| Page: 1 | Rating: Unrated [0] |
Movie Get2gether
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PoiSoNeD_CaNdY replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 12:48am |
 Coolness: 92375 | I'm thinking of seeing "Morven Callar" sometime this week (tuesday?) at cinema du parc. since this movie is somewhat rave-related, i'm wondering if anyone wants to join me or make this a bigger gettogether. even if you dont know me, if your interested in seeing this movie then come along! here is the review from hour:
Life of the party Director Lynne Ramsay takes Samantha Morton through the rave looking glass in the brilliant Morvern Callar Dimitri Katadotis RAMSAY: LISTENING TO HER INSTINCTS You may not have heard of it yet, but there's a reason why Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar made it onto many American critics' top 10 lists in 2002. This film, which seems to come from nowhere, is like a lightning flash, confirming the arrival of a great director. Ramsay, who hails from Scotland, first garnered attention with her 1999 debut Ratcatcher, a period piece set in Glasgow in 1973 during a garbage strike, the kids playing along a fetid canal that snakes through a council development. The film, though, was more than another dreary British kitchen-sink drama. It vividly evoked the sounds and smells of youth, crawling into the subjectivity of one little boy on the cusp of puberty. It was different, unique, in ways that were hard to calculate. Ramsay could still be described as a provincial filmmaker, but there was the suspicion - the hope? - she was onto something bigger. Morvern Callar is bigger. With this movie, Ramsay's experiments with subjectivity have come to full, stunning fruition. She takes us way out there - or rather deep inside her main character, a small-town Scottish lass who finds her lover dead, assumes his identity and goes on a tear that takes her from the honeycomb superhotels of coastal Spain to the middle of nowhere. Morvern Callar is sociological, offering a portrait of contemporary British youth caught up in the cycle of dead-end jobs and weekend hard partying, the dole and Ecstasy binges. But it's also - to use a nearly debased term - existential, shifting with the moods of its almost pathological protagonist. It's something to see. OOO In person, Ramsay is plump, sexy and stylishly turned out, speaking very quickly in a thick Scottish brogue. She looks like a one-time club hopper, which she in fact is. It may be modesty, but she's still surprised by the reactions her film has solicited. It turns out that preparation for Morvern Callar, which was adapted from a novel by Alan Warner, began before Ramsay had done Ratcatcher. "I'd been thinking about a film about a woman who's a compulsive liar for a while," she says. "Somebody over at [the production company] Film Four said I should read this book. I didn't go 'wow' when I read it. I liked the beginning of it, the character that was created and the end of it. But they asked me to try my hand at it." Having started production on Ratcatcher at this time, Ramsay solicited the help of a director she admired, Liana Dognini, to write the script. "We didn't fight too much," she says. "It ended up being a good process; Liana is quite analytical and I'm intuitive, so it kicked my arse to get things moving." All along, Ramsay's pointed intention was to get at how the eponymous Morvern "feels," what she was "going through." The film, you see, doesn't so much slip into the mind of the character as slip into her skin. Throughout, Morvern's motivations remain hidden, unexplained, our access to her limited to her sensorial reactions to the world around her. Ramsay accomplishes this feat through a sophisticated syncopation of image and sound. Morvern is never without her Walkman headset, listening to a compilation tape mixed by her boyfriend as a gift before he committed suicide. The soundtrack, which runs the gamut from Aphex Twin to Ween, from The Velvet Underground to Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, is integral to the film's coloration. But Ramsay has also ingeniously played with effects, notably letting us hear what Morvern hears on her headphones only to phase out to natural sound. "I'm really interested in film being almost three-dimensional," she says. "To me, sound is the other picture, and a lot of people ignore it. Often you're bombarded by it. In Morvern Callar, a lot of the time the sound is more important than the picture; it gets you into an atmosphere, an emotion. The music allowed me to get inside [the character]." To carry the central role, however, Ramsay needed more than an actor - she needed a medium. Which is exactly what she found in Samantha Morton. As Morvern, Morton barely speaks, communicating directly through her rounded, moon face, her body language. It's not for nothing Woody Allen cast the Oscar nominated performer as a mute in Sweet and Lowdown - she has the incandescence of a silent-era siren. "When I met [Morton] it was as if she had been transported from another planet and was capable of anything. She was capable of burying her boyfriend [which is literally what Morvern does]. "Samantha's a chameleon," Ramsay continues, not able to stem her enthusiasm. "You don't recognize her from movie to movie. For all the other parts I used non-professionals, but she fits in. It's not a movie star thing with her. When she's on screen she's being, not acting." OOO The extreme disconnect between what Morvern does and how she feels is not just a character trait. Through her, the movie explores a specific culture - that of the so-called rave generation, or rather that of the kids that are still playing out the same charade of lumpen debauchery. To Ramsay there's nothing revolutionary or new about this phenomenon. It's just kids dropping E and dancing instead of hoisting pints in the local pub. "It's about 'jobber' culture, which is really big in Britain," she says. "You get as trashed as you can and then go back to your normal job. It's not a political thing, like in the '60s when it was linked to the counterculture, it's just a 'let's have fun' sort of thing, very hedonistic." Ramsay, though, is careful to distance Morvern Callar from the stream of rave flicks that have come out of the U.K. over the past few years. "I hate those on the whole," she says. "I spent a lot of time in the club scene when I was in my 20s taking photos. I never thought it was lots of people waving their hands in the air. I feel my film is a truer representation of what it's like being in a club - kinda on your own planet, isolated. That hasn't been captured in those other films." To a certain extent, Morvern Callar is about one woman's disenchantment with this scene, her growing awareness of her separateness. It's in Spain that Morvern breaks away, faced with the absurdity of the mammoth tourist hotel she ends up in, which seems like a colonized version of Scotland. She's after something else, something more. Hers is almost a spiritual journey, the light of backcountry Spain becoming a sort of benediction. By the film's finale, Morvern has arrived somewhere, though it's not clear where. She truly has become someone else, pulling us, the audience, in her slipstream. At film festivals Ramsay has been asked to do question-and-answer sessions after screenings of her movie. Though she'll oblige she doesn't like to do it. "I want people to have their headspace for 10 or 15 minutes afterward," she says. "I don't want to be yakking away telling people what to think. Film is a powerful medium and I want to create a response. By the end you should be, like, 'I need a drink.'" |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Oliver_TwisteD replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 1:11am |
 Coolness: 86370 | ...Sounds interesting~ I Like scottish Films involving the urban scene~ |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Purple_Lee replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 7:14am |
 Coolness: 239305 | date & time and i am there
Lee |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Screwhead replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 10:04am |
 Coolness: 686275 | I'd love to, but I'm broke and I have class tuesday :( |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» daFTWin replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 12:55pm |
 Coolness: 277120 | Only if THEY will be there and I can watch THEM get it on.
 |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Fri Mar 14, 2003 @ 12:59pm |
 Coolness: 472490 | The soundtrack's good too ! |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PoiSoNeD_CaNdY replied on Sun Mar 16, 2003 @ 9:29pm |
| Coolness: 92375 | I'll be going to see the movie Tuesday at 9:15. If people are interested in coming, let me know sometime before then. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Purple_Lee replied on Sun Mar 16, 2003 @ 9:56pm |
| Coolness: 239305 | Dan if things go well i will be there
Liam |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Purple_Lee replied on Sun Mar 16, 2003 @ 10:01pm |
| Coolness: 239305 | going to have to miss the movie night Dan
pool is calling me on tuesday Lee |
Movie Get2gether
| Page: 1 |
[ Top Of Page ] |
Post A Reply |
You must be logged in to post a reply.
[ Top Of Page ] |
