Magic Marmalade 8th Jan 2023
| | Rated 7/10Hyper stylised, stark, black and white fever dream.
One I have gone through life thinking I'd seen but turns out, I hadn't!
This is a very odd film.
Not massively long, or epic really, which is surprising, given that this is essentially an art-house movie by Francis Ford Coppola, rather a more intimate tale centred around Matt Dillon's "Rusty James" character, a gang leader wannabe, living mainly off the reputation of his strange, soft spoken and sensitive (flaky) older brother's reputation as some kind of local legend: "The Motorcycle Boy" (Rourke), but who has long since dropped out of this gang world, and gone awol, as has Rusty James' dad (Hopper) - a ten-bob barfly, and local drunkard "philosopher" type.
Rusty's trying to live up to the hype, of a life his brother left behind, and both his brother and father seem to have a perspective on life he can't understand.
What's weird about this movie is that it has a note of the woozy unsettling tone that is induced in the viewer by Apocalypse Now, through the stark contrasting black and white giving the visuals (accompanied by the shot set up) a hyper natural emphasis... and punctuated by the odd moment of colour in the fish...
(You have to see this to understand it, but it amounts to a device to say there's a world we an see, but those characters cannot, even if it's right before their eyes - Rourke's character even says: "I wish I could see the Colours" while they're right before the audience's eyes.)
In addition to this. the assembled cast of brilliant accomplished actors, give almost caricature performances, - over emphasised, and almost hammy, like Coppola asked them deliberately to act badly, or slightly worse than we all know they can... and bizarrely, the most subdued performances comes from Nicholas Cage, and a cameo from Tom Waits!.
So to begin with, I just wasn't buying into it, as it felt like a monochrome, music-less West-Side Story affair, done by a local am-dram society, but as these are great actors, it feels almost like they're taking the piss out of the audience... But by degrees, I found the story more engaging, and was drawing me in, so by the end, it turns out to be not such a bad film after all... even a good one.
For this reason my rating began from a low point of about a 3, or 4,and gradually crept up as the film went on, landing finally on a 7. Had, perhaps, I'd known what this was going in, I might have stared a bit higher to begin with, or maybe if this was a bit better made, it might have a higher overall score.
So in terms of ratings, this film feels like a 6 or 7 out of 10 movie, with an 8, 9, or even a 10 out of 10 movie trapped inside it, trying to get out. I t might possibly be one of those that grows on you over time, but first viewing leaves you only barely whelmed.
1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review? |