Phillip Noyce
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The setting here reminded me a lot of the 1998 film, Pleasantville (although the use of black and white during the opening scenes probably contributed to that fact).
The most immediately striking thing about "The Giver" is that it begins entirely in black and white, giving it a feel not unlike "Pleasantville," which was the first film from "The Hunger Games" director Gary Ross.
The technique of melting his perceptions of color into pewter-and-white Sameness pleasurably recalls the anti-’50s satire “Pleasantville.”
It’s akin to the 90s film Pleasantville in that sense.
At first it involves the lad’s being able to discern colors: until this point, the film has been in black-and-white, but now it gradually turns to color, starting with individual elements in the frame (think of the little girl’s coat in “Schindler’s List”) and then progressing to “Pleasantville” mode, as it moves from full black-and-white to full color depending on a character’s perspective.
It was a device better used in the similarly themed, but vastly superior “Pleasantville,” but Noyce makes it work.
Today it just looks like a low-rent mishmash of Divergent and The Hunger Games , recycling riffs from Logan’s Run with sets and costumes lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey .
Yet because both “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” hit the screen first, the movie version of “The Giver” — scene by formulaic scene, narrative cliché by cliché — can’t help but come off as a poor copy of those earlier pictures.
The problem with the film adaptation isn’t simply that it messes with this simple plot—it’s that every single deviation from the book is meant to either push the story into the realm of familiar cliché, or to more closely and unnecessarily copycat the dystopian specifics of current YA hits like The Hunger Games and Divergent.
Not only does the screenplay tap into the essence of the futuristic tale, but it elaborates upon Lowry’s delicate and straight forward storyline—but this movie knows when to say when, running up to 97 minutes—short compared to The Hunger Games at 142 minutes, or Divergent ’s 139, even with the addition of the obligatory chase scene, the second of the film’s two endings (the first one is Lowry’s).
It's a scenario that has been developed in slightly different directions by the likes of The Hunger Games and Divergent, and it even has a scene reminiscent of the Sorting Hat selection in Harry Potter.
That said, the book's themes about the importance of passion, of celebrating differences, encouraging creativity and the joy of life in all its stages remain intact in “The Giver,” the new film based on the popular series that preceded both “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.”
Today it just looks like a low-rent mishmash of Divergent and The Hunger Games , recycling riffs from Logan’s Run with sets and costumes lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey .
There are also echoes of everything from “Logan’s Run” to “The Lego Movie.”
I get the attractiveness of the theme of wanting to be different from everyone else (thus the likely draw of this work to those who already felt that way upon reading the novel), and certainly have no issues with dystopian-related movie storylines (one of my all-time favorites is "Logan's Run").
Seriously, if Hollywood serves up one more spotless jump-suited crypto-fascist future where only a “Chosen One” can make us remember the humanity we have lost, I’m screaming “Logan’s RUN” and fleeing the theater.
Ok, sure, the whole planet is in black and white and nobody falls in love or kisses or dances, but there is calm and order, a Logan's Run-style Carousel-like ceremony for the geriatrics, a crazy perma-death sleep injection for genetically inferior babies, and it all happens without an annual Purge.
An agreeable YA riff on Orwell — via Logan's Run — topped with the kind of magic-transformative baloney that passes for an ending in too many otherwise-fine Hollywood adventures, Phillip Noyce's The Giver greets a man-made Utopia with the eternal question: "If you can't feel, what's the point?"
Rear Window (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced The Bone Collector (1999), Sliver (1993)
Themes Plot Characters
If Basic Instinct played off Vertigo, Noyce's film would like to be a sort of sexed-up Rear Window.
A souped-up, pornographic adaptation of Ira Levin's novel by "Basic Instinct's" Joe Eszterhas, it's essentially "Rear Window" with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, a remote control and a well-fingered playback button.
I began to think of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window and his fateful confrontation with murderer Raymond Burr.
Ed O'Neill co-stars as a cop, and Queen Latifah is a bedside nurse named Thelma, in obvious homage to the performance of Thelma Ritter in The Bone Collector's many-times-better source, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
It nods to classic suspense flicks - "The Manchurian Candidate," "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," "Three Days of the Condor" - without seeming dated.
At the start, you may be reminded of such Ford administration classics as “Three Days of the Condor” — a thriller that contains almost nothing like an action scene.
A dash of Bourne Identity series here, a pinch of Die Another Day, From Russia With Love and Mission: Impossible III there, a little Manchurian Candidate for flavor, and a hint of Three Days of the Condor and voila... you've got Salt.
A neo-Cold War thriller would seem like just the ticket for cineastes who fondly recall Iron Curtain-courting capers on the order of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Fail-Safe and select James Bond exploits.
The truck-jumping scenes recall similar acrobatics performed by Yeoh and Jackie Chan in the Police Story series from Hong Kong's golden age of action movies.
Its most overt homage is to 1993’s “Sliver,” with the key disclaimer that “Sliver,” already a terrible movie, would without the hilarious sex stuff be borderline unwatchable, and “Watcher” is actually pretty damn good.
…from Kiss the Girls to The Bone Collector, before the Saw franchise replaced mystery and suspense with gristle and innards…
The Bone Collector…
Just when we thought that Hollywood had emerged from the stock Cold War villain era, Australian director Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence, Patriot Games, Dead Calm) has cleverly resurrected the classic US enemy in an espionage thriller reminiscent, in story and style, of Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur.
It very much recalls the similar Tom Hardy movie Locke , which was also assembled entirely from phone calls, but that film had a narrative momentum that Lakewood lacks.
Noyce doesn’t direct with any sense of engagement, unlike the Steven Knight single location drama “Locke” starring Tom Hardy which had audiences hooked, instead keeping the atmosphere pedestrian as the movie weaves through the drama with minimal results.
Međutim, "The Desperate Hour" ustvari pripada (ili želi pripadati) pred-koronskom trendu svedenih trilera ili drama 2010-ih odigranih u realnom ili približno realnom vremenu a la "Gravitacija", "Živ zakopan", "Bankomat", "Sve je izgubljeno", "Krivnja", "127 sati", "Locke"...
She escapes in an awesome sequence at CIA headquarters that Mission Impossible man Ethan Hunt would envy, followed by a dynamic combination foot, car, truck, and motorcycle chase in Washington, DC.
With Bourne and Bond MIA, and Tom Cruise in the infinite stages of creating another Mission: Impossible, it is up to a woman to get the job done.
Originally tooled for Tom Cruise, who nixed the project as being too close to his Mission: Impossible ID (pity he didn’t make the same call on Knight and Day ), CIA Agent Edwin A. Salt is now Evelyn Salt.
A later, "Mission Impossible" style disguise is fun while more in keeping with Noyce's world.
Next time around though, Salt should be dispatched on an assignment that’s more Mission: Impossible than Mission: Implausible .
However, Cruise felt it was too close to his Mission: Impossible films (he's already done the rogue on the run) and decided to back out, leaving the role open for someone else.
They're towing a sailboat behind them so that, presumably, we can be reminded of Polanski's "Knife in the Water" (a psycho terrorizes a married couple aboard their yacht; it also inspired the Australian oceangoing thriller "Dead Calm").
Some of the action work is even more venerable: Orlov overcomes two captors in an elevator with the old switchblade-in the-shoe-toe trick memorably used by Lotte Lenya as SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in the second Bond film, From Russia With Love.
A dash of Bourne Identity series here, a pinch of Die Another Day, From Russia With Love and Mission: Impossible III there, a little Manchurian Candidate for flavor, and a hint of Three Days of the Condor and voila... you've got Salt.
The material provided here is paper thin: After a tragic prologue lifted from the screenplay structures of "The Changeling" "Don't Look Now" and "Dead Calm", "The Descent" settles into it's main narrative of six young ladies who decide to reclaim a sense of youthful danger in their responsible adult lives by going on a caving expedition in the Appalachian mountains.
The minions first arrive in New York, but while flipping channels on a department-store TV—The Saint, Bewitched, The Dating Game—they stumble across a secret channel announcing the upcoming Villain-Con convention to be held in Orlando.
Donnie Yen has a substantial role as Caine, an old friend of John’s hired to kill him—possibly the best blind ninja assassin since Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury (1989).
For over two-thirds of the exhilarating horror movie Don’t Breathe, young burglars are trapped in the home of a blind man they’re attempting to rob, which doesn’t sound like an impossible situation until you consider that the victim, a military veteran, has defense skills keener than Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury .
We have a suspicion writer Lowry was just cashing in on a familiar theme and that maybe the school curriculum should go back to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Unfortunately, the quality is more on the level of “Sliver” than “Basic Instinct.”