Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - 2015 - Movie

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 2015

PG-13  105min  Comedy-Drama  June 2015 (USA)

Funny Funny Sad. Mostly funny.  Powerfully realized as a screenplay and film. I took my 19yo daughter to this and we were both surprised, and elated.  At one point she had to calm me down a bit because I got over-giggled at the snippet of the mockery of Urban Cowboy.  That's ok though, there were some other adults in the crowd that were also laughing with me, and I understand why my girl could not get some of the particular points of reference that the film spoof titles were making because I'm sure she hasn't seen all of them.

Acting was not a main point here, it was narration and the follow-through invisibility of the camera, the pacing, and the way that the punchy lines were delivered throughout that made it all work.  Although the acting was excellent in itself, the editing has it in this film.  It's really a piece of magic.  David Trachtenberg is the cutter, and this is one case where it has paid to grab a TV-oriented editor and bring him over to the world of the feature.  Great stuff.  Fast, precise editing makes this story move, where it could have dragged in other hands.  And starting out with the narrator, being the principle player Greg, played by Thomas Mann, giving his voice and character both a calmly even tone was a great decision in the directing department, via Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.  Earl, well, he was so natural, a great foil in the structure, not an Abbot and Costello thing at all, but a very necessary partner and alter-ego to Greg.  The book of course plays on this much more, the relationship being one of kinship across racial lines, planting Greg firmly in the "I'm taking this as it is" department, whose first and foremost mission is to remain anonymous in life, or non-committed and universally ignored.  They played well together, especially when in conflict.

Olivia Cooke plays Rachel, the dying girl.  I would call her role absolutely real, and normal.  A teen girl, ill with cancer.  Her acting responses were so well done, bravo, just the way you would expect a real teen to act and to feel.  There was not a moment where I felt she was acting.  Superb.

This story is huge delight, and if you're a film buff, even more so for the comic insides that weave in between.  I have to post a separate picture here I found of just a "few" of the many titles that the young filmmakers were producing.  Gut funny.  What I want to know is, where is the entire list of their films?  There were so many!

8.5 is the correct number for this film.  IMDB said 8.3.  So what's .2 eh?

-Agitatus

Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Vinterberg - 2015

Far From the Madding Crowd 2015

PG-13  119min  Drama  May 2015 (USA)

A most wonderful escape into Victorian England, and a film you can take your spouse to safely without fearing being hit over the head by some agenda other than romance.  There is tragedy, conflict, and the essence of commitments.  Wonderfully played by all, albeit Tom Sturridge who plays the brazen and bold Sergeant is a bit too brazen and bold at times, and miraculously reappears at the appropriate moment....well, I will not give too much away here, but there were some farther-fetched plot points, yet we are all too eager to receive because of their inevitability.  Yes, it's all too obvious even from the start what is going to happen, but dang it all, that's the fun of the story, watching it unfold exactly as we would have it to be.  HOW it unfolds, the drama, is indeed wonderfully portrayed.  Have I used that word wonderful too many times yet?  There was one thing that happens near the end that was not foreseeable, although my wife says she saw it coming.  Hm.

The most fetching (ha, you thought I'd say wonderful) thing for me, the film guy, was the cinematography.  Quite frankly, that's the main reason I wanted to see it.  I knew it would be beautiful, and it delivers.  Painterly, moving, thick with mist and clarity where appropriate, the lens was polished on this one.   Charlotte Bruus Christensen, the Cinematographer is from Denmark.  Every scene was a thrill.  But there was one special moment, and I am prejudiced because I am a man, and I already love Carrie Mulligan, especially her work in The Great Gatsby aside L. DiCaprio and Inside Llewyn Davis...but the moment was one where the camera catches her seated on a sofa with the window light coming in, and....well, it was Vermeer and...other artists come to mind.  Perfect.  I'm sure that my lovely wife could also have pointed out a few scenes where the handsomeness of the 3 men were portrayed in the same manner.  Striking.

9 out of 10 I think.  Excellent.

In Abstentia, Duay Brothers - 2000

In Abstentia - 2000

B&W film.  Introspective POV in extremis.

This is Eraserhead + Vodka + Acid.

Basically this: A woman in an insane asylum writes to her husband.  There you go.

-Agitatus
07/16/15