isn't kitschy and never played up. cbrad, when you say "contemporary and relevant," I don't know why it needs to be contemporary. It's set in the 50s, based on Yates' book written in '61, it's very much about the post-war anxiety and the desperation for security that people bought into. It's a very critical look at the complacency that suburbia is rooted in. And the relevance of the film lies, for me, in the quelling of ambition and dreams, and the consequences of trapping yourself because of money or a passionless existence with promise.

Does the film need to be compared to Mad Men? It seems that Mad Men would owe a debt to a work like Revolutionary Road. And even then, the themes, the ideas, the fights, the dialogue of Yates are all there, from the actual period. Mad Men is more about focusing issues interesting to us, today, through the nostalgic prism of the 60s (I could be way off on this, right?), it seems. Whereas the verisimilitude of the film comes from the raw value of Yates' work. People yelled and screamed and were violent in their fights, in defending their dreams, and they are today; that's the relevance. Calling it outdated denies the work from being what it was and is.

And pic, I didn't see the perfection you seem to have noticed. If anything, the film had a rougher edge to it, more handheld work, less painterly lighting in favor of stark, realistic portrayals. More overblown backgrounds and pitch black interiors. The argument in front of the headlights, Leo alone in the house. One shot stands out where Kate is sitting at the table, and John (the mathematician) is yelling at her, but the shot never racks to him, it just stays on Kate. He's foregone more handsome camerawork in favor of a cinema that visually emotes, that sticks with Kate because she's not really listening, and his ideas come through in that. I felt like he had finally given up this perfection you're talking about.

I think you're right bonanzataz, it's not just about going to Paris. It could have been anything, it could have been wanting to make a film or open a store selling pies or whatever, and that's why it's not this urban vs. suburban. It's about passion vs. decay.

[©brad]

Does the film need to be compared to Mad Men? It seems that Mad Men would owe a debt to a work like Revolutionary Road.

for sure. i guess it's an unfair criticism. the book did come out first, and its fair to say that things like mad men and american beauty are the ones that are derivative. still, i would argue that these works tackle the same themes in more dynamic and original ways than this film adaptation did.

cbrad, when you say "contemporary and relevant," I don't know why it needs to be contemporary. It's set in the 50s, based on Yates' book written in '61, it's very much about the post-war anxiety and the desperation for security that people bought into.

it doesn't. i wasn't really referring to the content/themes themselves, but moreso the execution. the heavy-handed, subtext heavy dialogue felt old and forced to me. i would assume the book benefits because much of what is going on with frank and april is internalized, no? do they really say lines like "we bought into the same hopeless delusion" and "our whole existence here is based on the premise that we're special" in the book? even if they did, you didn't really need to be that blatant in the film.