Post by Capo on Feb 16, 2009 19:51:24 GMT
Minor spoilers...
Goodnotgreat. Very good in places.
Ceylan gave a 90-minute Q&A talk with Geoff Andrew after the screening I attended, and it may have been a language problem (a translator was present but hardly used; a few audience members exchanged words with Ceylan in Turkish) but I wasn't convinced of his intentions. True, some of the questions were a bit naff ("Could you elaborate on your choice of colour palette for the film?"), but he seemed quite elusive and vague ("It's all to do with instinct. I just choose it because it feels right.")
Said palette works well in the film, however intended; it's full of sickly greens and yellows. His framing is as claustrophobic as in Climates, too, perhaps even more so; and he's doing lovely stuff with the soundtrack (Geoff Andrew described it as expressionistic, but Ceylan said he doesn't like that term or the style it denotes).
It's a conscious step away from his autobiographical stuff, and as it happens I think the script (a 'crime story', though it's not really) is a good one, but it's quite exhausting at times, trying to tell (or follow) a story dealing with people evading their responsibilities and escaping their guilt with the same pregnant close-ups and elongated silences as his other films.
In this sense, it's a typical genre film by an arthouse director; I had the same problems as with The Man From London. It's interesting to see how these guys go about telling a seemingly straightforward story, though.
Major spoilers...
There are two moments in which the 'ghost' of a lost son appears, once to his brother, once to his father. The first came off a bit hackneyed, full of a mysterious figure (I thought it was an alien) emerging from an out-of-focus lens; the second, the way it happens, is a complete shocker and hit a chord with me right away. But it's ruined when Ceylan cuts away to something and then returns to the same shot - it would have been much more powerful as a stand-alone moment.
Feb 16, 2009 18:45:44 GMT RNL said:
I'll go see Three Monkeys sometime this week though. How was it?Goodnotgreat. Very good in places.
Ceylan gave a 90-minute Q&A talk with Geoff Andrew after the screening I attended, and it may have been a language problem (a translator was present but hardly used; a few audience members exchanged words with Ceylan in Turkish) but I wasn't convinced of his intentions. True, some of the questions were a bit naff ("Could you elaborate on your choice of colour palette for the film?"), but he seemed quite elusive and vague ("It's all to do with instinct. I just choose it because it feels right.")
Said palette works well in the film, however intended; it's full of sickly greens and yellows. His framing is as claustrophobic as in Climates, too, perhaps even more so; and he's doing lovely stuff with the soundtrack (Geoff Andrew described it as expressionistic, but Ceylan said he doesn't like that term or the style it denotes).
It's a conscious step away from his autobiographical stuff, and as it happens I think the script (a 'crime story', though it's not really) is a good one, but it's quite exhausting at times, trying to tell (or follow) a story dealing with people evading their responsibilities and escaping their guilt with the same pregnant close-ups and elongated silences as his other films.
In this sense, it's a typical genre film by an arthouse director; I had the same problems as with The Man From London. It's interesting to see how these guys go about telling a seemingly straightforward story, though.
Major spoilers...
There are two moments in which the 'ghost' of a lost son appears, once to his brother, once to his father. The first came off a bit hackneyed, full of a mysterious figure (I thought it was an alien) emerging from an out-of-focus lens; the second, the way it happens, is a complete shocker and hit a chord with me right away. But it's ruined when Ceylan cuts away to something and then returns to the same shot - it would have been much more powerful as a stand-alone moment.
