rhythmdevils
Member of the Trade: rhythmdevils audio
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2005
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The Savages - 8.5/10
Really loved this movie. It's rare to see a movie tackle a story like this (brother and sister dealing with their father dying and suffering from dementia) with such honesty, humor and just heart and soul. The characters had great depth. It never jumped into easy answers or plodded you over the head with black and white simplistic emotions. The father was suffering from dementia, but he wasn't just an angry, confused old man like you've seen in countless movies. He had moments like that, but was also gentle and kind. The story was sad, but there was a lot of humor in the little moments, and a lot of humor conveyed visually and even through the cinematography which is very rare in the world of both film and photography. The cinematography and shot design reminded me of Punch Drunk Love in that way (the organ or pudding scenes for example). I loved this light visual humor over the sadness of the script. They were really able to create a sense of place and feeling with many of the shots. Driving through some suburbia golf town in Arizona with rows of strangely landscaped trees, rows of elderly arms arcing up and waving gently in a yoga class at a nursing home.
Just a couple of qualms. There was a shot where they were panning through a cloudy but sunny sky, and they for some reason digitally added in a sun to the shot, a sun beaming right into the camera. It was a good idea for the shot, but they should have just filmed it like that, it couldn't be that hard to film a sunny sky. The digital sun was distracting for me, I rewound like 4 times trying to figure out why it looked weird. I also didn't like the ending, it changed the meaning of the movie for me in a rather unfortunate and sappy direction from the more profound meaning that had been established. Which took the whole movie down from a 10/10 for me to an 8.5. Still good though.
Really loved this movie. It's rare to see a movie tackle a story like this (brother and sister dealing with their father dying and suffering from dementia) with such honesty, humor and just heart and soul. The characters had great depth. It never jumped into easy answers or plodded you over the head with black and white simplistic emotions. The father was suffering from dementia, but he wasn't just an angry, confused old man like you've seen in countless movies. He had moments like that, but was also gentle and kind. The story was sad, but there was a lot of humor in the little moments, and a lot of humor conveyed visually and even through the cinematography which is very rare in the world of both film and photography. The cinematography and shot design reminded me of Punch Drunk Love in that way (the organ or pudding scenes for example). I loved this light visual humor over the sadness of the script. They were really able to create a sense of place and feeling with many of the shots. Driving through some suburbia golf town in Arizona with rows of strangely landscaped trees, rows of elderly arms arcing up and waving gently in a yoga class at a nursing home.
Just a couple of qualms. There was a shot where they were panning through a cloudy but sunny sky, and they for some reason digitally added in a sun to the shot, a sun beaming right into the camera. It was a good idea for the shot, but they should have just filmed it like that, it couldn't be that hard to film a sunny sky. The digital sun was distracting for me, I rewound like 4 times trying to figure out why it looked weird. I also didn't like the ending, it changed the meaning of the movie for me in a rather unfortunate and sappy direction from the more profound meaning that had been established. Which took the whole movie down from a 10/10 for me to an 8.5. Still good though.
