Mick LaSalle

2012 at the Movies: they were too damn long

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Waiting for THE MASTER to end

San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle recently wrote “Very few movies need to be longer than two hours. Directors should make movies, not take hostages.” He’s right.

Some filmmakers seem to have the mistaken view that length conveys importance.  It does not.  What makes good movies good – unpredictable plot, intriguing characters,  evocative settings and singular visuals – can be accomplished in 90 minutes.  A movie only needs to be longer if the sweep of the story requires it.

Sometimes it is necessary, but length itself never makes a movie better.  It does make a poor movie more unbearable.  The opening sentence of my comments on the ponderous The Dark Knight Rises was, “Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back.”  A much better franchise movie, Skyfall took two hours 23 minutes – but how much was really the action spectacle and Bond coolness that we were looking for? The Master was two hours 24 minutes long, but only the first 110 minutes was good; a potential masterpiece just fizzled out, trying to find an ending.

For some movies, being overlong is the fatal flaw.  I wrote about A Royal Affair: “It’s a romance and tragedy of operatic depth, and, unfortunately, operatic length.  It would make a gripping 90-minute film, but A Royal Affair slogs through 137 minutes.   As a result the sharpness of the tragedy becomes dulled into mere grimness.”

Its 2 hours and 47 minutes duration was the only imperfection in In the Family.  I wrote: “There’s probably a 130 minute indie hit somewhere inside In the Family.”  If it lost half an hour, In the Family would have made my list of the year’s best movies.

Of course, an epic like Lawrence of Arabia needs to be long. That’s why this year’s Cloud Atlas needed over two hours to cover its six story threads across six centuries. With this year’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the leisurely pace and long length were key to its hypnotic appeal.

But my current pick for top movie of 2012, The Kid with a Bike, is only 87 minutes long.  Looking at this year’s other best movies, Elena, Bernie, End of Watch, Headhunters, Moonrise Kingdom, Rampart, and The Sessions, are all well under two hours.   (At 122 minutes, Silver Linings Playbook, is also under two hours if you leave during the end credits.)

Hereafter and the Critics

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Bryce Dallas Howard and Matt Damon in Hereafter

I’m surprised at the wide range of critical reaction to Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, a film that I admire.   Hereafter now has a middling MetaCritic score of 56 – the same score as Jackass 3D.

Comfortingly, three of the critics that I respect the most reacted to Hereafter as I did.  Metacritic assigned 100 points to reviews by Roger Ebert and Mick LaSalle and 90 points to a review by A.O. Scott.  But enough midrange reviews along with a smattering of  negative reviews brought Hereafter‘s average down.

I read several of the lukewarm and disapproving reviews.  Some didn’t find the supernatural premise credible enough to suspend disbelief.  Some expected an answer about what comes after death.  Some were disappointed by the languid pace after the rock-em sock-em opening sequence.   I think that they all missed the point.  The movie isn’t really about whether there is an afterlife.  It’s about how we living humans deal with mortality with grief, fear, avoidance, faith, questioning and belief or non-belief in an Afterlife.  The richness of the movie is in the superb depiction of actual humans doing what we humans do – including grieving, longing, wondering, scamming, searching and ignoring.

As to the Afterlife, the one character in the movie who really knows that there is one, can’t work hard enough to escape any contact with it.  What does that say?

As a side note, virtually all the reviews, even the most negative ones, praised the tsunami sequence at the beginning.  Everybody loves a good tidal wave.

The Tillman Story

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Pat and Kevin Tillman in Afghanistan

The more I think about The Tillman Story, the more I admire it.  And I am increasingly grateful that Michael Moore didn’t make this movie and degrade it into a screed.  Instead, Director Amir Bar-Lev avoids the simplistic and satisfying formulas and respects his subject matter and the audience by letting the story speak for itself.

I thought I knew the story. Tillman left the fame and wealth of an NFL career to enlist in the Army post-911.  He was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan.  The Army reported that he was killed while heroically charging the enemy to save his comrades.  It was later revealed that he was killed by fire from his comrades.   Still later, it became clear that the heroic death story was immediately concocted by the military for spin control or, worse, propaganda.

I didn’t know that Tillman predicted that the Army would propagandize his death and smuggled out to his wife the documentation of his wish for a civilian funeral.

I didn’t know that Tillman crouched on a hill watching the bombing of Baghdad, and said, “This war is so fucking illegal.”

I didn’t know that Tillman was with the team that waited hours to “rescue” captured soldier Jessica Lynch (abandoned by her captors) until a film crew arrived.

The US military made a huge miscalculation:  they assumed that the family that produced someone with Pat Tillman’s values would be satisfied with a phony narrative of cartoonish heroism.

The Tillman Story weaves three stories together: the making of Pat Tillman, how he died in Afghanistan and his family’s struggle to pull the sheets back on the US military’s cover-up.  At its core, it is the story of people who insist on truth dealing with a system that operates on perception.

And here is a sharp insight from Mick LaSalle:

“By the way, “The Tillman Story” has an R rating because of language. Think about that one, too: Lies are rated G and can be heard around the clock on television, but try saying the truth with the proper force and you end up with a restricted audience.”
Here is Mick LaSalle’s full review.

Mick LaSalle on Toy Story 3

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The staff meeting does not go well.

 

Mick LaSalle has a great insight on Toy Story 3 and the fates to be suffered by the toys:

“Thrown out is the equivalent of death.

“Being put in the attic is the equivalent of retirement.

“Relocating is the equivalent of changing jobs.”

Read his blog here.  This post also links to his review.

My point here is that Toy Story 3 is BOTH a great children’s movie AND a great movie for adults, too.  I regret that lots of childless adults won’t see it.  Adults should see this movie – at times it is thoughtful, profound, moving and hilarious.  Hey, take a date to this movie – it’ll make her/him laugh and admire your movie taste.