About film-makers repeating themselves

[chani]

Yesterday I saw Kingdom of Heaven and today I saw Last Days! Two VERY different films actually. One was average, the other very good. Guess which one?

Well...Ridley Scott used to be a director I liked. Mostly because of Blade Runner which is one of my favourite movies (probably one of the best Sci-Fi movies along with Outlaw and The Matrix...waiting for Serenety!). And I loved Gladiator despite a few historical mistakes. Unfortunately Ridley Scott is making the same film over and over while making it less and less good. The battles scenes for instance are beautiful but they call to mind Gladiator. You can't helpt thinking I've already seen that before. You can even spot similar shots. Even the plot!

 The Hero begins his journey by losing his family and his "father" (either a real or spiritual one), he crosses the path of two siblings sharing a very close bound. The princess is always very beautiful and there's some romance between the hero and her...Her brother is sick and ends up dead. The pattern is always the same. Scott likes to work on father-son relationships and on brother-sister relationship (always with an incestuous connotation). But Kingdom of Heaven lacks of the epic athmosphere, Shakespeare-like, that was in Galdiator, many things were predictable and Balian's fight against the supposed Syrian lord was a blatant lie.

Of course it has its moments. Sybille is a good character, so is Beaudoin, and Saladin has great presence (even if a Kurde shouln't have looked that dark-skinned)...But the film is far too edifying, lecturing. Balian's speech about Jerusalem before the last battle is completely anachronistic and unlikely, but the director obviously wanted to do a film with a message...

BTW the character of Balian is quite improbable...the movies flaws actually made me see the lack of historical accuracy that the Historian in me could have forgotten or forgiven if the film were very good. And all those people speaking English, the worst being, perhaps, the Sarrasins' accent when they talk to each other!

I mean I am not a purist, really so I don't expect an American movie in which people would speak the various languages they did at the time, and in this case a film without anyone speaking English. Movies can be like books after all, so the language used on screen can belong to an omniscient point of view, allowing the viewers to understand every languages without subtitles, a little like those translator microbes that allowed communication in Farscape, but then the characters shouldn't have any accent when they are supposed to speak in their own tongue!

So well it was entertaining, Orlando Bloom was good-looking, but it was not great, sometimes poor even and I think I'm going to forget it quickly. Last Days I will remember...

Now that's a very well done film. I was not a Kurt Cobain fan, I liked Nirvana music as I like many bands, nothing more. But once again, with Last Days, Gus Van Sant shows us how good a director he is. The shots are often great and the soundtrack is neat. Don't expect any Nirvana's songs though.

Van Sant is making the same movie over and over, but every time he manages to create something else. He definitely has a certain style, his own way of shooting that you can recognize in all of his films. He doesn't pull easy emotional strings to win the viewers, he doesn't lecture, he doesn't even explain...he only shows simple things and makes the viewers see. We are often put in the situation of a voyeur until the camera shifts, because Gus Van Sant doesn't show everything. We are free to fill in the gaps...or not. 

He likes to shoot his characters' back, the camera following them, tracking them down. But in a way the characters always end up escaping from us.

He likes to show them walking over long distance, especially when they are just wandering. They are either moving, on a journey, or completely still. It's always about young men on a lonely journey (as Blake sings in the film !)and there's often homosexual bits in the film. Also Gus Van Sant likes to play with chronology and to show the same scene from different point of views, yet it's never quite the same scene. It doesn't start at the same moment, sometimes the camera isn't at the same place. Through that method we understand how lonely the characters are, how shattered the world really is. Sometimes the sound doesn't fit in the pictures. For instance when the camera is on a car we hear what people say in another car that passed by a few seconds before. It's very interesting because the viewers can feel omniscient and shifted around at once.

So Last Days is very similar to Gerry and to Elephant, but it's a different work.

Gus Van Sant tells here a very simple story. Those last days of a rock-star are filled with ordinary stuff, and ordinary people (the scene with the "yellow pages guy" is just neat)coming to visit. We witness an existence that is drowing in loneliness, represented by the woods, an existence falling to pieces while Blake's language is getting more and more basic. The others who share the same house, run away in the end, leaving him alone, like animals withdrawing from the one that's gonna die soon. The world get narrower and is even buzzing with sounds when Blake finally reaches the place of his death.

But life goes on...