I agree with everything you said above, about everything.
I think "Here" is going to go down as one of the big disasters in modern movies.
A main selling point of the movie went against it: that this was a reunion of Forrest Gump's key players: stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, musical composer Alan Silvestri.
"Forrest Gump" has its detractors, but there can be no doubt that it was a HUGE blockbuster in its time with a lasting quality. Oscars were won: Picture(over Pulp Fiction), Actor(back to back for Hanks after Philadelphia), Director, Screenplay. But it was really the emotion of the story, its "tour of the baby boom years" and the characters that made it last.
None of that came back here. Even the film's approach -- like Gump - to show decades in a man's life -- was dashed by the way the movie kept leaping around in time(CENTURIES) and staying unclear on exactly which year we were in(the songs helped, a little -- including the Beatles on Ed Suliivan but not their VOICES -- somebody read this script.)
At the end of the day for me was this: Tom Hanks whose back-to-back Best Actor Oscars and string of hits in the 90's and 00s made him a true leading superstar of his time -- just wasn't PRESENT in this movie. His looks have faded with the years(remember: he was actually a "handsome romantic lead" for about 20 years) and he didn't have much of a character to play. The de-aging wasn't that bad, but his LOOK in those scenes -- the hairstyles, the clothes -- were nothing to generate much "star power." Meanwhile, Robin Wright never maintained the star career that Hanks did, but actually held the screen better --de-aged or not.
I DID think it was interesting to see Kelly Reilly -- the big-breasted, big-haired ball-buster of Yellowstone -- playing WAY against type as Hanks' subservient 50s' mother, she never played sexy here, and took us right up into old age and illness.
CONT
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roger1 (4046)
19 days ago
I also felt that Here had a fairly particular and depressing story to tell, tied directly into the gimmick: we never leave the living room or the same camera angle for the entire movie(until the end.)
The stasis of this gimmick (which I akin to the famous "long uninterrupted take in an apartment" gimmick of Hitchcock's 1948 Rope) wears us down over the movie, but the movie is ABOUT that stasis:
For here is a person(Tom Hanks) who NEVER leaves that house - or, in the movie -- that ROOM -- from childhood to sex life (he sires a child with Wright on the living room couch), to fatherhood to marriage(not in that order) to old age. Wright's character becomes sympathetic in her desperate quest to ESCAPE that room, and that house -- but neither she (as a character) or we(as an audience) get to.
And that kinda/sorta IS the plot of "Here," and its not a bad plot -- its just buried in other plots and technology and it all falls apart.
The movie is suspiciously short, too -- about 90 minutes. Best Pictures and blockbusters rarely run that short. I sense a lot was cut out -- too boring.
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