W00t! W00t! This is a great flic. I have to say it’s definitely in my top 5 for the year so far, quite probably up there in the top 2. I have to decide if it was better than City of God (which I just noticed I never actually wrote anything about). Anyway George Clooney goes on to prove himself more than just a handsome face by pulling together an incredibly polished film.
The script is great and fast paced, Charlie Kaufman wrote it and it is far and away better than Adaptation (which I’ve also written nothing about yet, naughty). If you have a choice between the two see this one, adaptation is just a build up to one big and, by the end, one very tired joke. The dialogue sparkles and slips off the actors lips. The cast is superb, including many amusing cameos… camera slips by Brad Pitt in the dating game. Rutger Hauer does some scene stealing, posing for a Polaroid while silencing a skier.
But possibly the best is that it is visually stunning. It’s beautiful to watch, filters and over exposure are used to great effect, giving some scenes weight by blowing them out completely, other scenes being dreamlike due to the filters or film used, dreamlike and like a film shot by some kind of Lomo (now wouldn’t that be a great idea). The cinematographer was Newton Thomas Sigel, who also worked beside Bryan Singer on both X-men films and the Usual Suspects. I wonder if it was him pushing the visuals or Clooney. Some of this may have also been down to Stephen Mirrione, who edited also on Swingers, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven.
And I like the fact that they didn’t try to interpret the story in a is-he-crazy-or-is-he-not indeterminate fashion.
