Here it is – we investigate TAKEN 2, aka UNKNOWN, and special guest film critic Glenn Kenny talks about a film that had a profoundly personal effect on him: SHUTTER ISLAND.
Also mentioned on today’s show: Jett’s Original TAKEN post, Glenn Kenny’s blog SOME CAME RUNNING.
Running time: 43 minutes and 36 seconds – 40mb mp3
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Most Dutch angles: Battlefield Earth?
Bingo – you got it! :)
congratulations = you’ve just won a membership to TFT – send me the email address and username you’d like to:
contact@thefilmtalk.com
and i’ll set you up + of course the ‘In the Bath with Barry’ video, (but only if you really want it – it’s not a pretty sight).
Speaking of Dutch angles, have you seen “The Howling Man” episode of The Twilight Zone? The way the camera rocks from Dutch angle to Dutch angle like we’re on a boat is the sensation I got from the first act of Unknown.
Haven’t seen Battlefield Earth, but I did take an hour to read that colossal New Yorker piece. Does that count?
I have seen THE HOWLING MAN – I always felt for the director of that ep – he had a perfectly good ‘theoretical’ way of doing a cool makeup change for the man turns into devil scene, (in brief a man is walking along an outside corridor – our vision of him is obscured by pillars – the idea was to add to his make up every time he was behind a pillar and do it in multiple takes as the camera dollied along – in practice it didn’t work at all – but it COULD have)
+ for great ‘rocking camera on a boat action’ you can’t beat MR. ARKADIN / CONFIDENTIAL REPORT – it’s crrraaaaazy.
[...] – here’s what we’ve got coming up: Tony Youngblood on KABOOM, Brandon Nowalk on UNKNOWN and, though it pains me to even mention it, Gareth and I will be discussing this past [...]
Whew. “Taken” is the most underrated film of the last decade?
If a film is going to lead up to a confrontation, the director owes you some effort to make it – whether it’s a gunfight, or spaceships shooting laser beams, or Liam Neeson in hand-to-hand combat – coherent. Who is hitting whom? With what? Why did he fall over? How did he get back up in time to deflect that Ming vase?
The entire film leads up to that point. That scene needs to be shot with utter care – and edited even more carefully. “Taken” was not. And without that craftsmanship and cautious eye for detail, it falls apart completely. And it did; whatever it might have been, those scenes reduced it to just another movie-of-the-week.
I’ve never listened to your podcast before, and I liked it enough to give it another shot, but hearing you championing such an obviously unexceptional flick is kinda disappointing.
Convince me.
Hi Noam thanks of course for listening :)
TAKEN is notable not for its craftsmanship which is a the level of a generic euro-actioner, (the kind usually starring Jason S(r)atham, but for it’s primal ‘first story’ power – here’s my original post:
http://thefilmtalk.com/blog/taken-review-liam-neeson/
“And this is what the film tells us at the end. That U.S. civilization has declined to such an extent that it has collapsed into a state of prehistory – of savagery.”
As much as I enjoy flights of fancy I’m quite positive that the audience is not contemplating this interpretation whilst watching “Taken”. On the contrary, I would say that the audience experiences a rush of revenge fuelled pleasure with each brutal takedown.
And if this is the case, does it really matter what obscure motive the filmmaker had? The fact remains that the film celebrates violence and encourages the audience to derive satisfaction from the maiming, killing and torture of others. When I saw Taken I was not struck by the audience’s quiet meditation on the savagery of the present. Instead, each action sequence was applauded and cheered with the fervor of the sports fan.
I do agree though that the story is “primal”. Smug, conniving criminal, assured of his invulnerability meets Liam. Criminal is soundly punished. Repeat.
This, no doubt, is also the template for 99% of crime reporting in our more excitable news publications.
i hear ya – i see no evidence the filmmakers had the conscious intent as i outlined in the post – i think the archetypal by its very nature operates ‘below’ the conscious –
+ re: “The fact remains that the film celebrates violence and encourages the audience to derive satisfaction from the maiming, killing and torture of others. When I saw Taken I was not struck by the audience’s quiet meditation on the savagery of the present. Instead, each action sequence was applauded and cheered with the fervor of the sports fan.”
you’re absolutely right = this is a topic that Gareth and i get into not infrequently – “the myth of redemptive violence”
- Gareth and I have both had violence in our lives, he of course raised in N. Ireland could not be immune from the troubles and my experiences need not be delved into here – suffice to say there were of an extreme nature – the point is violence in real life is in no way related to violence as seen in commercial cinema –
anyhow – for me TAKEN was ‘underrated’ by the mainstream critics in the sense that there was no recognition of the primal nature of it’s storytelling – the nature of which was so strong that it led to worldwide boffo biz.
Whatever the filmmakers intended, a high-concept lousy movie is still a lousy movie. To most of us.
Okay, now I get it. After listening to the “Taken” podcast I now realise that your review was satirical. I owe you an apology.
In my opinion Morel and Besson are rabble rousing yahoos who appeal to the lowest common denominator for a buck. Consider this, they made Banlieue 13, a film that attacks the racial and class barrier that divides us; a film that demands the destruction of this barrier. This is followed by two films that are made for a US audience, Taken and From Paris with Love. Both of these films in effect reverse the themes of Banlieue 13. Both films essentially resurrect that mental barrier destroyed in Banlieue 13.
Obviously this is simply “user-centered design” applied to film making…which, as you aptly put it when discussing the “outsourcing” scene, speaks to our descent into savagery.
[...] Brandon NowalkAfter a good three minutes of pulling my hair out trying not to have to write about UNKNOWN (about which Jett and Gareth have already covered the full spectrum of my faintly entertained [...]
I know it is cool to trash on 3D these days(it’s been called a gimmick on TFT), but can you imagine watching Enter the Void in IMAX 3D? Just because they have been making bad 3D movies they shouldn’t trash the whole concept. There is potential there.
hi ken, i think you’re on to something there + don’t forget Herzog’s 3D Cave film: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/apr/13/werner-herzog-cave-art-documentary-3d