In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it for decades. Never shy about out-sized ambition, Coppola's movie (reviewed on this blog) took precedence for me. Don't take that as any reflection on Wild Robot. As of this writing, Wild Robot boasted a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll have to catch up with it.
Now for the rest of the week:
Ibelin, a documentary from director Benjamin Ree, surprised me. Generally, when cultural critics discuss gaming, they emphasize the way gaming can isolate young people and discourage personal communication. Ree presents an alternative view, telling the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25. Lonely in reality and increasingly debilitated, Steen sought refuge in the World of Warcraft, where he assumed the identity of Lord Ibelin Redmore. Steen's body may have betrayed him, but online, he became a muscular character with a well-developed sense of compassion. Ree ably depicts the gap between role-playing and reality. Better, though, he shows how the gulf can be bridged, how two worlds ("the virtual" and "the real," for want of better terms) can nourish each other. Using animation to depict Steen's Warcraft journey, bits from Steen's blog, and interviews, Ree creates a moving story about a young man who couldn't beat the odds, but who did something meaningful with the hand he was dealt: He affected the lives of others.
Then there's Lee, a movie about the great World War II photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. Directed by Ellen Kuras, Lee tells the story of a woman who began her career as a model and fashion photographer for Vogue before convincing the editor of the magazine's British edition to turn her into a war correspondent. You'd think that by now, filmmakers would have tired of structuring films around interviews. Lee doesn't help itself by tying a chronologically presented story to an interview in which Lee answers questions from a character played by Josh O'Connor. The movie begins with Lee's pre-war days in France, where she spent time as part of an avant-garde circle that included the editor of Vogue Paris (Marion Cotillard). In France, she also met English painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) with whom she developed a long-term relationship. The heart of the movie involves Lee's struggle to gain access to the fighting and later, to German death camps, where she took a career-defining series of photographs. It wasn't easy for a woman to break into the war correspondent ranks. When the Brits refused to give Lee combat credentials, she used her American citizenship to access the fighting. On the French and German fronts, Lee traveled with another American photographer Andy Stamberg's David E. Scherman, who worked for Life magazine. Difficult either to pan or praise, Lee sheds light on an important career, but a cumbersome structure weighs it down. Winslet goes all in on playing a tough, sexually uninhibited woman who refuses to be deterred, but the movie underlines its themes and feels stuck in a biopic ghetto where its story too often feels locked in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment