Movie Review: Life (2015)
Ref: Life (2015)
For the record, this is not the recently released sci-fi horror film featuring Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal, this is but a different film entitled: Life (that I personally enjoyed). I also keep coincidentally watching films with Dane Dehaan in them so I’ve decided to make this film choice intentional for the sake of watching all films featuring him (LOL).
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Quotes for the road:
“It’s Life”
“That’s how the world works… maybe you gotta learn to appreciate things”
“To find anywhere in all of life a happier happiness than blessed us then…”
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Context:
This biopic stars both Robert Pattison and Dane Dehaan in the roles of James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock. The film really pushes the reality of being an artist and one of the biggest truths of life: not everything is going to turn out to be what you want it to be, regardless of who you are, even celebrities feel this way (and I’ll elaborate more on this in the content section). I enjoyed it because it was very pure, but I enjoyed it more for the performance of the actors in the film than on the story itself, but it’s not to say that the moral and the lesson that it pushes is not a good one. I think that the film executed this theme of reality pretty well and that it held up too, it wasn’t a disaster film is probably the best way I’d put it (though that sounds rather harsh and negative which isn’t my intention).
Technicalities and Functioning:
I thought that this film made a very good use of its color palette and the beautiful work of pretty low-key lighting (and when I say pretty, I mean that it’s attractive and not the other thing). There are many scenes that take place in dim lighting with very high contrasting shots and I thought that these scenes helped to umpf the mood a bit, it added some more atmosphere and dynamic to what the characters were feeling and also brought more vivid colorization into each scene (really the colors in this film are beautiful). The framing was also very beautifully done as well, there are several frame-in-frame shots that I will definitely use for referencing when doing my own filming. The colors added more realism than took it away which, for most of the other films that I watch, do the opposite it actually takes away realism and makes it more expressionistic. Noting that the film supposedly takes place in the 1940s to 1950s, the attire, the lighting, the technology used all within the film brings in more dynamics to each scene. So in this aspect of the film, I loved it.
Content:
Being that it is a biopic of the late James Dean, there was but so much that you could work with in order to create a film of it. I loved the concept that it expressed, that it’s more of a game of what you want versus what you have and how that affects people in that experience, but the film also includes the concept of having this genuine passion for art (specifically for photography and for acting). Both the actor and the photographer want to go against the flow, to do new things and to embrace this passion and pure love for what they do, but this passion puts them at odds with themselves; they are essentially fighting against the current trying to do the things that makes them happy instead of what makes other people happy (and this is a very important concept, at least in my eyes).
The film is very slow-paced and not very exciting, and could potentially be very uninteresting to a few viewers, though I personally enjoyed it myself, I know that it’s pace and the kind-of dragging tendency of this film would put viewers off. I enjoyed it because I got to see the actors put on very moving performances, and both Pattison and Dehaan are great at doing so. You can really feel the emotion and sadness, stress, tension, anger… especially Dehaan, knowing about his roles in other films he seems to put a slight contrast to them in this film, he’s more mellow and more moody and that makes him more raw and his emotions more dynamic. It’s not until his character gets angry and yells that you actually get to see him in his kind-of “typical role”, but he does a fantastic job, anyways, in playing this discontent character who is unsatisfied with his life despite “having it all”. The subtleness of this emotion, he doesn’t tell the audience that he is sad or he is depressed or that he is stressed, Dehaan performs it in a way that it is invisible but whilst also being transparent at the same time (kind of a strange concept going on here psychologically LOLOL).
I think that film was pretty interesting, I was intrigued by the cast, didn’t know much about the movie beforehand but I didn’t DISLIKE it, I enjoyed it and found it refreshing and beautiful in a sense.
My rating: 8/10, again there’s but so much you can do with a film that’s based on real life. Real, in every sense of the word, is hard to capture especially in film where we’d always want it to be unreal and to use it as an escape from the world.
For the record, this is not the recently released sci-fi horror film featuring Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal, this is but a different film entitled: Life (that I personally enjoyed). I also keep coincidentally watching films with Dane Dehaan in them so I’ve decided to make this film choice intentional for the sake of watching all films featuring him (LOL).
----------------------
Quotes for the road:
“It’s Life”
“That’s how the world works… maybe you gotta learn to appreciate things”
“To find anywhere in all of life a happier happiness than blessed us then…”
----------------------
Context:
This biopic stars both Robert Pattison and Dane Dehaan in the roles of James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock. The film really pushes the reality of being an artist and one of the biggest truths of life: not everything is going to turn out to be what you want it to be, regardless of who you are, even celebrities feel this way (and I’ll elaborate more on this in the content section). I enjoyed it because it was very pure, but I enjoyed it more for the performance of the actors in the film than on the story itself, but it’s not to say that the moral and the lesson that it pushes is not a good one. I think that the film executed this theme of reality pretty well and that it held up too, it wasn’t a disaster film is probably the best way I’d put it (though that sounds rather harsh and negative which isn’t my intention).
Technicalities and Functioning:
I thought that this film made a very good use of its color palette and the beautiful work of pretty low-key lighting (and when I say pretty, I mean that it’s attractive and not the other thing). There are many scenes that take place in dim lighting with very high contrasting shots and I thought that these scenes helped to umpf the mood a bit, it added some more atmosphere and dynamic to what the characters were feeling and also brought more vivid colorization into each scene (really the colors in this film are beautiful). The framing was also very beautifully done as well, there are several frame-in-frame shots that I will definitely use for referencing when doing my own filming. The colors added more realism than took it away which, for most of the other films that I watch, do the opposite it actually takes away realism and makes it more expressionistic. Noting that the film supposedly takes place in the 1940s to 1950s, the attire, the lighting, the technology used all within the film brings in more dynamics to each scene. So in this aspect of the film, I loved it.
Content:
Being that it is a biopic of the late James Dean, there was but so much that you could work with in order to create a film of it. I loved the concept that it expressed, that it’s more of a game of what you want versus what you have and how that affects people in that experience, but the film also includes the concept of having this genuine passion for art (specifically for photography and for acting). Both the actor and the photographer want to go against the flow, to do new things and to embrace this passion and pure love for what they do, but this passion puts them at odds with themselves; they are essentially fighting against the current trying to do the things that makes them happy instead of what makes other people happy (and this is a very important concept, at least in my eyes).
The film is very slow-paced and not very exciting, and could potentially be very uninteresting to a few viewers, though I personally enjoyed it myself, I know that it’s pace and the kind-of dragging tendency of this film would put viewers off. I enjoyed it because I got to see the actors put on very moving performances, and both Pattison and Dehaan are great at doing so. You can really feel the emotion and sadness, stress, tension, anger… especially Dehaan, knowing about his roles in other films he seems to put a slight contrast to them in this film, he’s more mellow and more moody and that makes him more raw and his emotions more dynamic. It’s not until his character gets angry and yells that you actually get to see him in his kind-of “typical role”, but he does a fantastic job, anyways, in playing this discontent character who is unsatisfied with his life despite “having it all”. The subtleness of this emotion, he doesn’t tell the audience that he is sad or he is depressed or that he is stressed, Dehaan performs it in a way that it is invisible but whilst also being transparent at the same time (kind of a strange concept going on here psychologically LOLOL).
I think that film was pretty interesting, I was intrigued by the cast, didn’t know much about the movie beforehand but I didn’t DISLIKE it, I enjoyed it and found it refreshing and beautiful in a sense.
My rating: 8/10, again there’s but so much you can do with a film that’s based on real life. Real, in every sense of the word, is hard to capture especially in film where we’d always want it to be unreal and to use it as an escape from the world.
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