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Posts Tagged: The Book of Eli

New York Film Festival 2010: My Joy

by on September 27th, 2010 at 2:36 pm in Festivals, Film

My Joy

And the prize for most ironic title at the New York Film Festival goes to…My Joy, a wrist-slittingly morose Ukraine/German/Dutch coproduction set in Russia. An art-house variation on the post-apocalyptic road movies that are so popular these days (The Road, The Book of Eli, Children of Men), this relentlessly pessimistic parable gave me a new appreciation for its mainstream cousins' visual flair and narrative clarity. The city life Georgy (Viktor Nemets) leaves in order to deliver a truckload of flour to the boonies looks pretty bleak, but it's a paradise compared to the predatory world he blunders into, where the scars inflicted by WWII are still raw and there's barely a hint of kindness or love to be found. Georgy literally loses his way, then loses his innocence and all sense of hope as he is abused, misused, and left for dead by his glassy-eyed countrymen. Deliberately paced and full of weighty silences, the film lurches from scene to scene with the abrupt illogic of a nightmare. Dogs howl, goats bleat, sadistic traffic cops bludgeon citizens pulled over at random, and then it all repeats until we watch him plod from a pool of light into the murk of a deserted nighttime street, his figure eventually disappearing into darkness. In one of those coincidences that hit you when you watch a string of movies at a film festival, it's the same device that closes Of Gods and Men, whose doomed monks' fade into the white of a snowy hillside—and it feels equally heavyhanded in both films. By the time Georgy fades to black, I felt as hollowed out and stonyhearted as he looks.

The 48th New York Film festival runs from September 24 to October 10. For a complete schedule, including ticketing information, click here.




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Understanding Screenwriting #42

by on March 22nd, 2010 at 3:00 am in Film

Coming up in this column: The Book of Eli, Valentine's Day, Theater of War, Hamlet 2, Test Pilot, Prince Valiant, In the Line of Fire, Life Unxpected, Temple Grandin

THE BOOK OF ELI (2010. Written by Gary Whitta. 118 minutes)

The Book of Eli

A stranger comes into town...: I am not normally a fan of post-apocalyptic movies. My left brain always has trouble with the reality of the details. For example, if it is all arid and dusty, where do they get their food? Where do they get their refined gasoline to drive their motorcycles and trucks? Where do they get the bullets they fire off in great numbers? And so on. I had some of those problems with this movie, especially the bullets, but Whitta has thrown in a nice scene when The Man With No..., sorry, Eli, comes into a rundown town. He has not said much so far, as one might gather when one learns from Peter Clines's article on the writing of the film in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting that Whitta is a big fan of Sergio Leone and Toshiro Mifune samurai films. By the time he gets to town we already know he is a whiz with an industrial strength machete, having dispatched several hijackers on the road. We also know he doesn't say much. Hey, if it worked for Eastwood, why not? So he goes into a store and negotiates swapping various stuff he has picked up along the way for other stuff he needs. I don't know how much of the dialogue is in the script—most of it I would guess—but Denzel Washington as Eli and Tom Waits as the Shopkeeper get a nice rhythm going and we get a sense of what is now valuable and what is not any longer. If the rest of the film appeals to post-apocalyptic action junkies, this scene appeals to my left brain. Continue Reading »




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