BEFORE: I've decided to add two currently airing films to this year's chain, instead of next year's - "Frozen" and "American Hustle". But this means I have to select two films to push into 2015, and I think to preserve the chain it will have to be the versions of "Hamlet" and "Othello" starring Laurence Olivier. Those are the breaks.
Linking from "The Island", Scarlett Johansson was also in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" with Patricia Clarkson - and I kick off a 5-film Leonardo DiCaprio chain.
AFTER: First, a word about my process. I tape movies of the premium channels and burn them to DVD, usually in themed pairs. While checking my dub, I sometimes see images from the films, and that makes me vulnerable to seeing "twist" endings, and in fact endings in general, before I'm ready to watch the entire film. With tonight's film, I didn't really have to worry because it's so full of random dream-like, or perhaps nightmare-like, images that anything I seen couldn't possibly have been understood.
But the other issue was - why did it take so long for me to track this film down? I think I was looking for it for a long while, and none of the premium channels wanted to run it while I was searching for it. I think I eventually had to get it off PPV for a couple of bucks, but it does make me wonder why it was so hard to find. Sometimes that's a bad sign, if the film isn't airing for some reason.
So finally I've watched it and I found it very obtuse - in that it seemed to be heading in a particular direction (umm, sort of?) for most of the film, and then it switched tracks at nearly the last minute. There are twist endings, and there are shock endings, and then there are massive u-turns. Once I started to feel that things as portrayed on the screen might not be reality, I started wondering where the film was ultimately going to go. Was this something akin to "The Sixth Sense" crammed into "Fight Club", "Inception"-style? Were there different levels of "reality" in this film?
There is an explanation for why the film gets progressively weirder, but obviously it's nothing I can talk about without spoilers. But I certainly don't appreciate having the rug pulled out from under me at the last minute, and I'm guessing that other people who've seen the film might feel the same way. This is my way of saying that I'm not convinced that all of the pieces presented in this film came together in the most satisfactory way.
Also starring Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "The Man in the Iron Mask"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Iron Man 3"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "Hugo"), Michelle Williams (last seen in "My Week With Marilyn"), Emily Mortimer, Max Von Sydow (last seen in "Conan the Barbarian"), Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "Lincoln"), Elias Koteas (last seen in "Apt Pupil"), Ted Levine (last seen in "The Manchurian Candidate"), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "Anywhere But Here")
RATING: 5 out of 10 migraines
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